Coca-Cola Supports Terrorists? - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Coca-Cola Supports Terrorists?
by

Via Kyle Smith at National Review, I’ve learned that the Puerto Rican Day Parade on June 11 in New York City will be honoring unrepentant terrorist leader Oscar López Rivera, and that Coca-Cola is one of the sponsors of this parade.

López Rivera, a leader of the Puerto Rican Marxist terrorist group FALN, will be the parade’s first-ever “National Freedom Hero.”

Joseph Connor, whose father was killed Jan. 24, 1975 by FALN, denounced the move in the New York Post as “truly sickening.” FALN took credit for the bombing, describing it as a blow against “reactionary corporate executives.” “In fact,” Connor says, “my dad was born to immigrants and raised in working-class Washington Heights, very near where several of the FALN members were from.”

In his final days in office, President Obama bestowed this wholly undeserved clemency on his fellow radical. Two days ago day, López Rivera, 74, was freed after being in custody since 1981.

You can register your displeasure with Coke here. The following is the message I sent:

To whom it may concern:  I have just learned that Coca-Cola is sponsoring the Puerto Rican Day Parade which will honor unrepentant terrorist Oscar López Rivera.  My wife and I are regular purchasers of Coke Zero.  However, the case currently in our refrigerator will be our last if your company sponsors a parade that honors this thug as a hero.  We will gladly change the soda we buy.  Perhaps PepsiCo has better sense in its choice of which events to sponsor.

Sincerely,

David Hogberg

Other corporate sponsors, along with links to their contact info, are: AT&T, JetBlue, Corona (owned by Constellation Brands), the New York Yankees, the United Federation of Teachers, and the local affiliates of NBC (owned by Disney) and ABC (owned by Comcast).

Here is more on Oscar López Rivera from Smith’s article:

López Rivera, an admitted leader of the 1970s Marxist terror group FALN, which sought independence for Puerto Rico under Communist leadership, was in 1981 sentenced to 55 years in prison [for seditious conspiracy], later increased to 70 as punishment for an escape attempt. After being arrested with six pounds of dynamite in his Chicago apartment and declaring at trial, “I am an enemy of the United States government,” he served a bit more than half of his sentence before Obama released him. Puerto Ricans have repeatedly voted against independence in a series of referenda, so López Rivera’s terrorist career amounted to killing innocent civilians — FALN carried out more than 100 bombings, including one at Manhattan’s landmark Fraunces Tavern in 1975 that killed four — to pursue a political goal not supported even by his fellow Puerto Ricans.

[New York City Mayor Bill] De Blasio this week shrugged at López Rivera’s hideous past.

“The organization he was affiliated with did things I don’t agree with, obviously, and they were illegal,” the mayor said at a press conference this week. “I don’t agree with the way he did it. But he did serve his time,” adding that López Rivera “renounced violence.”

He did? Here is what López Rivera, quoted in yesterday’s New York Times, said upon his release from a halfway house in Puerto Rico on Wednesday: “We are a colonized people, and according to international law, that says all colonized people have a right to struggle for its independence, using all methods within reach, including force.”

Sign up to receive our latest updates! Register


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: . You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact

Be a Free Market Loving Patriot. Subscribe Today!