Campaign contributions and Puerto Rico – By José Aponte-Hernández

Campaign contributions and Puerto Rico

September 10, 2015, 06:00 pm

By Jose Aponte-Hernandez
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The 2016 presidential campaign is in full swing as candidates from both national parties are crisscrossing the nation in search of money and votes. In recent years, the United States Territory of Puerto Rico has become one of the more attractive landing spots for those seeking to live at Pennsylvania 1600.

Ever since the 2008 primary between President Barack Obama and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, our Island have been routinely visited by most of the top tiered presidential candidates in search of money and more money.

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Votes? Maybe, if the primary is heated, such as was the case in 2008 when Clinton needed a win in Puerto Rico to make it competitive. But that was the exception, not the rule. They all come, but they come mainly for the money.
Being a non-incorporated territory, the Island does not have the right to send senators and representatives to Congress. It also means that we don’t have a vote in the presidential race either.

There’s a paradox here. A circle of self-dependence, if you will, between the national parties and the Popular Democratic Party (PDP), a local political party that advocates the status quo, that has spent, over the last three decades, millions of dollars in campaign contributions with the hopes of perpetuating the current colonial-based relationship we have with the U.S. despite the fact that a robust majority of the people in the Island want a change.

PPD’s donors use the influence money have on national candidates in an attempt to silence the clamor of the American citizens living in Puerto Rico that crave for equality, for statehood.

Is ironic because on one hand they participate in the presidential primary process and even attend national conventions, while with the other hand they do not want us to actually vote for the person who could send our children to war or to have full representation in Congress, like every other state of the union.

Donors affiliated with the PDP are mostly Democrats, which is even sadder due to the fact that the Democratic Party is the standard bearer for social equality and reform in the United States.

Enough is enough. It’s time for the national parties to alter their ways in the matter of how they handle the issue of Puerto Rico. To state, unequally, to any lobbied and donor, what their real posture is regarding our political status. No more games, no more ‘fuzzy’ politics.

Although we can blame that local party for the lack of action taken regarding Puerto Rico by the last two Democratic incumbents of the White House, William ‘Bill’ Clinton and Obama, the majority of the blame rest with them.

They should know better.

In 2008, then candidate Obama promised the U.S. citizens living on the Island that he will deal with the status matter within his first term in office. Unfortunately, with almost two full terms in the books, the president has yet to act on his promise.

The same promise was that spring made by Republican presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, and although he won his party’s nomination, the former Massachusetts governor did not win the big price.

We are in a new presidential cycle and that means it’s time for those hopefuls to land on the Island in search of money and votes, for the primary of course.

This year alone, two of the Republican Party’s frontrunners, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have visited the Island in search for, what else, money for their campaigns.

Bush, whose father and brother advocated in the past in favor of statehood for Puerto Rico, stated, when he visited in April that he wants to see the Island become our nation’s fifty-first state.

On the Democratic field, Clinton just recently visited Puerto Rico to hold a fundraising event.

Enough is enough. We don’t want any more promises in exchange for a few campaign donations. The national parties take our money in exchange for letting us participate in a few selective events, not in the whole process, as it should be. In essence, they seem not to care if we have equality or not, as long the money continue to flow.

Enough is enough. It’s time we held those promises in check. A promise to the people, to the American citizens, must be respected, and above all, fulfilled.

No more blank checks for those who come to Puerto Rico seeking our help in their bids, only to have them forget about us once they get into the Oval Office.

Bush, Rubio and Clinton and the others who plan to make Puerto Rico a destination in their run for the White House should act now.

Two years ago, President Obama assigned $2.5 million for a federal sponsored referendum in Puerto Rico regarding the political status. Nothing has happened since then.

In January, our resident commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi, sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, stating the need to act on that allocation. Pierluisi has also filed HR 727, an admission bill aimed at granting Puerto Rico statehood. That was the will of the people expressed in the 2012 status referendum when the majority of the voters rejected the current colonial status in favor of statehood.

Aponte-Hernandez was Speaker of the House of Representatives of Puerto Rico from 2005 to 2009.