After calling for a boycott of Goya Foods last week after the company withdrew sponsorship from the 2017 National Puerto Rican Day Parade, Oscar López Rivera shared additional thoughts this week about the controversy surrounding the parade honoring him as a National Freedom Hero, saying that Puerto Ricans rely too much on corporations anyway, according to a English-language story from Puerto Rico’s Noticel outlet.
“No Puerto Rican should submit to the wishes of a corporation. Especially Puerto Ricans who love our country,” López Rivera said in the Noticel story, which translated his remarks in Spanish from an interview he had with Radio Isla.
“I believe Goya, JetBlue, the Yankees, and Daily News are entitled to do whatever they want. We Puerto Ricans have the right to do whatever we want,” López Rivera added later, according to the story.
“I believe in boycotts. We would need to use our power as consumers. A boycott would be perfect, because corporations cannot tell us what to do,” López Rivera said in the interview as well.
Besides the anti-corporate creed, López Rivera suggested in the Noticel article’s account of the Radio Isla interview that the FBI might also be influencing the campaign against him.
“I believe there are certain factors involved,” López Rivera said in the article. “There’s the FBI, for example. They could never do anything with us, because for all of us who were imprisoned for many years, they don’t have the tiniest bit of evidence that we did what they say we did… I imagine that maybe they’re involved in this, because last December, 32 FBI agents sent a letter to (Barack) Obama telling him not to release me.”
“[The FBI] hates the pro-independence movement,” López Rivera added. “They have always been willing to destroy the Puerto Rican pro-independence movement. They’re behind this.”
“Previously, former prisoners like Lolita Lebrón have been honored in the NY Puerto Rican Day Parade, and there has never been a controversy like this year,” he said.
“That board [of the National Puerto Rican Parade] has the right to choose whomever they want, and they chose me this year, and I am extremely grateful. That decision deserves to be respected,” López Rivera added.
