Thursday, December 17, 1998

Puerto Ricans choose to keep the status quo

Political wags have joked that given the choice of “none of the above” on the ballot, voters would take it. Sunday, the Puerto Ricans were, and they did.

Under prodding from Congress, Puerto Rico held a nonbinding referendum in which the voters were given five choices: commonwealth status, which the island has now; statehood, semi-autonomous “free association,” full independence and, of course, none of the above, opted for by 50 percent of the voters.

Statehood, heavily promoted by Gov. Pedro Rossello, and his New Progressive Party, received 47 percent and the other choices a total of 3 percent. Despite the dreams of its small band of nationalists, independence has never had much support. Undaunted, Rossello declared the results a victory for statehood.

Under their somewhat anomalous commonwealth status, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and eligible for military conscription but they do not vote for president, do not have voting representation in Congress and do not pay federal taxes. Legally speaking, it’s not the prettiest arrangement, but it works.

To Puerto Ricans, the great drawback to statehood is the fear they might lose the Spanish language and their separate culture. The flip side of that fear — that statehood would institutionalize Spanish as a second language — is one of the reasons that Senate leader Trent Lott bottled up a House-passed bill establishing a two-step process to statehood.

Although it received less than 1 percent of the vote, commonwealth status and not “none of the above” was the biggest winner in the referendum because the voters, in effect, gave a ringing endorsement to the status quo.