Puerto Rico: A National History, Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, 2024 Princeton University Press
If ever you needed an example of the role played by party politics under global capitalism, it is Puerto Rico.
Since 1968 two parties have maintained a Faustian stranglehold over the electoral process: the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) and the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP).
What characterises both is their shared commitment to colonial status—the PPD created the “commonwealth” during the 1950s while the PNP pressed for statehood through Puerto’s Rico’s incorporation into the United States.
The “status issue”—what is ultimately to become of Puerto Rico, often referred to as the “world’s oldest colony” for having endured seamless Spanish and then American imperial control—remains at the heart of the island’s social and political problems.
While statehood continues to be the preferred option for its deeply corrupt political elite, nationalist sentiment can be found everywhere and nowhere, a diffuse, blurred and meandering instinct that lacks credible leadership.
A third party, the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP) has at times raised its head above the parapet with calls for independence.
However, the PIP—despite attracting the interest of the FBI and the venom of Washington—is no threat to colonial status. It has remained a minority, often divided, political force, with those divisions having their origins in its slavish focus on winning elections.
In short, electoral politics have served loyally to divide Puerto Ricans on behalf of its venal establishment, diluting any chance of forging a popular consensus behind independence while offering a managerial class of bureaucrats and politicians rich pickings as proxies for US colonialism.
One might even see the ways the party system and political machinery operate in Puerto Rico as a mirror of those across the capitalist world, where democracy is defined in highly limited terms as competition among elites—within party machines funded by big business—often for the spoils of power and invariably against the interests of their own people.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, as author Jorell Meléndez-Badillo points out, that “although the two parties [PPD and PNP] alternating power had different views on the political status of the archipelago, as time went by both parties became more and more alike.”
That, of course, is the whole point.
Limited party systems that exist to manage capitalism in Western “liberal democracies” have overstayed their welcome and the result everywhere is disillusionment and growing revolt—in the case of Puerto Rico, against “a defunded educational system, massive displacement and migration, and endless corruption”.
This has manifested itself in a loss of faith in the political apparatus and the emergence of new, usually short-lived, forces expressing growing discontent with politics as usual, such as the Puertorriqueños por Puerto Rico, Movimiento Unión Soberanista and Partido del Pueblo Trabajador, as well as popular unrest.
The massive protests of July 2019 against then governor Ricardo Rosselló and his contemptible acolytes were a potential sign of things to come, should the real opposition—among ordinary people and outside existing political institutions—forge a consensus.
At the heart of Puerto’s Rico’s many problems—not least the slow but relentless replacement of its population by white American newcomers salivating at the price of real estate and tax breaks—is the relationship between a corrupt, entitled and all-but transnational elite and their imperial masters.
This makes Meléndez-Badillo’s history of Puerto Rico refreshing, focusing as he does on the travails and travels of its working-class emigrants who over time have been the main losers of a colonial political process built upon corruption. In Mexico they have long had a word for the local servants of empire who stuff their pockets through endless betrayal—vendepatrias.
As the author writes: “The country’s colonial condition has created a managerial class that has benefited from Puerto Rico’s current relation to the United States. While their corrupt practices have changed throughout time, they have maintained positions of power in Puerto Rico’s public and political life.”
While little has changed since 2019—and the demographic dissolution of Puerto Rico continues apace through emigration and the lack of access to basic public goods such as housing intensifies—what happened may have been a breaking point.
Meléndez-Badillo argues that the protests were not solely about challenging corruption, and new forms and understandings of Puerto Ricanness were being negotiated.
“That is, people are working to create liberatory futures for Puerto Ricans no matter if they are in Santurce, Cayey, and Cabo Rojo, or New York City, Orlando, or Milwaukee.”
It would seem that after 500 years the embers of national liberation continue to burn, and all that is needed is for them to cause a spark that will consume the rotten colonial institutions under which the Puerto Rican people continue to be oppressed.
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Categories: Caribbean, North America, Puerto Rico, United States