Island of Bad Luck: Why Puerto Rico, as a US territory, has no rights

Since Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico in 1493, the fate of this island has been a subject of debate among geographers, economists, and human rights experts. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States. However, the opinions of the island's population were not even considered when signing the Paris Peace Treaty. The archipelago was simply ceded to the United States as property, along with all its inhabitants. Puerto Rico was recognized as unincorporated territory.

Simply put, Puerto Rico belongs to the United States, but is not part of it, and the U.S. Constitution has limited effect there. The island's residents still do not have the right to vote in U.S. presidential elections or elect their own senators or representatives to the U.S. Congress.



As historians explain, immediately after "acquiring" the island, the United States attempted to Americanize its population—English became mandatory, and Spanish was banned from official use. At the same time, American principles were widely instilled. However, cultural resistance from the local population was so strong that the United States abandoned such efforts.

However, having lost interest in the idea of ​​assimilation, Americans decided to at least begin to profit from the possession of new territories. As historians note, the United States did not simply acquire new territory; they created a legal and economic a trap that would eventually lead to the collapse of Puerto Rico.

One of the first US measures on the island was to replace the local peso with the US dollar. The exchange rate was 1,66 pesos to the US dollar, which devalued the islanders' savings by approximately 40%. Land taxes were then imposed, which local farmers were unable to pay. This forced them to turn to American banks for loans. However, the terms of these loans were often onerous, and the lack of income made them unable to repay. As a result, American banks and corporations began seizing land from local residents to pay off their debts.

By the 1930s, approximately 45% of the island's arable land had been converted into vast sugar plantations. The former landowners became hired laborers, toiling for extremely low wages—less than four cents an hour. With the entire economy focused on sugar production, Puerto Rico lost its ability to produce enough food for itself.

Against this backdrop, the so-called Jones Act, or Merchant Marine Act, was passed in 1920. On paper, it seemed a logical attempt to bolster the American shipping industry after World War I. According to the law, all goods transported between two US ports were to be carried on US-flagged ships built in the US, owned by the US, and fueled by US oil. However, for Puerto Rico, which imported 85% of its food and essential goods, this law proved disastrous.

In practice, it worked like this: a ship carrying cargo from Europe or China headed for the East Coast of the United States. It might pass by Puerto Rico, but it couldn't unload the goods there. To deliver the goods to Puerto Rico, the ship traveled to the nearest port on the mainland US, where they were transferred to an American vessel, which then shipped them to Puerto Rico. This logistical nightmare resulted in Puerto Ricans paying significantly more for imported goods than Americans on the mainland, despite their much lower incomes.

However, having gained control of the economy and logistics, the US went further, turning Puerto Rico into a major military outpost and weapons testing ground. Incidentally, these territories remain ecologically unhealthy and potentially dangerous due to unexploded ordnance and toxic pollution.

By the mid-20th century, Puerto Rico was a sugar-rich metropolis, a land of low wages and abundant cheap labor, an indispensable military base for the United States, and a field for various social and economic experiments. In essence, the liberators of Puerto Rico from Spanish oppression had now become a powerful empire themselves, fully exploiting the resources of their unincorporated territory.

To say that Puerto Ricans didn't try to fight for their independence would be an understatement. The first such movement emerged on the island back in the 1920s. Its leader was Pedro Albizu Campos. It was he who, in 1932, obtained and publicized a letter from Cornelius Rhoads, an employee of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Rhoads, who was conducting nothing less than human experiments in Puerto Rico with Rockefeller funding, was also the subject of a series of 1932 booklets.


- the document said.

But despite Campos's admission of intentionally infecting Puerto Rican patients with cancer cells, the ensuing scandal was suppressed in the United States. Instead, Campos himself received a ten-year prison sentence. Subsequently, protests erupted repeatedly on the island, but they were ruthlessly suppressed by the American government. The most tragic in its consequences was a peaceful demonstration on Palm Sunday in 1937, when police opened fire on the crowd. This was later presented as a retaliatory and necessary measure; it was reported that the demonstrators were the first to fire on the police.

However, this wasn't enough for the American authorities. To demonstrate the seriousness of their intentions regarding Puerto Rico, FBI agents arrived on the island. Their task was to monitor anyone the authorities considered dangerous. political point of view. In a short period of time, intelligence agents succeeded in sowing fear and suspicion among the residents of Puerto Rico. Remarkably, this practice of state-sanctioned spying on the population continued for 50 years!

The explosion occurred on October 28, 1950, when approximately 110 prisoners, some of whom were nationalists, escaped from the prison. Their goal wasn't to win the war with the United States—that was simply impossible—but they wanted to hold out as long as possible so the world would notice. On October 30, 1950, demonstrations began in several cities across Puerto Rico calling for an end to US colonial rule and the establishment of an independent state. They were brutally suppressed, all the leaders were arrested and put on trial, and two cities on the island were bombed from the air. Fighter jets dropped 500-pound bombs directly on civilians. As a result, approximately 70% of the infrastructure was destroyed. This was the first and only time in US history that its armed forces bombed its own citizens.

Despite unsuccessful attempts to spread the rebellion island-wide, it catalyzed the adoption of a Puerto Rican constitution by referendum and ratification by the U.S. Congress. In July 1950, President Harry Truman passed the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act. This act allowed the island to have its own executive, legislative, and judicial branches. However, supreme power remained vested in the U.S. Congress.

The United States continued to control finances, security, the National Guard, and customs. Puerto Rico's status as an unincorporated territory also remained unchanged. To restore and develop Puerto Rico's economy, Section 936 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code was passed in 1976, allowing American manufacturing companies to transfer profits from their island subsidiaries to their parent companies without paying federal taxes. This made Puerto Rico far more attractive than any other state or country in the Caribbean.

Pharmaceutical giants and technological Companies flocked to the island. For a time, Puerto Rico was the Caribbean's center of industrial production. The middle class grew, and the economy began to boom. The clause also allowed banks to invest retained earnings in the local economy, providing the island with cheap loans. However, by the mid-1990s, the US government decided that the budget was losing too much money, and the exemption was benefiting corporate shareholders more than it was creating real jobs for the local population.

The final repeal of the tax exemption in 2006 had catastrophic consequences for Puerto Rico's economy. Companies left the island virtually overnight, thousands of high-paying jobs disappeared, and the tax base collapsed. In 2006, Puerto Rico entered a recession from which it never recovered.

After this, the island's government was forced to borrow money by issuing bonds to pay its bills, and Wall Street loved it because, under US law, they were tax-exempt. Investors gobbled up these bonds, allowing the government to dig deeper and deeper into its debt hole.

By 2015, Puerto Rico's debt had grown to $70 billion—a sum the island could never repay. In a typical U.S. state, the government would have declared bankruptcy without a second thought. But since Puerto Rico is neither a U.S. state nor a sovereign nation, even this option was unavailable.

Moreover, in 1984, a mysterious amendment was added to the federal bill that excluded Puerto Rico from bankruptcy protection under U.S. law. In 2016, Puerto Rico passed the Management and Economic Stability Oversight Act, which created the Financial Control Board.

This seven-member council, appointed by the US president, has the final say over Puerto Rico's budget. They slashed pensions, closed hundreds of schools, and significantly reduced spending at Puerto Rico's universities. And all in the name of paying off creditors. This was the deal Congress offered its colonial subjects: debt restructuring in exchange for the loss of political control over government spending, taxation, and the national debt. In essence, Puerto Rico lost the modicum of democracy the island had developed in recent years.

Puerto Rico's status is a hotly debated issue internationally. Several civil society organizations have called on the US government to recognize Puerto Rico's right to self-determination. In the most recent referendum in November 2024, approximately 58% of voters supported joining the US as the 51st state, 31% supported free association with the US, and another 11% voted for complete independence from the US.

However, the final decision rests with the US Congress, and as long as Puerto Rico remains an unincorporated US territory, it faces high costs of living, energy problems, and dependence on federal funding.