For the first time since the Civil War, American citizens have a real chance of electing a governor who wants to completely break away from the United States. On Nov. 5, Puerto Ricans will be going to the polls, and all elected positions are up for grabs. Normally, the gubernatorial job is contested between a pro-statehood nominee and a pro-commonwealth-status one, but for the first time, a pro-independence candidate is polling in second place, at 25 percent.
Juan Dalmau’s position in the polls represents a radical shift. The Puerto Rican Independence Party has never received more than 6 percent for the governor’s position in modern electoral history, except in the 2020 elections, when Dalmau got 13.5 percent. Given that the majority of Puerto Ricans have been historically pro-commonwealth, and more recently pro-statehood, it may come as a surprise that the people of this US territory would consider electing a pro-independence nominee. The reality is that Puerto Ricans are fed up with the political culture that has dominated the island since it gained territorial commonwealth status in 1952.
Since the introduction of party politics in Puerto Rico in 1870, when it was a maritime province of Spain, the animating question has been what type of relationship the island seeks with the metropolis. In the initial period, the two main parties organized themselves around being in favor of or opposed to gaining more autonomy from Spain. Under US rule, things weren’t all that different. When Puerto Ricans went to the polls to elect a governor for the first time in 1948, the top two candidates were, respectively, pro-autonomy and pro-statehood. The candidate belonging to the pro-autonomy party, Luis Muñoz Marín, won the election decisively. Muñoz’s People’s Democratic Party (PPD) would go on to dominate Puerto Rican politics until 1968, when the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP) won its first election. Throughout this period, independence was a very unpopular cause, largely due to the economic prosperity ushered in by the PPD.
“Puerto Rico’s people would later find out that the promises of capitalism are not everlasting.”
In 1949, Puerto Rico’s manufacturing sector was valued at $93 million. By 1967, with the PPD still in power, the figure rose to $621 million. This economic miracle was fueled by tax breaks and the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company, a government corporation tasked with convincing companies to open operations on the island. The tax-incentive regime was further strengthened by an amendment to section 936 of the US Federal Tax Code in 1976 under the administration of PPD Gov. Rafael Hernández Colón. The PPD turned Puerto Rico into a beacon of democracy and capitalism in Latin America, which, in turn, benefited Washington’s Cold War propaganda efforts. But Puerto Rico’s people would later find out that the promises of capitalism aren’t everlasting.
In 1996, under the administration of PNP Gov. Pedro Rosselló, President Bill Clinton signed a law that would phase out section 936 over a 10-year period. The manufacturing sector had sharply declined by the time the phase-out was complete. To offset the resulting losses, administrations (both PPD and PNP) had to start issuing more debt. Governors depended on this strategy until PNP Gov. Luis Fortuño was forced to lay off more than 17,000 government workers to balance the budget. The next governor, the PPD’s Alejandro García Padilla, declared in 2015 that Puerto Rico’s public debt was unpayable. To restructure the debt, the Obama administration passed the PROMESA Act, which imposed a board tasked with guardianship of the island’s fisc. This board had to approve any budget proposed by Puerto Rican officials, and the Puerto Rican people had no input on the selection of its members.
Gradually, public opinion shifted in favor of statehood. This had less to do with an increased ideological affinity for the United States than with material conditions. One of the PNP’s main arguments for statehood rests on the idea that Puerto Ricans, by virtue of being American citizens, deserve parity with the other states in the union when it comes to federal programs such as Medicaid and Social Security. Now, per the most recent status referendum, a small majority of Puerto Ricans favor statehood.
The explanation for the rise of a pro-independence figure like Dalmau lies beyond the paradigms that have always dominated Puerto Rico’s politics. The people of Puerto Rico have grown tired of a political culture dominated by two parties with no distinct ideology, whose coalitions form around the status issue. This dissatisfaction came to a boiling point in the summer of 2019, after Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s Telegram groupchat with his top officials leaked to the public.
In this chat, Rosselló and members of his executive team carried out policy discussions and political strategy but also engaged in locker-room talk and profanity that riled up many progressive sectors in Puerto Rico. Some of the highlights of the chat included the governor calling a former speaker of the New York City Council, Melissa Mark-Viverito, a “whore” and mocking the families of the victims of Hurricane Maria; the government’s representative to the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, Christian Sobrino Vega, confessed he was “salivating” to kill San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz.
The leak was followed by more than a month of protests that were mostly peaceful but that tended to become more violent at night. The historic area of San Juan, where the executive palace is located, was heavily vandalized, and the police responded with tear gas. Initially, Rosselló resolutely refused to resign. Save for news conferences, he didn’t engage the media—except for a Fox News interview that was clearly not intended for a Puerto Rican audience. The governor cited his track record during the ongoing Hurricane Maria recovery efforts. But the Puerto Rican people were done with a ruling class that, behind closed doors, had no respect for them. They continued protesting until Rosselló saw no other choice than to resign and to leave the island with his family.
The elections that followed the protests in 2020 saw the emergence of two new political parties, Project Dignity (PD) and the Citizen’s Victory Movement (MVC), as well as the PIP’s most successful campaign yet. The minor parties both adopted an officially agnostic stance on the status question, while the PIP de-emphasized its pro-independence stance in its platform. PD and MVC secured seats in both chambers of the legislature, while the PIP managed to maintain its seats and to garner a higher share of ballots for the gubernatorial position than it normally gets.
The PIP’s chances this time around are higher, because the party now leads an electoral alliance with MVC. Both parties have socialists in their coalitions, although MVC has never adopted an official party platform until last month (in the past, it merely offered a vague “unity agenda”). The success of this alliance of progressives and leftists wouldn’t necessarily represent a substantial change, though. MVC has become a local stand-in for the identity politics that also dominates the US left. Some of its legislative projects include the establishment of a “National Day for the Eradication of Racism and the Affirmation of Afro-Descendance” and, more recently, a law that prohibited discrimination according to hairstyle in the workplace.
The other emerging party, PD, was originally formed as a Christian-democratic vehicle by evangelical protestants. Its first gubernatorial candidate, César Vázquez, was a cardiologist and an evangelical pastor. Its candidates for at-large seats in the legislature were both outspoken Christian women, one of them a lawyer who practiced family and administrative law and the other a Catholic canon lawyer who hosted a religion podcast. The party’s platform placed a heavy emphasis on family and culture-war issues.
Today, PD has not changed its stances on these issues, but there has been a clear shift on its emphasis. PD’s gubernatorial candidate for the upcoming election, Javier Jiménez, is a former PNP loyalist who has been the mayor of the rural town of San Sebastián for 20 years. He started breaking from the PNP in 2017, after Hurricane Maria, when the state-owned power authority didn’t act quickly enough to restore electricity in his town. Jiménez took matters into his own hands and organized the Pepino Power Authority, an informal group of volunteer electricians that worked to re-establish electrical service in San Sebastián and the surrounding towns without permission of the state government. Jiménez’s dissatisfaction with his party was further solidified during the Covid pandemic, when he opposed vaccine mandates and lockdowns. As the PD’s gubernatorial candidate, Jiménez has brought private-property rights and free enterprise to the forefront of his rhetoric. As a result, PD looks more and more like a Puerto Rican version of the GOP.
For a time, it seemed that Puerto Rico was poised to move beyond a jaded political culture dominated by two political parties with no substantial ideology. The island that once was the Caribbean beachhead of American capitalism and liberal democracy appeared to be on the verge of embracing a politics that was genuinely its own, a development reflected in the unprecedented surge of support for a pro-independence candidate. But ironically, despite the short-term success of emerging forces in challenging the old consensus, the new forces that have arisen on the right and left seem more likely to make our political culture more like that of the United States.