Rosa Cortez Collazo

Vocation

Puerto Rican political activist, wife of Oscar Collazo (one of the participants in the attempted assassination of US President Harry S Truman in 1950). She emigrated to New York in 1925. She joined the New York cell of the Nationalist Party in 1937, after Slaughter of Ponce in Puerto Rico. After a failed first marriage marriage, she married Oscar Collazo. After the attempted assassination of Truman by her husband was jailed, he accused of collaboration to overthrow the government. After his release, successfully he campaigned on behalf of her husband, demanding that his death sentence be commuted. On October 12, 1954 , after the Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire on the US House of Representatives, was convicted again for seditious conspiracy , serving six years in a federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, accompanied by Dolores (Lolita ) Lebron. In 1977 Rosa was part of a campaign to free the nationalists imprisoned in the United States. Two years later, President Jimmy Carter pardoned, and Rosa traveled to Kansas City to meet with Oscar, but his separation of twenty years had eroded marriage. Rosa Collazo remained in Puerto Rico, active in the fight for independence, until her death at the age of 83 years on 3 May 1988.