Dylcia Pagan, 77, Dies; Puerto Rican Nationalist Who Spent 19 Years in Prison

Dylcia Pagan, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican nationalist who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and spent 19 years in prison before being granted clemency by President Bill Clinton under the condition that she renounce violence, died on June 30 in Carolina, P.R. She was 77.

Her son, Ernesto Gomez Gomez, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was cardiorespiratory failure.

Ms. Pagan was one of the most high-profile of the 10 members of a domestic terror group, Armed Forces for National Liberation, known by its Spanish initials, F.A.L.N., who were convicted on arms and conspiracy charges in 1981. The defendants refused to mount a defense at their federal trial in Chicago, claiming that they were prisoners of war.

The authorities said the 10 were the core of the F.A.L.N., one of the homegrown revolutionary movements of the 1970s that, along with the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army, staked out an extreme fringe of the New Left by embracing terroristic violence but had little popular support.

The F.A.L.N. claimed responsibility for 120 bombings in New York and other cities from 1974 to 1983 in the name of Puerto Rican independence. The wave of terrorism included a bombing at the historic Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan in 1975 that killed four people.

Ms. Pagan’s 55-year sentence was the lightest received by the 10 defendants; she owed her particular notoriety to the fact that she was in a relationship with William Morales, an F.A.L.N. leader who was then a fugitive. The trial judge said he believed that Ms. Pagan acted under his influence.