Puerto Rico, Now! On the Road to Self-Determination

2011

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NACLA Vol 40 No. 6, 2007

During Puerto Rico’s may 2006 fiscal crisis, the people watched as the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA), or U.S. commonwealth government, fell apart as a model of both economic and political development. After the governor Acevedo-Vila, shut down most public operations, leaving about 80,000 employees temporarily laid off, the island’s congress approved a 7% sales tax that enabled the island government to keep up payments to its bondholders, payments that amount to $3.6 billion annually.

Centro Journal, 2012

Journal of Contemporary Thought, 2006

Első Század, 2006

Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 25, No. 5 (Sep., 1998), pp. 7-26 , 1998

Latin American Research Review, 2005

Theory & Event

How do the lived conditions of colonialism assume particular forms of legibility and dissociation in relation to imperial nation-states such as the United States, where a variety of colonialisms remain both constitutive and continuing, but are seldom understood as such? Conventional historical narratives of decolonization are insufficient for addressing the complex overlay of colonizations in the present and what might come afterward. This essay focuses on Puerto Rico in order to consider the colonial disavowals that strive to render these conditions unintelligible and against which counter-epistemologies and new social possibilities take shape under the escalating pressure of recent judicial rulings and fiscal crises.

2004

The intention of this paper is to establish why the political status of Puerto Rico is an international issue, rather than a purely internal matter of the United States and provide a possible transition plan that will permit the U.S. and Puerto Rico to make a decision that would modify the status quo. The arguments assert that the political status of Puerto Rico can be resolve if the United States takes a genuine interest by working on a domestic policy to address the situation and finally end the inattentive policy. On the other hand, the main Puerto Rican parties should all agree to work on a local political process in order to come up with a consensus on a formula that expresses the will of the people of Puerto Rico. There has been a tendency to believe that only those Puerto Ricans who support independence consider the status quo an international issue. At the present time the argument asserts that the actual status of Puerto Rico provided a significant change in 1952 from a purely colonial government to certain degree selfgovernment, but 51 years of this formula have not resolve the issue. The island is considered the oldest colony in the world. Regardless of the Puerto Rican preferences for the following options: commonwealth, statehood or independence; the people of Puerto Rico consider this issue a domestic matter that has evolved into an international issue that needs to be resolve in the near future.