Venezuela’s President Maduro Urges Puerto Rico to Declare Independence, Join Latin American Bloc

Nicolás Maduro Moros, the president of Venezuela, used the occasion of the 55th anniversary of Cuba’s Communist revolution on January 9th to call on Puerto Rico to secede from the United States, so that it can join the community of Latin American nations, and in particular the 33-member Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños, or CELAC).

Venezuela will be hosting the annual CELAC summit later this month, and with that mind, Maduro said, “I have asked Foreign Minister Elías Jaua Milano to prepare a document to propose, in the name of Venezuela, the incorporation of Puerto Rico to CELAC.  May Puerto Rico take the path of Latin America.  ...  One day we will see the birthing of a Republic of Puerto Rico and we will go together to consolidate its independence.  It would be our greatest homage to the giants: to Bolívar, Martí, and to Chávez. ...  If we really consider ourselves sons of Bolívar, sons of Chávez, let us never let go from our hearts the cause of Puerto Rico’s independence.”

Maduro used Venezuelan and Cuban flags as a backdrop to make his point.

The new statements are the latest volley in a rhetorical and diplomatic war between Venezuela and the United States that continues the clash between the two countries’ former leaders, Hugo Chávez and George W. Bush, respectively, in the 2000s.  Last year, Maduro succeeded the wildly popular Chávez, who in his 14 years in office took inspiration from Cuba’s 1959 revolution and from its hero, Fidel Castro, in blazing a path toward redistributionist economic policy and charismatic left-wing populism.  He also leaned slightly in Castro’s direction when it came to his relationship to democracy—using his popular mandate to grab more power for the presidency and to jail political opponents.  Genuinely committed to economic inequality, he redistributed wealth and responded to food shortages through price ceilings and the nationalization of large sectors of the economy—which only worsened his country’s economic crisis, in a kind of parody of the carefully managed command economy in Cuba, which for all its faults is at least stable.  But it was Chávez’s nationalization of the oil industry that threw the U.S. into a complete tizzy.  Venezuela is the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, and its untapped reserves are now thought to be the world’s largest, exceeding Saudi Arabia’s.

Me and Mini-Me: Maduro (right) rode to power on Chávez’s coattails.

For Maduro, who was Chávez’s vice-president and has modeled his presidency on Chávez’s, the idea of advocating separatism within the U.S. is not a strategy that comes out of the blue.  Chávez had also called for Puerto Ricans to free themselves from “U.S. imperialism,” as had Fidel Castro and as does Castro’s brother and successor as Cuban president, Raúl Castro.  In fact, in 2011 the Italian-American, Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi published The United States of Banana, which depicted Chávez, Castro, and three other populist left-wing Latin American leaders—Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner—leading a campaign to “liberate” Puerto Rico.  For Latin Americans bristling at two centuries of the U.S. “Monroe Doctrine,” Puerto Rico is Exhibit A.

Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Evo Morales in 2011

More to the point, Chávez and Maduro had long accused the United States of pursuing its own economic goals in Venezuela by fomenting separatism in the country’s westernmost state, Zulia.  Known as “the Texas of Venezuela,” Zulia has 40% of the country’s oil.  It has always been the least “Venezuelan” part of Venezuela and for much of the 19th century had a sort of semi-autonomous status—an independent streak which the discovery of oil only widened.  In 1925, an American oil speculator from the Texas of the United States—you know, Texas—named William F. Buckley, Sr. (yes, he was the father of that William F. Buckley, Jr.), tried to stir up a separatist rebellion in Zulia as part of his attempt to corner the market on Venezuelan oil.  He had bought up valuable tracts of land in Zulia and was also trying to convince the government in Caracas to develop a port on the Paraguaná Peninsula, in Falcón state just to Zulia’s east, in order to make it the country’s one transshipment point—convenient for whoever controlled Zulia’s oil reserves.  But Buckley was elbowed aside by other competitors, like Gulf Oil.

Today in Zulia, a political movement called Our Way (Rumbo Propio) is pushing for a devolved parliamentary government for the state along the lines of Catalonia’s within Spain and Scotland’s within the United Kingdom.  But during the 2000s Chávez accused Bush outright of covertly supporting alleged Zulian separatist militants.  This was never substantiated, and in fact full-on Zulian separatism seems to barely exist.  But it did not help when a joint NATO military exercise in the Caribbean in 2001 called Plan Balboa simulated an invasion of Venezuela and the “liberation” of Zulia—or when Bush’s ambassador to Venezuela in 2005 referred to the province as “the independent western Republic of Zulia”—or when, that same year, the right-wing extremist American evangelist Pat Robertson, a confidante of Bush’s, called for Chávez’s assassination.  Bush’s military probably did have an “if we ‘have to’ invade Venezuela” plan on the shelf, but the idea that he would further stretch the U.S. military at a time of war in Iraq and Afghanistan by “liberating” Zulia, and thus diplomatically alienating every single other country in the hemisphere, is ludicrous even by Bush standards.  But Chávez, in his increasingly bombastic and paranoid later years, was convinced.  Even in the Barack Obama era, Maduro might still be convinced that such an invasion is imminent.

Zulia, Venezuela’s westernmost state

But back to Puerto Rico.  Unfortunately for Maduro, a referendum in Puerto Rico in 2012 came out with only 5.5% supporting independence for the territory (a referendum discussed extensively at the time in this blog).  The great majority of Puerto Rican voters—61.13%—wanted to become the 51st U.S. state.  Almost no one there is happy with the status quo: though it has had its own Olympic team since 1948, Puerto Rico is firmly under U.S. jurisdiction, but Puerto Ricans are represented in Washington only by one non-voting observer member of the U.S. House of Representatives and have to move to the mainland if they want to vote for president.  During the 2012 presidential campaign, with its crucial Hispanic vote, every candidate seemed to like the idea of Puerto Rican statehood, but the reality is that the U.S. Congress would need to approve any additions to the Union—and, in a tradition dating at least as far back as the Missouri Compromise of 1820, it is really only politically feasible to admit two states in tandem, one in the column of each of the two major political parties.  And that is a low priority nowadays on Capitol Hill, where Republicans and Democrats can barely agree on emergency budget measures to keep the government functioning.  There’s the added problem of whether Puerto Rico would be a blue state or a red state.  It is traditionally Republican but, like most of the U.S. Hispanic population, went heavily for Obama in 2008 and 2012, in what may or may not be a permanent shift.  A surer bet would be the simultaneous admission of the hardcore-Democratic District of Columbia alongside one of the many Republican 51st-state proposals going right now, in places like northern Colorado, western Maryland, and northern California.

A rare pro-independence voter in the 2012 Puerto Rico referendum

The cause of Puerto Rican independence has become much more marginal since its heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s, when it was energized by the popular revolution in neighboring Cuba and inspired by the Civil Rights movement and by the Black Power and Red Power movements in the mainland U.S.  Puerto Rican separatism has always had a left-wing flavor, its infiltration and near “neutralization” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) at the time, plus, more recently, the end of the Cold War and a general American political shift rightward in the 1980s and ’90s, have left the movement rather moribund.

Puerto Rican independence activists in the 1960s

However, an even third of voters opted for a “free association” status, similar to that enjoyed by three former U.S. colonies in the Pacific: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau.  Those three nations have something significantly more than quasi-independence; they are members of the United Nations General Assembly.  (Other examples of “free association” states are the New Zealand territories of Niue and the Cook Islands and the United Kingdom satellite states the Isle of Man, Jersey, and Guernsey—none of those five being U.N. member states, however.)  Perhaps once Puerto Ricans realize there is a third way—with some of the advantages of statehood, nearly all the advantages of independence, and none of the diplomatic isolation that has plagued Cuba—then that current 49% approval of either independence or “free association” status could coalesce into a serious movement.  Perhaps.  But if so, it will have to come from below, and it won’t be because Maduro and Castro’s thundering paranoid rhetoric convinces them of what they are supposed to want.

This is actually the flag of the Venezuelan state of Zulia ...

... which is allegedly not inspired by the American superhero the Flash.

[You can read more about Zulia, Puerto Rico, and other separatist movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]