In a startling complaint to the United Nations, Puerto Rico Gov.
Puerto Rico faces a $1 billion debt payment to bondholders in just a few days.
In a startling complaint to the United Nations, Puerto Rico Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla blasted a legal opinion on his island’s political status that the Obama administration filed last week in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Garcia Padilla’s Dec. 26 letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon accuses the federal government of backtracking on the sovereignty rights granted to the island’s residents when the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was created in 1952.
Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. filed that amicus brief on Dec. 23. In it, he opposed an appeal by Puerto Rico’s government of a double jeopardy ruling by a lower court involving two federal gun trafficking convictions on the island, a case the high court has agreed to review.
Garcia Padilla’s complaint to the UN is sure to embarrass the White House by resurrecting the issue of whether Puerto Rico remains a U.S. colony.
It comes only days before the island’s cash-starved government faces a nearly $1 billion debt payment to bondholders, and on the heels of the refusal by Congress to allow Puerto Rico to restructure its huge debt.
“The United States government abruptly reversed course, and took the position that the Constitution and laws of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico do not emanate from the people of Puerto Rico after all,” the governor said of Verrilli’s opinion.
Puerto Rico Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla is accusing the federal government of backtracking on the island's sovereignty rights.
That opinion, the governor noted, directly contradicts written assurances the federal government made to the UN in April 1953 that Puerto Rico’s colonial status had ended with “new constitutional arrangements.”
“The people of Puerto Rico have complete autonomy in internal economic matters and in cultural and social affairs under a Constitution adopted by them and approved by Congress,” the federal government claimed at the time.
But critics of this arrangements model — both advocates of independence and of statehood — always regarded it as old-style colonialism in a modern disguise.
Verrilli’s brief describes in stark terms the total control Congress exercises over territories like Puerto Rico: