Statement to the United Nations on Puerto Rico’s Sovereignty and U.S. Colonial Genocide

On June 16, 2025, Amy Golzar-Beverley, founder of the Ruth Reynolds Front for Puerto Rico’s Independence and descendant of colonial governor James R. Beverley, addressed the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization (C-24).

In her remarks, she invoked the legal reasoning of Puerto Rican nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos, who maintained that Puerto Rico’s sovereignty—recognized in the 1897 Carta Autonómica—remained intact despite U.S. invasion and occupation. Albizu argued that no legal or moral justification ever extinguished Puerto Rico’s nationhood.

Golzar-Beverley connected this historic claim to the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, which affirmed that sovereignty cannot be erased without explicit Congressional action. That precedent confirms what Albizu declared nearly a century earlier: Puerto Rico remains a nation under international law, unlawfully held under colonial rule.

She called for the reinscription of Puerto Rico as a non-self-governing territory, the restoration of its sovereignty, and an international investigation into the genocidal nature of U.S. policy. The forced sterilizations, unethical medical experiments, economic dependency, and repression of the independence movement were not aberrations—they were instruments of a colonial strategy designed to suppress and erase the Puerto Rican people.

The results seen today—declining birthrates, mass displacement, crumbling public health infrastructure, and cultural erasure—are not natural outcomes. They are the fulfillment of policies designed a century ago to limit the growth, power, and future of Puerto Ricans as a people.

Her statement is part of a broader personal reckoning with her family’s role in this colonial history and a commitment to radical solidarity, historical accountability, and reparative justice.