Puerto Rico, U.S.A: The Case for Statehood

Carlos Romero-Barcelo

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1980

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Summary:  ?The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a political and economic anachronism.? With that one-sentence paragraph, Rubén Berríos-Martínez began an article in the April 1977 issue of Foreign Affairs, entitled, ?Independence for Puerto Rico: The Only Solution.? But the President of the Puerto Rican Independence Party was too kind: ?commonwealth? as a political status is not even an anachronism; it is a myth.

Carlos Romero-Barceló, a graduate of Yale (1953) and the University of Puerto Rico School of Law, served as Mayor of San Juan from 1969 to 1977. He has been Governor of Puerto Rico since 1977.

"The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a political and economic anachronism."

With that one-sentence paragraph, Rubén Berríos-Martínez began an article in the April 1977 issue of Foreign Affairs, entitled, "Independence for Puerto Rico: The Only Solution." But the President of the Puerto Rican Independence Party was too kind: "commonwealth" as a political status is not even an anachronism; it is a myth.

For 400 years, Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain. Then, after the Spanish-American War, sovereignty over the island was transferred to the United States, a nation which, in deference to its own revolutionary origin, eschews the use of the term "colony" in describing its dependencies. Thus, as the nineteenth century ended, Puerto Rico ceased to be known officially as a "colony," and instead was euphemistically redesignated an "unincorporated territory."

So it has remained to this day.

In this article I intend to show why "commonwealth" is a myth, and why the time has come for Puerto Rico to enter the union as the 51st state. I am convinced, both as a Latin American and as a U.S. citizen, that statehood for Puerto Rico would constitute a boon for the nation, as well as for the island.

II

Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution invests Congress with the "power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States." Under that clause, Congress saw fit to confer American citizenship upon the Puerto Rican people through a 1917 law commonly known as the Jones Act. In 1952, as Mr. Berríos correctly observed:

the U.S. Congress enacted Public Law 600, giving the island the power to draft its own Organic Act which was to be called "the Constitution." All the provisions of the Jones Act, which governed the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, remained unaltered but were now to be known as the Federal Relations Act. Puerto Rico obtained absolutely no additional economic or political power, except the right to design the structure of its internal government, under the ever-watchful eye of the U.S. Congress. (Emphasis added)1

It was this Organic Act, this local constitution, which was heralded in Puerto Rico as representing a "compact" between the "peoples" of the United States and Puerto Rico. In Spanish the "compact" would be known as the Estado Libre Asociado (a deliberately deceptive misnomer if ever there was one, since its sponsors knew full well that Congress retained the constitutional right unilaterally to alter or even terminate the so-called free association at any time), and in English by the comfortingly less autonomous-sounding label of "commonwealth," the name by which states of the union such as Kentucky and Massachusetts are formally chartered.

In an era of worldwide decolonization, the myth of the "Estado Libre Asociado" served the interests both of the U.S. government and of the then dominant Popular Democratic Party (PDP) in Puerto Rico. In 1953, just a year after the "Commonwealth" was established, the United ...

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