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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2009
The United States insists that the issue of Puerto Rico was removed from the international agenda by a vote of the UN General Assembly in 1953. This insistence has not quieted the international debate. During the last decade, more nations have used more international organizations to pursue the decolonization of Puerto Rico. They have been assisted by moderate Puerto Rican leaders who are looking for a way to induce the United States to change the island's status. As an agenda-taker, the U.S. government has had to expend increasing amounts of energy, prestige, and resources—mostly diplomatic, but occasionally economic and political—each year to try to keep from being condemned as a colonial power. Agenda-setters, particularly Cuba, pay a small price but derive substantial benefits from raising the cost to the United States or increasing the number of turnstiles (actions in other international forums) through which the United States must pass each year. Other countries, whose UN vote is transformed by U.S. concern into hard currency, owe the agenda-setter a debt. Five specific changes in strategy could reduce the costs to the United States of being an agenda-taker in the United Nations
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3 For a full discussion of each option and its implications for the United States, see Comptroller General of the United States, Report to the Congress: Puerto Rico's Political Future—A Divisive Issue with Many Dimensions, GGD–81–48 (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, 2 03 1981)Google Scholar.
4 This was Resolution no. 23 of the Constitutional Convention. See Reisman, W. Michael, Puerto Rico and the International Process: New Roles in Association, a Report for the Conference on Puerto Rico and the Foreign Policy Process held at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in October 1973 (Washington, D.C.: American Society of International Law, 1975), p. 42Google Scholar.
5 In fact, the UN Fourth Committee rejected all petitions to testify from groups in non-selfgoverning territories until 1961.
6 For the text of Resolution 748, as well as other key UN Resolutions 1514 and 1541, see Reisman, , Puerto Rico, Appendices 4–6, pp. 173–83Google Scholar. For this vote and others at the United Nations, the following sources were used: U.S. Participation in the United Nations: The President's [Annual] Report to Congress; annual editions of Yearbook of the United Nations, in this case 1953, pp. 533–39; and for a summary of action before 26 August 1974, UN General Assembly, “Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, Question of the List of Territories to Which the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples Is Applicable,” A/AC.109/L.976 (26 August 1974).
7 For a brief review of these requests and the lack of response by Congress, see Comptroller General of the United States, Report to the Congress: Experiences of Past Territories Can Assist Puerto Rico Status Deliberations, GGD–80–26 (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, 7 03 1980), pp. 61–62Google Scholar. Also see the statement of Maurice Ferré, mayor of Miami, speaking as a U.S. citizen born in Puerto Rico before the UN Special Committee on Decolonization, at UN Headquarters, New York, 29 August 1978, p. 7.
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11 For the resolutions, see Reisman, , Puerto Rico, pp. 176–83Google Scholar. Resolution 1514 has a quasilegal status in the United Nations, almost comparable to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; this is not the case for 1541. Though the United States sometimes cites 1541, the resolution defines free association to include the right of unilateral secession, which Puerto Rico does not have.
12 The correct name of the committee is the “Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries,” but for obvious reasons, people refer to it as the Special Committee on De-Colonization or more simply as the Committee of 24 (C–24). When Venezuela rejoined the committee in 1980, it became the 25th member, but the committee is still known as the Committee of 24.
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18 Cabranes, Jose, “Puerto Rico: Out of the Colonial Closet,” Foreign Policy no. 33 (Winter 1978–1979), p. 67Google Scholar; statement of Maurice Ferré before the UN Special Committee on De-Colonization, 29 August 1978.
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21 For the debate, see UN General Assembly, 24 September 1982, A/37/PV.4 (27 September 1982). The characterization of the lobbying campaign is by Berlin, Michael J., “U.S. Wins UN Vote on Puerto Rico,” Washington Post, 25 09 1982, p. 1Google Scholar; see also “U.N. Supports U.S. over Puerto Rico,” New York Times, 25 September 1982, p. 3.
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26 This is the conclusion of Austin Linsley in “U.S.-Cuban Relations,” pp. 127–28, and one with which I agree, having discussed this issue several times with the highest Cuban officials, including Fidel Castro, between December 1978 and January 1980.
27 Interviews with Rubén Berrios Martinez, president of the Independence party, and with Carlos Gallisa, secretary general of the Socialist party of Puerto Rico, April 1983.
28 On her maiden speech to the OAS in 1979, Ambassador Dessima Williams of the Revolutionary Government of Grenada expressed her government's solidarity with Puerto Rico's quest for independence. See Votaw, Carmen Delgado, “Puerto Rico: A Pawn or an Option for Governance in the Western Hemisphere's Future (Paper prepared for the Aspen Institute Project on Governance in the Western Hemisphere, 06 1981), p. 3Google Scholar.
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34 For Ford's statement, see New York Times, 1 Janaury 1977, p. 1. President-elect Carter's response came the next day: “Until the Puerto Rican people themselves express a preference for statehood…the Congress should not take the initiative” (New York Times, 2 January 1977, p. 2). For President Reagan's statement, see Presidential Papers, 12 January 1982, p. 19.
35. Comments at the Conference on Puerto Rico sponsored by the World Peace Foundation, 20 September 1983, Washington, D.C.
