FALN

Between 1974 and 1983, the Puerto Rican nationalist group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, also known as Armed Forces of National Liberation but commonly known as FALN, perpetrated more than 130 bombings in the United States, mostly in New York City and Chicago.

Like other anti-imperialist groups founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the Black Panther Party, the FALN was committed to the revolutionary ideal of “armed struggle.” It wanted to win Puerto Rico's independence from the United States and end “Yankee imperialism” in the Caribbean. Along with other Puerto Rican militant nationalist groups, the FALN quickly became the second most important focus of the FBI's COINTELPRO division, which was created to investigate and infiltrate leftist groups.

Unlike other Puerto Rican nationalist groups, such as the Macheteros, the FALN focused on urban areas in the continental United States. In a communiqué on October 26, 1974, the group took credit for firebombs at five New York banks, as well as the bombings of the Newark, New Jersey, police headquarters and City Hall. Within a month, the group planted another bomb in the Bronx. When that bomb exploded, one police officer lost an eye. These early FALN attacks were typical, in that they were aimed at government and corporate offices and the police, with few civilian casualties

On January 11, 1975, a bomb went off in a restaurant in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, injuring 10 people and killing 2 young activists and a 6-year-old child. The FALN quickly blamed the CIA for the attack. Two weeks later, on January 24, 1975, FALN members bombed the Fraunces Tavern, a historic bar and restaurant near Wall Street in lower Manhattan, killing 4 people and injuring more than 50. The group claimed responsibility in a note left in a nearby telephone booth. No one has ever been tried for the crime, the bloodiest and most infamous attack ever carried out by the FALN. The group is also the major suspect in the 1975 bombing of the Trans World Airways terminal at LaGuardia Airport in which 11 people were killed.

Over the next three years, the group set off bombs in the Chicago Loop area, a Chicago Merchandise Mart, the FBI's Manhattan headquarters, the New York Public Library, and a Mobil Oil employment office, as well as planting several pipe bombs at corporate headquarters throughout New York City and firebombs at New York's major airports. In 1978, an explosion in Queens, New York, led police to Willie Morales, a suspected FALN leader. Morales was making a bomb that accidentally detonated; he lost most of his fingers in the blast. He was arrested soon after for possession of explosive devices and jailed on Riker's Island. His lawyer, Susan Tipograph, pressed to have him transferred to the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Once there, he escaped from a window, allegedly sliding down a rope of bandages with his maimed hands. Tipograph, a major suspect because she was the last to visit Morales before his escape, was a member of the [Page 194]May 19 Communist Organization, a clandestine militant group that often provided support for anti-imperialist causes, such as the FALN and the Black Liberation Army.

...