Veteran pro-statehood lawmaker Aponte responds
By The Star Staff
Resident commissioner-elect Pablo José Hernández Rivera said in a Hill editorial this week that his mandate will be to put the pursuit of statehood for Puerto Rico aside and focus on economic development.
“For the first time since 2000, the people of Puerto Rico have elected a resident commissioner (non-voting delegate) to Congress who opposes statehood for Puerto Rico and thinks we should focus on different priorities. That would be me,” he wrote in the editorial.
“Puerto Ricans are simply tired of the sterile status debate,” he continued. “In my campaign, I pledged that instead of wasting time dealing with Puerto Rico’s political status, I would focus more on promoting new tools for the island’s economic development, securing equal treatment in federal programs, and accelerating the disbursement of federal funds for the electrical grid’s reconstruction. The people listened and agreed.”
In the race for resident commissioner, the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party won by the largest margin since 1964. As reported by the STAR in its Nov. 7 edition, Hernández Rivera said his mandate is to put statehood aside and prioritize economic development.
While his predecessor, now governor-elect Jenniffer González Colón, of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party and a Republican, agrees with Hernández Rivera on the urgent need for economic development, her position is that statehood won a recent nonbinding status referendum, and, accordingly, she will pursue that option.
“Let’s clarify this ‘mandate’ with straightforward facts. Four years ago, 52 percent of Puerto Ricans voted for statehood in a simple yes-or-no vote. This year, that number dropped to 47 percent, when you count the blank or void ballots that thousands cast, either in protest of the exclusion of the island’s current commonwealth status or of the referendum’s nonbinding nature. Support for statehood thus dropped below 50 percent,” Hernández Rivera wrote in the Hill.
“The lack of a clear mandate, declining support and Republican opposition to statehood in Washington should suffice to pause all discussions regarding the topic,” he added. “Instead, we should focus on a more productive agenda that addresses the island’s real priorities and problems, and how the island can support, rather than lean on, the mainland.”
One longtime advocate for statehood wasn’t buying it. In a press release issued Wednesday, New Progressive Party Rep. José Aponte Hernández demanded that Hernández Rivera accept the victory of statehood in the Election Day status consultation and work in Congress to implement the will of the people of Puerto Rico.
“The elected Resident Commissioner has before him an electoral mandate in favor of the admission of Puerto Rico as a state of the union,” Aponte said in the statement. “At this moment, because we understand that by counting the early votes the support will increase, 57 percent of the voters freely and democratically selected statehood in the status consultation. That is a robust majority of the voters. Mr. Hernández cannot ignore that result as he tries to do; on the contrary, he has to act on it.”
“Recently, the elected Resident Commissioner has made a series of statements in which he indicated that statehood is not on his ‘agenda’ before Congress, even though it was on the ballot and received the majority of votes and there is a mandate from the sovereign in a democracy, the People,” the veteran lawmaker added. “On his agenda must be the implementation of the People’s public policy, statehood. The People do not want to return to the past, they do not want to live in the colony, as Hernández wants to happen with his obsession of returning us to the ’50s and ’60s.”
Aponte said he will be communicating with the leadership of the new Congress to establish the triumph of statehood in the most recent status consultation, which was carried out using U.S. House Resolution 8393, better known as the “Puerto Rico Admission Act,” a bipartisan measure approved in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the current Congress the measure was introduced in the House as HR 2757, which has 100 co-authors between Democrats and Republicans. A similar bill in the U.S. Senate has the support of 27 senators.
“Congressmen from both national parties will know that Puerto Rico chose to be admitted as a state of the union and by a marked majority margin,” Aponte said. “That message will get through even if the incoming Resident Commissioner does not want to talk about the matter.”
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