A group of people in Puerto Rico are campaigning to have the archipelago drop its title of United States territory in favor of an annexation with Spain.

"The U.S. distorted our history," Jose Nieves, founder of Puerto Rico Reunification With Spain, told Fox News Latino. "Nobody here knows we were Spanish citizens with full voting rights until the 1898 invasion. The United States denies us that right."

Spain claimed Puerto Rico on Nov. 19, 1493, owning it until 1898 when they ceded the land to the United States under the American War's Treaty of Paris.

Nieves argued that "Puerto Rican culture is disappearing." The 42-year-old, who has a criminology degree from Caribbean University, added that Puerto Rico had a charter in 1897 that granted the land sovereignty as a Spanish province.

"In contrast to what we're told in the schools, we Puerto Ricans welcomed U.S. troops with gunfire, not with flowers," he said. "The U.S. invasion was heavily contested. In fact, they could not move in during the first two attempts. Finally, they managed to do it because the mayor of Yauco sold out."

Nieves thought of creating the group because the U.S. has failed to please Puerto Ricans unhappy with being a territory.

"We want to become Spaniards again, to be autonomous community No. 18 of a country that we never wanted to abandon," Nieves explained.

Nieves will hold a summer general assembly on the topic. After the assembly, he plans on registering the Puerto Rico Reunification With Spain group with the Puerto Rico State Department. Next, the group will formally reach out to the Spanish Consulate and then the Spanish government.

Eventually, Nieves said that group will go to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands to "contest" the Treaty of Paris, Fox News Latino reports.

"Our priority is to have historic justice done, because Puerto Rico and Spain were forcefully separated," he said.

So far, the movement has the support of Partido Libertario de España (Spain's Libertarian Party) and over 2,100 Facebook followers. Nieves claims his group includes people with "advanced degrees," and they receive positive feedback 95 percent of the time.

"We're getting support from (U.S.) statehood advocates, independence-minded people, who would accept unification as a decolonizing option, and even supporters of the status quo," Nieves said.

In 2012, a plebiscite was released revealing that 54 percent of voters want to "change island's territorial status." In addition, 61 percent said they would prefer statehood as a "non-territorial option," followed by being a sovereign free associated state (33 percent) and then being independent (6 percent).

Nieves plans to be a write-in candidate in the 2016 gubernatorial election.
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Follow Scharon Harding on Twitter: @ScharHar.

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