Puerto Rico, an important player for the US national security in Latin America

Earlier this year, The Hill published an Op-Ed I wrote that was titled “Puerto Rico’s political status, an issue of national security.” In that piece I presented a series of events to stress and relate the political future of Puerto Rico, its importance to the U.S. national security needs and how foreign powers push their agenda through the pro-independence movement within the island.

This past June, the United Nations Decolonization Committee met to discuss the issue of Puerto Rico at the request of Cuba. That body also passed the 41st consecutive resolution asking for the island’s self-determination and independence, with complete disregard of the will of its residents, who are US citizens. I tried to set the record straight by submitting a written and oral statement but the representative of Cuba had other plans. My statement blew the Cuban representative’s mind that led to an interruption rampage. Somehow my statement, based on the Op-Ed that I referred to at the beginning, made him forget that he was not in Cuba and that the UN is a place where different points of view are supposed to come together in order to encourage a thorough discussion of the issues pressing the world. I can attest that this wasn’t one of the UN’s best moments. 

But what was he trying to hide? Simple, for the Cuban representative, the truth is inconvenient. Its ties with China and Russia are publicly known and widely reported. The Wall Street Journal, in June 20, 2023, wrote “Beijing Plans a New Training Facility in Cuba.” This is something that the Cuban representative did not want on the UN record. But why would China want to establish a military training facility in Cuba? Maybe for the same reason, the Chinese wanted to buy what used to be Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Puerto Rico but couldn’t. 

On June 9, 2023, CNN reported that “Cuba has agreed to allow China to build a spying facility on the island that could allow the Chinese to eavesdrop on electronic communications across the southeastern US.” Why would the Chinese want to do that? Well, this is nothing new. Cuban relations with Venezuela and Nicaragua are well beyond the Puerto Rico independence issue. It is way more complicated than that. The U.S. indifference to address and assist its Latin American neighbors’ countries particularly allowed China, Russia, Iran and other power players to advance its interests in the U.S. backyard. 

In June 2023, Francisco Urdinez wrote for the Wilson Center, “At the OAS, where China is an observer, an analysis by George Meek showed that between 1948 and 1974, the United States influenced 75 percent of the 297 roll-call votes. That influence has clearly diminished. Between 2001 and 2021, countries in which China has displaced the United States economically were 26 percentage points less likely to vote in alignment with Washington than other member states.” This clearly represents a shift in political power because of ill conceived policies that fail to recognize the importance of U.S. leadership in Latin America.

It is important to remember that the involvement of foreign powers and interests in Latin America is not new. In 2011, the subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on Hezbollah in Latin America — Implications on U.S. Homeland Security, and received the testimony of Ambassador Roger F. Noriega, former US Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OEA) and stated, “Hugo Chaves hosted a terror summit of senior leaders of Hamas (supreme leader “Khaled Meshal), Hezbollah (unnamed “chief operations”), and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (Secretary General Ramadan Abdullah Mohammad Shallah) in Caracas on August 22, 2010. That extraordinary meeting was organized at the suggestion of Iran,… In addition to the summit, operatives from other countries gathered in Caracas to meet with these terrorist chieftains.”

These are but a few indications that Puerto Rico’s political status may have a significant impact on U.S. security and foreign policy interests. The island’s current political status is not sustainable and when it comes to an end there will be only two options: it either becomes a state, thereby ensuring a strategic U.S. presence at the crossroads of the Americas, or it becomes a sovereign country which would be tantamount to ceding the island to our adversaries. The longer Congress takes to act on Puerto Rico’s political status, the greater the likelihood of the latter outcome.

It is almost surreal how people in Washington fail to see the importance of this national security issue, and have failed to acknowledge the importance of Puerto Rico statehood not just for the rest of the Caribbean but also within Latin America as a whole. 

José Enrique Meléndez-Ortiz, Esq., LLM., is representative at large in Puerto Rico’s House of Representatives.