NAACP endorses Puerto Rico statehood

The NAACP on Tuesday passed a resolution supporting a bill to make Puerto Rico the 51st state by 2021.

Under that bill, Puerto Rico would be integrated as an incorporated territory of the United States until its full acceptance as a state in 2021.

“The Puerto Rican Admission Act [is] a major step towards realizing the democratic will of the U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico,” the NAACP resolution states.

The resolution was approved after Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló (D) addressed the group, calling statehood a “civil rights issue” and Puerto Rico's current territorial status “colonialism.”

In a 2017 referendum in Puerto Rico, 97 percent of voters chose statehood over independence or the status quo. But that referendum was boycotted by opposition parties, so only 23 percent of the electorate showed up to vote.

Opposition parties have panned the governor’s characterization of statehood as a civil rights issue.

Héctor Ferrer, president of the opposition Popular Democratic Party, said the referendum process was “rigged” because it did not include the word “commonwealth” as an option.

“[The government] is depriving at least half of the people of Puerto Rico of the right to choose,” he said of the turnout.

Ferrer is a Democrat at a national level, as is Rosselló, while Del. Jenniffer González-Colón is a Republican. But in Puerto Rico, González-Colón and Rosselló both belong to the New Progressive Party, a coalition of centrist Democrats and Puerto Rico's Republicans.

The debate over Puerto Rico’s status heated up in 2016, after the Supreme Court decided that the United States and Puerto Rico cannot successively try the same person for the same crime.

That decision fudged the distinction between Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status, adopted in 1952, and territories fully under control of the federal government, as established in the U.S. Constitution.

Still, specific distinctions remain: Puerto Ricans do not vote in federal elections or pay federal income tax, and the island sends a non-voting resident commissioner to Congress for four-year terms.

Rosselló and González-Colón blame the island's status for its poor economic development and say full representation in Washington will help the island achieve equal footing with the states.

Rosselló told the NAACP convention that the lack of statehood is an “injustice that damages” the more than four million U.S. citizens in the territories of Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa.

NAACP endorses Puerto Rico statehood