Guam South America
South America GuamEverything is better than the state quo": The Guam eye end of US imperialism
While Guam is preparing to mark Liberation Day this weekend, Pacific Islands policymakers say it's the right moment to choose whether to stay a US settlement or become an autonomous people. There has been a heated discussion about the question of sovereignty for many years, but there have been a number of delays in the plan to bring the matter to a referendum due to legislative draft.
"We' ve driven, but we don't know where we're going and how far we're going," he said recently at a session of the Guam Decolonization Committee in the capitol Hagatna. Since 1898, Guam has been an uncorporated US jurisdiction, which means that its 160,000 residents are US nationals but have restricted privileges.
You cannot take part in the US election and Guam's only US Congress agent cannot decide on the poll. Guam is cited by the United Nations as one of only 17 left in the world, which Governor Eddie Calvo wants to fix. For a long time Calvo has advocated a self-determined referenda that offers the electorate three choices for the future: autonomy, transformation into a US state or staying in a "free association" with Washington.
They all have their supporters and Calvo says, whatever the result, at least the electorate would have had a say in their futures. Guam's long and intricate relations with the USA since the Washington settlement after the Spanish-American War have made the issue of sovereignty more intricate. In the Asia-Pacific area, it continues to host one of the biggest US troops, often called America's "spearhead" in a zone where tension with China, North Korea and Russia is all too frequent.
Furthermore, many people in Guam are highly reliant on US charity, with some 44,900 people and 15,650 homes getting grocery postmarks and healthcare services. Government subsidies and taxation for U.S. staff in Guam also plays a major part in covering the island's budgets and infrastructural needs. A woman from the town of Agana Heights, Marites Schwab, said she was worried about whether Guam was ripe enough for political rule if it became a state.
She decided that the restriction of the election to the Chamorro tribe, which has about 65,000 inhabitants in the multi-ethnic area, was racist and thus against the constitution. A Chamorro cultural specialist at the University of Guam, Michael Bevacqua, said tribal peoples should be voting on their futures after they were deprived of fundamental human liberties among the generation of colonist dictators.
"The decolonization that must be followed by the colonizer is not decolonization, but an expansion of colonization," he said.