Coronado, Rodney (1966–)

Rodney Coronado (aka Jim Perez and Martin Rubio), a member of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), was the first radical animal rights activist to serve time in a federal prison for actions against animal exploitation in the United States. In 1995 he was sentenced to 57 months in prison for his involvement in ALF's five-state anti-fur campaign during the early 1990s.

Coronado became involved in animal rights early in his life. He claims that a documentary film on the slaughter of harp seals converted him into an activist at the age of 12. By the age of 18, he had joined the Sea Shepard Conservation Society, an anti-whaling direct-action organization founded by Paul Watson in 1977. Watson's goal was to inflict economic damage on whaling and other marine industries. He used his boat, the Sea Shepard, to disrupt whaling activities, sometimes by ramming whaling boats at sea. Coronado was an engineer on the Sea Shepard. In November 1986 he helped sabotage a whaling station in Reykjavik, Iceland, and sink two of Iceland's four whaling ships, causing damage estimated at $2.7 million. This action, along with his role in vandalizing nine fur salons in Vancouver, earned Coronado a reputation in the animal rights community. As early as 1987, the FBI and Department of Justice had identified him as a threat.

By 1990 Coronado had become involved with the Coalition Against Fur Farms (CAFF). For nine months, he worked undercover in a fur-ranching community in Montana to gather information about industry practices. Over the next two years, Coronado's findings were used to carry out “Operation Bite Back,” which used arson, destruction of property, burglary, vandalism, and theft to disrupt the fur-farming industry. In the early 1990s, ALF sabotaged fur farms and fur-animal research facilities at universities in Oregon, Washington, Utah, and Michigan, and the group brought operations at the Malecky Mink Ranch in Yamhill, Oregon, and the Northwest Fur Farm Food Cooperative in Edmonds, Washington, to an end. Although no one was injured, these acts caused several million dollars in damages. Federal investigators later linked Coronado to the site of each of these actions.

Further investigations showed that Coronado was a key organizer of each of these ALF initiatives, including an aborted proposal to free the “Silver Spring monkeys” from Tulane University in 1990 (these macaques were originally housed at the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland). During a search of Coronado's storage locker in Talent, Oregon, investigators discovered plans to target two Montana fur farms, as well as proof that he had stolen a historical artifact—a notebook of one of Custer's soldiers—from the Little Bighorn National Park.

In July 1993 a federal grand jury in western Michigan indicted Coronado for his part in the ALF raid on Michigan State University's experimental fur farm. Coronado, who had gone into hiding after Operation Bite Back, was captured in November 1994, on the Pasqua Pueblo Indian reservation in Arizona, where he lived with his tribe, the Yaqui. On March 3, 1995, Coronado pled guilty to aiding and abetting arson and to one count of theft of U.S. government property. He served almost four years in prison.

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