Jimmy Carter served as President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. His legacy as a humanitarian is widely recognized, but his accomplishments during his presidency are sometimes downplayed or even overlooked. President Carter’s legacy for Puerto Rico includes some milestones worth remembering.
Recognition of Puerto Rico’s unsettled status
El Nuevo Día, a Puerto Rican news source, recently wrote that Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president to recognize that the 1952 update of Puerto Rico’s name and approval of the territory’s constitution did not in fact resolve the question of Puerto Rico’s political status. “In 1978,” according to the 2011 report of the President’s Task Force on Puerto Rico’s Status, “the Carter Administration developed an “alternative futures” policy, which suggested that the executive branch would support all possible Island statuses as legitimate and would not advocate for a specific status option.”
In his 1978 statement, Carter said, “My administration will respect the wishes of the people of Puerto Rico and their right to self-determination. Whatever decision the people of Puerto Rico wish to make – statehood, independence, Commonwealth status, or mutually agreeable modifications to that status – will be yours, taken in accordance with your own traditions, democratically and peacefully,”
Jeffrey Farrow, Carter’s Associate Director of the Domestic Public Policy Staff, pointed out that the inclusion of statehood among the options was a milestone. “That proclamation, in itself, buried the theory that the Commonwealth had solved the status,” added Franklin Delano López, chair of the Democratic Party of the United States in Puerto Rico.
Respect for Puerto Rico self-determination
Under Carter’s leadership, the Democratic Party added this statement to its 1980 political platform:
“The Democratic Party respects and supports the desire of the people of Puerto Rico to associate, by their own freely expressed will in a peaceful and democratic process, in permanent union with the United States, either as a Commonwealth or as a state, or to become an independent nation. We are also committed to respecting the cultural heritage of the people of Puerto Rico and the elimination of discriminatory or unfair treatment of Puerto Ricans, as U.S. citizens under federal programs.”
Carter also supported the Senate’s Concurrent Resolution 35, “A concurrent resolution reaffirming the commitment of Congress to the right of the people of Puerto Rico to determine their own political future.” The companion measure in the House was Concurrent Resolution 165.
Carter might have supported statehood for Puerto Rico; contemporary reports suggest that his call for “self-determination” was intended to appease fellow Democrats who supported “commonwealth.” But Congress, not the president, admits new states. Carter was one among many presidents who have supported statehood for Puerto Rico.
Yet Congress has not yet taken the action necessary to admit the last remaining populous territory. In that vein, Carter’s legacy may also be as the original precedent in what has become continuing lip service given to “self-determination” despite the premium Rico Puerto Ricans place on U.S. citizenship (valuing it enormously” according to a 2011 Obama Administration report) and related results of Puerto Rico referenda returning votes favoring statehood.
