Associated Press
Sunday, July 26, 1998; Page A10

GUANICA, Puerto Rico, July 25—To screams of approval at a rally marking 100 years since U.S. troops invaded, Gov. Pedro Rossello announced today that a local referendum will be held in December on whether Puerto Rico should become the 51st state of the United States.

The governor's announcement came as a bill for a plebiscite approved by the House of Representatives lay stalled in the Senate. The locally organized referendum outlined by Rossello today, which will be nonbinding, seemed designed as a gesture in hopes of strengthening his controversial campaign for Puerto Rican statehood.

"If after 100 years, the U.S. Senate does not possess the will to put an end to a century of colonialism, Puerto Rico does," Rossello told tens of thousands of cheering supporters waving the U.S. flag and Puerto Rico's single-star and stripes.

Even before Rossello's announcement, his opponents predicted the failure of such a referendum on an island where polls over the past five years have shown islanders evenly divided, with about 40 percent supporting statehood and the same percentage for the current commonwealth status.

"If he holds a creole [local] plebiscite, he will lose it," independence supporters were told at a nearby rally by Lolita Lebron, the unrepentant militant who led a 1954 armed attack on the U.S. House of Representatives that wounded five lawmakers.

Fernando Martin, vice president of the Puerto Rico Independence Party, told reporters that the Senate's stalling showed "tremendous opposition to statehood in the United States."

Legislators have questioned the wisdom of making a state of the mainly Spanish-speaking island. Two-thirds of Puerto Rico's residents get some form of federal welfare, yet pay no federal taxes.

"Estados Unidos!" statehooders jeered at "independentistas," or supporters of independence, earlier today as they went their separate ways to the rallies at Guanica, the southwestern town where 100 years ago the U.S. battleship Gloucester launched an embarrassingly swift end to 400 years of Spanish colonial rule.

"The Fatherland or Death!" declared a poster carried by one supporter of independence, who was among the less than 5 percent of islanders that polls show support independence.

In a non-binding referendum in 1993, similar to what Rossello proposes this year, the commonwealth status edged out statehood by 2 percentage points.

The statehood camp wants the economic advantages and political prestige of a firmer alliance with the United States. Advocates say their current status is like that of a servant who is not invited to sit at the table.

Hundreds of police provided strong security at rallies marking the anniversary, which comes amid heightened tensions over Rossello's privatization of the state telephone company.

Protesters have planted bombs, slashed telephone cables and in pre-dawn drive-by shootings attacked a local bank that is part of a U.S. consortium buying the Puerto Rico Telephone Co.

Telephone workers have been on strike since June 18 but union leaders said late Friday they had come to an agreement with the government to go back to work. They refused to give details until they present the proposal to union members.