Many things have changed in Puerto Rico since powerful hurricane Maria made landfall on the island last year and I would say that the most that has changed is the political scenario. Right now the territory is ruled by the New Progressive Party, a political party in Puerto Rico founded in 1967, which whose reason of its foundation was the dissatisfaction that many annexationists of the time had with the Republican Statehood Party (Partido Estadista Republicano) that at the time was the main pro-statehood political party in the island. Is in 1967 when Luis A. Ferre (who a year later would win the 1968 general election to become the 3rd Governor Elect of Puerto Rico), founds the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo Progresista or PNP) as a new political alternative for all Puerto Ricans that want Puerto Rico to become the 51st state of the United States of America and that felt betrayed by the inactions of the Republican Statehood Party and its leader Miguel Angel Garcia Mendez on achieving statehood for Puerto Rico.
A year later, in the 1968 general election, Ferre runs for governor as the candidate for the PNP and is responsible of the Popular Democratic Party’s first defeat. The Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático or PPD) was the largest political party at the moment, founded by the island’s first elected governor Luis Muñoz Marin, a strong ally of the Democratic Party in the mainland, and had complete control of all of the island’s government thanks to the fact that since 1940, the PPD would never lose an election until Ferre’s victory in 1968. With the historic victory of Luis Ferre and his new party, pro-statehood Puerto Ricans saw the establishment of a new chapter in their fight for statehood. During time to time the PNP would achieve victories by electing five governors under their party, being the most recent, current governor Ricardo Rossello, who is the son of former governor Pedro Rossello, also from the PNP.
From 1968, the PNP would become the face of the pro-statehood movement in the island, where almost every pro-statehood Puerto Rican would identify itself as a member or supporter of the PNP and would support all the candidates of the PNP for public office in every general election. The PNP would break voting records achieving more than a million votes for their gubernatorial candidate in the 1996 and 2008 general elections. In 1996, governor Pedro Rossello ran for reelection and he received 1,006,331 votes equal to over 50% of the popular vote becoming the candidate with the highest number of votes received in history until the 2008 election when Luis Fortuño, also running under the PNP platform, received 1,025,965 votes equal to 52.8% of the popular vote becoming the candidate with the highest number of votes received in Puerto Rican electoral history. This would indicate that the PNP is a strong political party that would not disappear too easily.
Everything would look fine until the 2016 general election. In this election, the PNP would “win” the governorship but with the 41.8% of the popular vote, the smallest percentage in PNP’s history. Lower that the percentage they got in elections they didn’t win like the 1972, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2012 elections. In 2016, Ricardo Rossello became the fifth PNP candidate to become Governor of Puerto Rico. He won the election under a campaign of promising on being the “last colonial governor”. The arrival of Ricardo Rossello to the island’s highest office is joined by Donald Trump’s historic victory in the 2016 US presidential election. Rossello who is a member of the Democratic Party and Trump who is a republican president, we would suppose that they would have a bad relationship but it wasn’t at the beginning. After hurricane Maria struck the island in 2017, president Trump would practically offer a path to statehood to Rossello. He would do it by considering the territory of Puerto Rico as domestic jurisdiction in the tax cut legislation that would become the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 but Rossello alongside anti-statehood leaders from the PPD and democratic congressmen that support independence like Luis Gutierrez, he lobbied for the island to be treated as a foreign country even though when the island is the home of over 3.5 million American born citizens.
For many pro-statehood Puerto Ricans they felt that move was a betrayal from governor Rossello and the PNP to the pro-statehood cause. Is after this that a group of pro-statehood Puerto Ricans joined and formed the Puerto Rico Statehood Alliance (Alianza Estadista). A new pro-statehood movement that looks to make Puerto Rico the 51st state. For the founders of this new Statehood Alliance, the PNP leaders don’t represent the statehood ideology. For them, the PNP has become another colonialist party like the PPD. Not only has become a colonialist party but has also become a party with socialist influence by supporting socialist policies like the Democratic Party does, that no more denies socialism inside the party.
The leaders of this new movement, the Puerto Rico Statehood Alliance, affirm that they don’t belong to the PNP, they don’t make any alliance with democratic politicians or any colonialist party in the island, and they affirm that they represent a base of conservative pro-statehood citizens that believe in republican values and principles. This new movement not only presents itself as a new alternative for those pro-statehood citizens that feel betrayed by the PNP and its leaders but it also presents itself as an alternative for those pro-statehood citizens that identify themselves as supporters of the Republican Party and consider themselves as republicans and left the PNP due to their turn to the democratic left. There is no doubt that the Puerto Rican political scenario is changing as I already wrote many times before and it only remains to see how it will continue to change.
Vita ac Libertatem 