Decolonise Puerto Rico

The US mid-terms will be watched eagerly just about everywhere on the planet. With Donald Trump breaking records for unpopularity, the Democrats look set to take control of the Senate and Congress. But expectations may not be matched by action, least of all on foreign policy, where differences between the two parties are often marginal.

When the Republicans lost the mid-terms in 2006, it didn’t stop George Bush launching a disastrous ‘surge’ in Iraq. After Barack Obama suffered a similar electoral setback in 2014, he continued to pursue an aggressive strategy overseas. One of his lesser known decisions, which drew no meaningful opposition in Washington, was to impose an unelected board on Puerto Rico to control its finances.

The Puerto Rican example is significant not only because it is the meeting point between foreign and domestic policy, but also because the board Obama appointed — known as PROMESA — is still in charge, and the future of the colony remains unresolved.

The US has ruled Puerto Rico for longer than the British Raj in India. These mid-terms are the 65th round of Congressional elections since the US invaded Puerto Rico in 1898. In 1917, Puerto Ricans were given US citizenship — conveniently making them eligible for conscription just as the US was entering World War One — but those living in the colony are still unable to vote in elections for the legislature that exercises sovereignty over them. This democratic outrage was compounded when Obama responded to Puerto Rico’s debt crisis by imposing PROMESA, depriving it even of the bankruptcy protection afforded to US cities.

As ever with colonial situations, ‘debt’ is itself a misnomer. Colonial powers do not keep their possessions out of charity. Puerto Rico has served as a major US military base and test bed for all manner of nasty weapons. Its economy has been shaped for colonial purposes, first as a supplier of sugar and later as a low-tax, cheap labour producer of pharmaceuticals and electrical goods. Recent years have seen its prime Caribbean coastal land plundered for development, pricing Puerto Ricans out of their own communities.

Some aspects of Puerto Rico’s value to the US are impossible to quantify — how, for example, do you price being used to launch the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela? But the colony’s economic value has been more precisely measured in studies that show how the gap between the wealth it creates (GDP) and the income it retains (GNI) has grown since the 1960s to a point where around a third has been expatriated annually in most years since the 1980s. Just two years’ worth of this surplus value would be enough to clear Puerto Rico’s bond debt.

‘US corporations make billions on the island while half of Puerto Rican children live in poverty — and this all happens as an unelected fiscal board and not the Puerto Rican people decide the island’s future,’ says Arializa Ávila Chevalier, the Democrat candidate for New York’s 13th District, which includes Harlem and parts of The Bronx.

Ávila Chevalier is among the candidates backed by the advocacy organisation of Puerto Ricans living in the United States, Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora (BUDPR), which is working to ensure that the case for independence is not sidelined by a row between Trump and the Democrats over ‘statehood’.

In July, Kamala Harris sent Trump into apoplexy by suggesting the issue should be ‘revisited’ both in Puerto Rico and in Washington. Posting on Truth Social, he replied that this would make it ‘impossible for Republicans to ever win an Election again’ and represent “THE END OF AMERICA!” 

Trump’s rant was a slap in the face for Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood governor, Jenniffer González, whose craven support for the president was shown to count for nothing. At the same time, for independence supporters, Harris’s proposal to revisit statehood is yet another case of the Democrat leadership using the issue garner Latino votes having done nothing about it when they had the chance.

The Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), which has enjoyed a resurgence in support since the debt crisis, sees ‘statehood’ simply as annexation and believes it will leave the island languishing in even worse poverty than the most deprived US states such as Mississippi and Louisiana. Despite more than a century of US colonial rule and periods of sweeping repression of pro-independence groups, Puerto Rico has remained a Spanish-speaking nation with a distinct identity that its people — across the political spectrum — hold dearly.

The limited self-government Puerto Rico has had since 1952 was accepted in a take-it-or-leave it referendum only after Luis Muñoz Marín, the colony’s first elected governor and prime advocate of a compromise, claimed that independence would mean veterans losing their war pensions and be an economic ‘tragedy’ leaving people in ‘hunger’. Even after that vote, the US Congress removed from the draft constitution an entire section that promised ‘the fairest distribution’ of economic benefits that were claimed to accrue from remaining part of the US because it sounded too much like socialism.

This devolution of some powers — which, without irony, was officially called ‘free association’ — was enough to get Washington off the hook at the United Nations, which voted in 1953 by 26 to 16 to remove Puerto Rico from its list of non-self-governing territories. However, it did not change the underlying colonial relationship or deter the US from suppressing dissent using the coercive tools of its domestic red scare and the covert tactics of the FBI’s counter intelligence programme, COINTELPRO. 

By 1973, a UN transformed by the presence of newly-independent states defied US objections and initiated regular hearings on Puerto Rico again. This year, BUDPR’s Damara González told the UN’s Decolonization Committee that PROMESA’s ‘dangerous cuts to basic services’ meant that ‘every day thousands of Puerto Ricans go without water and electricity in their homes and workplaces [and that] citizens are unable to adequately bathe, prepare meals, and store medicine.’ She said: ‘If the United Nations is to live up to its charter of affirming human rights and promoting social progress, it must move to mitigate these ongoing crises by first addressing their root cause, the United States’ colonial rule over Puerto Rico.’

Washington has been successful over the decades in dividing Puerto Ricans, but support for independence is growing. The party of Muñoz Marín gained only 21 percent of the popular vote in governor elections, while Allianza — which includes PIP — saw its support rise to 31% to become the main challenger to González, who won with a 41 percent vote share.

While this issue is ultimately a matter for Puerto Ricans to decide, there will be no progress without pressure in the US itself on Washington politicians. As BUDPR president Alberto Medina says: ‘Without the ability to vote for president and no voting representatives in Congress, Puerto Ricans are wholly disenfranchised from U.S. politics. It’s Americans, not Puerto Ricans, who can pull on the levers of power and compel action from their elected leaders.’