Committee of Correspondence for Puerto Rico Self-Determination

In an April 3 Caribbean Business column on the federal indictment of Governor Acevedo Vila, former Governor and past President of the  PDP, Rafael Hernandez Colon, eloquently discredited the ideological provocation of those who claim federal law enforcement authorities and federal courts have no legitimate jurisdiction in Puerto Rico.   RHC calls on all Puerto Ricans to avoid a “constitutional crisis” by recognizing that the people consented to federal jurisdiction in the commonwealth by approving the local constitution in 1952.  He also points out that both Congress and the U.N. recognized the allocation of local and federal powers in the commonwealth to which the U.S. citizens of the commonwealth consented in their locally adopted constitution. RHC is legally and historically correct, and his call for respect of the rule of law was intellectually honest and morally courageous. 

Lamentably, RHC does not stop there.   He just can not seem to resist also making every issue or event our political life the occasion for a self-serving defense of the intellectually and morally dishonest ideological fiction that commonwealth is a non-colonial status.  Once again, he pretends to be respectful of those in Washington and Puerto Rico who disagree with him on what the ultimate status of Puerto Rico should be, only his feigned civility is betrayed by belligerence toward any one not in collusion with him in the revisionist myth that the commonwealth ceased to be a territorial and colonial status in 1952. Yet, even the true intellectual architect of commonwealth, former Puerto Rico Supreme Court Chief Justice Jose Trias Monge, recognized that Puerto Rico did not become fully self-governing, democratic, non-territorial or decolonized in 1952. 

The RHC theory is that Puerto Rico is not a territory simply because of U.N. acquiescence in General Assembly Resolution 748 to the U.S. desire to end the inconvenience of annual reporting to the U.N. on its territorial administration of Puerto Rico.  In this context, the louder RHC’s anguished cries that commonwealth is a status option of “equal dignity” with statehood or independence the less convincing he becomes. 

The truth is that commonwealth is not even a political status, it is rather a form of territorial government which enables the internal civil affairs of Puerto Rico to be administered by a locally constituted government.   Commonwealth is created by, and remains subject to, federal statutory organic law enacted by Congress pursuant to the territorial clause of the U.S. Constitution.  

So there is no constitutional crisis related to the juridical nature of commonwealth which is a limited grant of local power by Congress.  All residual sovereignty in Puerto Rico reposes with Congress, and the reservation of powers to the people in the territory under Article I of the local constitution relates only to the limited powers vested in the local government by federal organic law. Thus, if PDP voters want to define their party’s future by staking its credibility on a single man’s fate, instead of sound principles of governance, and a very troubled man at that, that is a PDP problem more than it is for the NPP.  

Indeed, if the PDP ties its future to AAV, that is hardly a constitutional crisis for the commonwealth, much less the U.S. as the metropolitan power.   The U.S. somehow will muddle through in its on-going administration of Puerto Rico as a territorial commonwealth, even if AAV and his most fanatical followers want to delude themselves with more of the pseudo-nationalist notions and doctrines of quasi-sovereignty that are the true pillars of ELA ideology, but which are utterly without structural integrity. 

When the U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico are ready to stand up and claim their true birthright to full and equal rights and duties of national citizenship, through statehood or real nationhood, the U.S. will welcome that, not oppose it.