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Puerto Rico's Cloudy Future
| Article
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20555 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
1,926 Words |
| Author
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Juan M. Garcia Passalacqua
Juan M. Garcia Passalacqua is a visiting professor at Yale.
He is a political analyst for newspapers, radio, and
television in his native Puerto Rico and for EL Nuevo Herald
in Miami. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
in New York. |
In the face of the 1992 elections in both the United States and Puerto Rico, a political hurricane of untold dimension moves speedily from the Caribbean to Washington. It will force the United States to opt between chauvinism and pluralism, between accepting the Puerto Ricans as an ethnic minority within the Union or sending them toward an autonomous future.
On November 3, the forces favoring Puerto Rico's annexation to the United States are expected to win a comfortable victory, and if that happens, a plebiscite in which the request for statehood is expected to win will be held in the summer of 1993. At that moment, the irresistible force--the growing pro-statehood sentiment in Puerto Rico--will meet the immovable object--a U.S. Congress intent on denying admission to three million mulatto, Spanish-speaking, poor inhabitants of the island.
Two specters will dominate the impending debate: Quebec and Northern Ireland. These, say many in Congress, are the examples of what happens when a coherent nation swallows a foreign nationality. For that reason, sentiment against Puerto Rico's admission as the 51st state is rife in Washington.
The issue narrows down to a simple understanding of what the Puerto Rican people--three million on the Caribbean island and two million in the continental United States--should be: an autonomous nationality in the Caribbean or an ethnic minority in the United States?
History In Brief
Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony for 400 years, before being invaded by the United States in 1898 as part of the Spanish American War, and has been U.S. "territory" since. It has never exercised its self-determination. In 1917 its inhabitants were made U.S. citizens in the face of a potential German invasion during World War I. In 1952, after World War II, Puerto Rico was granted the power to draft its own constitution, and it is now governed by a local governor with two houses elected by the local people, in a political relationship known as "a commonwealth." Opposed to that political arrangement are two other sectors of the society, one favoring annexation to the United States, the other favoring independence. The debate among the three options came to a head in December 1991, in a referendum held on the island.
Beyond the three political alternatives of statehood, commonwealth, or independence is a more crucial issue. Puerto
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