Carmen Valentín Pérez

In 2017, Valentín Pérez and other Puerto Rican nationalists welcomed a newly-freed leader of the nationalists, Oscar López Rivera, who said the nationalists had disavowed violence years ago.

In criticizing President Clinton's decision to release the Puerto Rican prisoners, the conservative U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee also categorized Valentín as a "Puerto Rican Nationalist", echoing a recent Newsweek article. In 2006, the United Nations called for the release of the remaining Puerto Rican political prisoners in United States prisons.

For many years, numerous national and international organizations criticized Carmen Valentin's incarceration categorizing it as political imprisonment. Carmen Valentín Pérez was finally released from prison on September 10, 1999, after President Bill Clinton extended her clemency. Clinton cited Rev. Desmond Tutu and former President Jimmy Carter as having been influential on his decision to grant Valentin the clemency offer. Cases involving the release of other Puerto Rican Nationalist prisoners have also been categorized as cases of political prisoners, with some being more vocal than others.

Valentín Pérez and 11 others were arrested on April 4, 1980 in Evanston, Illinois. She was charged with seditious conspiracy and related charges, and sentenced to 90 years. Her release date was scheduled for 2043.

They had been linked to more than 100 bombings or attempted bombings since 1974, actions whose goal was to achieve independence for Puerto Rico. At their trial proceedings, all of the arrested declared their status as prisoners of war, and refused to participate in the proceedings. None of the bombings of which they were convicted resulted in deaths or injuries. Among the other convicted Puerto Rican nationalists there were sentences of as long as 90 years in Federal prisons for offenses including sedition, possession of unregistered firearms, interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle, interference with interstate commerce by violence and interstate transportation of firearms with intent to commit a crime. None of those granted clemency were convicted in any of the actual bombings. Rather, they had been convicted on a variety of charges ranging from bomb making and conspiracy to armed robbery and firearms violations. They were all convicted for sedition, the act of attempting to overthrow the Government of the United States in Puerto Rico by force.

Carmen Hilda Valentín Pérez (born March 2, 1946) is a former member of the FALN, an armed clandestine group which fought for Puerto Rican independence from the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. She was arrested and charged in 1980 for seditious conspiracy and other charges and was sentenced on February 18, 1981 to 90 years imprisonment. She was incarcerated in a U.S. federal prison and released early from prison after President Bill Clinton extended a clemency offer to her on September 7, 1999.

Carmen Valentín Pérez was born in Camuy, Puerto Rico, on March 2, 1946 and emigrated with her family to the U.S. when she was 10 years old. She graduated from Providence/St. Mel High School in 1965, and received a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish from Northeastern Illinois University and a Masters of Arts in Counselling from Roosevelt University. At the time of her arrest by the U.S. Government on seditious conspiracy charges, she was completing her Doctorate from Loyola University in Chicago.