PUERTO RICO: Statehood Tree

Governor Luis Muñoz Marin likes to think that Puerto Rico’s commonwealth relationship to the U.S. is “like a tree; it may grow, but not into any other kind of tree.” Last week the signs were that, despite Muñoz Marin’s eloquent opposition. the kind of tree into which the commonwealth will one day grow is statehood.

Muñoz has an author’s pride in commonwealth, which since 1952 has given Puerto Rico (pop. 2,400,000) local self-government plus exemption from Federal income taxes. He fears that statehood would be fatal both to the Hispanic culture he prizes and to Operation Bootstrap, an industrialization program fostered by tax abatement. But with the entry of Alaska and Hawaii into the Union, Muñoz had to give way to growing statehood sentiment, some of it within his own Popular Democratic Party.

First he proposed a plebiscite to choose between statehood, commonwealth and independence. This idea died when the opposition Statehood Party, which is the island branch of the mainland’s Republican Party, would not buy his condition that the vote settle the question “once and for all.” Last week, after what one associate called “quite an emotional wrench,” Muñoz threw his support behind a new idea: a proposal to Congress that when per-capita income in Puerto Rico equals that of the poorest state (Mississippi’s $1,053 v. Puerto Rico’s $480), Congress will consider Puerto Rico’s tax structure and give the islanders a chance to vote on their “basic terms of association” with the U.S.

If postwar growth rates remain constant, Puerto Rico will catch Montana (whose growth rate is the slowest in the nation) in 1991, Mississippi in 1996. Statehooders, who are willing to pay the penalty of increased taxes in return for an end to what they call “second-class citizenship,” find that too long to wait, talk of statehood within ten years or sooner. To them, Governor Muñoz Marin’s political timetable is less significant than his reluctant admission that the tide for statehood is running strong.