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146 CHAPTER SIX Terrorists and Tourists in Tierra Amarilla THE EXPLOSIONS THAT DETONATED SIMULTANEOUSLY in Manhattan on October 26, 1974, destroyed four banks and announced the start of a bombing campaign by a group called Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation, or faln), a clandestine paramilitary group that advocated Puerto Rican independence from the United States. Born the same year as the beginning of the bombing campaign, the faln was formed when the Comandos Armados de Liberación (Armed Commandos of Liberation) joined forces with the Movimiento de Independencia Revolucionario (Revolutionary Independence Movement). As the names suggest, the merger created a group committed to an armed struggle to evict the United States from Puerto Rico and destroy “the imperialist power base on the island to hasten a crisis which would shake the foundation of the Puerto Rican colonial world.” Although bombings by Puerto Rican nationalists were not uncommon in the late 1960s, they were largely limited to attacks on U.S. businesses and military installations located on the Puerto Rican archipelago. The October 1974 explosions were the first attacks on the U.S. mainland since the March 1, 1954, attack on the U.S. Congress, when four armed assailants infiltrated the Capitol building and launched a barrage of gunfire from the visitor’s gallery into a packed assembly on the floor of the House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen. Beginning in 1974 the terrain of conflict shifted back to the U.S. mainland. Between 1974 and 1983 the faln claimed responsibility for more than 120 attacks on targets throughout the United States, 58 of which came during an intense three-year bombing campaign that began with the October 1974 explosions in Manhattan. Among the targets during the campaign were New York banks and department stores, the State Department in Washington, D.C., the headquarters of the Newark city police department, and the Standard Oil Building in Chicago. On the morning of April 3, 1977, two bombs exploded, one right after the other, in New York. One bomb destroyed the entire floor of a Madison Avenue Terrorists and Tourists • 147 building housing offices of the Department of Defense, while the other destroyed one floor of the Mobil Oil Building on Forty-Second Street, killing one man and injuring seven others. Hundreds of additional bomb threats flooded emergency channels. Authorities evacuated hundreds of thousands of office workers from buildings throughout Manhattan, including the World Trade Center, where tens of thousands of office workers streamed out onto the street and blocked traffic in Lower Manhattan for most of the day. Authorities later found a communiqué from faln at the Central Park statue of Cuban revolutionary Jose Martí that threatened more bombings against U.S. corporations. Despite nearly sixty bombings by early 1977, New York and Chicago police and the fbi had no leads, nor did they know the identity of any members of the faln. But just months prior to the April attack, in November 1976, a Chicago drug addict and small-time thief unwittingly interrupted faln plans and gave fbi investigators a break in the case when he kicked in his neighbor’s door looking for drugs and found instead a faln bomb-making lab. According to the Chicago Police Department, the addict had been watching his neighbor, a schoolteacher named Carlos Torres, bring large packages into his apartment late at night. When he kicked in Torres’s door one evening looking for money or drugs, he found instead 211 sticks of dynamite. He was quickly arrested when police found him trying to sell or trade the dynamite for drugs on the street. When police raided Torres’s apartment, they found faln communiqu és among the bomb-making materials. The fbi took over the investigation. Sporadically throughout 1976 dynamite left by faln at targets in New York or Chicago had failed to detonate. Authorities claimed that the dynamite in Torres’s apartment matched the faln duds. Agents pursued the lead aggressively and eventually claimed that they had traced the dynamite to a cache of explosives allegedly stolen in the late 1960s from the Bureau of Reclamation’s Heron Dam construction site west of Tierra Amarilla. The fbi and the attorneys general in New York and Illinois believed that two New Mexico activists, Moises Morales, one of the twenty courthouse raiders from 1967, and a thirty-year-old resident of Tierra Amarilla named Pedro Arechuleta, were somehow linked to the faln. According to the fbi Morales and Arechuleta...

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