Puerto Rico: A Domestic Foreign Policy Connection
by Anne Winkler-Morey, WAMM

For the third consecutive issue of worldwideWAMM, Anne Winkler-Morey brings us an article on the connections between U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Anne teaches Cuban and Puerto Rican history at the University of Minnesota.

Puerto Rico may not seem to fit in this series on the domestic/foreign policy connections. But Puerto Rico, like U.S./Native American relations, is a “domestic foreign policy” issue.

Puerto Rico became a colony of the United States in 1899. The U.S. president appointed the governor, who appointed a local congress. In 1917 Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens, just in time to become soldiers during World War I. In 1948 the first governor was elected by Puerto Ricans. In 1952 Puerto Rico became a “freely associated commonwealth” of the United States, with its own local government. This status continues to this day.

Like the States, Puerto Rico must abide by U.S. military and trade policies. Unlike people who live in the States, however, Puerto Ricans on the island cannot vote for U.S. president and they have no representation in the U.S. Congress. They pay no federal taxes, yet they can be drafted.

The U.S. military controls huge sections of the island, including over 70 percent of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. If the military wants to use Puerto Rico for bombing practice, the Puerto Ricans have no recourse except to appeal to international public opinion through popular protest. And protest they do. Islanders who have been divided for a century into three factions (supporters of statehood, the current commonwealth status quo, and independence) are united in opposition to recent bombing practice on the island of Vieques.

Three arguments are used by the U.S.-military-out-of-Vieques movement: First, the military use of Vieques is a human rights issue. The health and welfare of residents is at stake. Second, the U.S. military presence in Vieques is just one example of how their dependent status vis a vis the United States oppresses Puerto Ricans. Third, military maneuvers in Vieques aid a foreign policy that oppresses Third World people. Many use all three arguments to explain their opposition.

As it stands, this unity among Puerto Ricans has not stopped the bombing. In September the U.S. engaged in three weeks of practice drills despite island and worldwide protest. What is to be done? While it may seem the politically correct thing to support independence for Puerto Rico, the islanders have voted repeatedly in plebiscites (votes that don’t count) for a continuation of the status quo. Why? The answer has more to do with U.S. policy toward the rest of the so-called “Third World.”

While Puerto Ricans have endured U.S. territorial imperialism, the rest of Latin America has experienced the neo-colonial economic and military policies of the United States. These have been even more devastating than the semi-colonial U.S. policies governing Puerto Rico (at least since the 1950s). All Puerto Ricans—as the saying goes—are independentistas when they are drunk. In other words, all Puerto Ricans, like all human beings, think they have a right to be free, but in the sober daylight the Puerto Ricans look at Haiti and the Dominican Republic and say, “In the world we live in, things could be worse.” In other words, what Puerto Ricans have is not a bad deal for a Third World country. But of course they are not a Third World country. They are a part of the United States.

Under the current system, Puerto Ricans will never enjoy equality with their fellow U.S. citizens. So the question still needs answering: What is to be done? It seems to me that defending Puerto Rican sovereignty needs to be part of the larger campaign against what we misleadingly call globalization: the world economic system of unequal exchange between First and Third World, white and non-white, men and women, working people and the tiny elite who control global corporations. Many Puerto Ricans have come to this conclusion.

In August 2002, the Puerto Rican Senate sponsored an international peace conference hosted by the former president of Costa Rica, Nobel Peace prizewinner Oscar Arias. People came from all over the world, but the vast majority of participants was from the island. They talked about Iraq, U.S. nuclear proliferation, and IMF and World Bank policies that violently erode the livelihood of Third World citizens. They talked about Vieques within this global context.

Puerto Ricans at a mass demonstration in Vieques were even more direct. People on the island of Vieques want to fish without military pollution and they do not want their island to be used to practice killing Iraqi people. In putting local livability and national sovereignty issues into the context of global inequality and militarism, Puerto Ricans are leading the way. We mainlanders should follow their lead.