why does the US manufacture its drugs and medical supplies in Puerto Rico, of all the places it could possibly do this.
why does the US manufacture its drugs and medical supplies in Puerto Rico, of all the places it could possibly do this.
domestic production with technical not domestic tax law
so full statehood would have upsides and downsides huh
Yes, in fact this is why many PR citizens did not wish to become a State. However, with the recent issues with the PR government debt, and of course the hurricane and the response, we should anticipate a change.
I have to say that geographically it makes so little sense for Puerto Rico to be a US territory, I mean even Hawaii makes more sense.
You should remember that the US tried its level best to make Cuba and Hispaniola (the Haiti/Dominican Republic island) US territory as well. The general feeling at the time was that the Western Hemisphere was our property by right. By that view, all of it is ours de facto and which parts are ours de jure is a formality to be fixed eventually.
Eventually didn’t arrive before decolonization started being politically fashionable/advantageous, so that didn’t happen.
One of the main effects of the Spanish-American war is that by taking Puerto Rico and Cuba the US dominated the Caribbean, an (Anglo-)American lake.
And we propped Cuba up as a friendly but independent country, and then in return during the Cold War it got co-opted as a client state of our existential enemy.
With great effort the US kept it from becoming a naval or nuclear base, but it was stil an espionage/special forces base and logistics base for challenging the Monroe Doctrine sphere of influence in South America, and even for projecting power to southern Africa.
(The subtext of a lot of 60s-70s stuff: the Suez closure and the Iranian revolution; dictatorships in the Phillipines and Indonesia; communist revolutions in SE Asia; the Angolan Civil War shoring up a position against South Africa – was control of the approaches to the Indian Ocean)
So, having learned from that, the US is eager not to repeat the lesson, it keeps PR as a territory (and exercises effective veto over Haitian/Dominican sovereignty) less because they particularly want to control it than because they don’t want anyone else to have it