Governor Arnold Palacios of the Northern Mariana Islands died on July 23 at age 69, after suffering from an enigmatic “medical incident.”
Palacios suddenly “collapsed” and died within months of announcing his intention to pivot from China to the United States.
According to members of his government, Palacios suddenly collapsed in his office on the island of Saipan on Wednesday afternoon. He was in stable condition, conscious and in “good spirits” when he was airlifted to the Guam Regional Medical City, but died at 10:37 p.m. that night.
Lt. Gov. David Apatang said he was tending to his duties around lunchtime on Wednesday when he heard a stampede of emergency medical personnel “running” to the governor’s office.
“So, I went up and checked, and he was being wheeled out. And that’s all that I know,” he said.
Apatang thanked the U.S. Air Force for transporting the governor to Guam for specialized treatment based on recommendations from the medical team at Saipan’s Commonwealth Health Center Corp. (CHCC). He asked his constituents to pray for Palacios to recover and “come back to us again,” but a few hours later the governor was pronounced dead. Apatang assumed the governor’s office the following morning.
Palacios was elected governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) in 2022, capping off a long career in Commonwealth politics that included a stint as lieutenant governor. He died a month shy of his 70th birthday. His state funeral is scheduled for Saturday, August 2. Representatives of the U.S. government are expected to attend.
The modern economy of the CNMI is heavily based around tourism, especially from the United States and Japan, although in recent years foreign investors have supported a significant expansion of the garment industry, including Chinese investors. The CNMI has a combination of duty-free access to American markets, plus extremely relaxed labor laws, that makes it a magnet for both investment and controversy.
Chinese tourism has grown steadily in the CNMI over the past 20 years, with an understandable pause during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. The CNMI encouraged Chinese tourism by implementing the “Economic Vitality and Security Travel Authorization Program” (EVS-TAP), which allows Chinese tourists to visit the islands for up to 14 days without a visa. Passengers on flights from Hong Kong could get their travel documents processed in a matter of hours.
The EVS-TAP program began experiencing delays this year, leading to the suspension of direct flights from Hong Kong to Saipan in May. Frustrated Hong Kong travel agents complained the delays undermined their efforts to rebuild tourism to the Northern Marianas after the pandemic. China had grown to the second largest source of CNMI tourism before the pandemic struck, with over 15,000 visitors a month. About ten percent of that number of Chinese tourists were visiting the CNMI when flights to Saipan were suspended in May.
Governor Palacios said in May that the “geopolitical situation in our Asia Pacific area” was choking off Chinese tourism. Some of the squeeze came from Beijing, which decided to tighten its overseas gambling rules and crack down on casinos.
Another contributing factor was a high-profile drug crime committed by a Chinese national who arrived in 2016 and dramatically overstayed his tourist visa. A growing number of complaints had been filed against Chinese factories and casinos for abuse labor practices, including visa-waiver violations.
Palacios said he raised the matter of Chinese visa delays and the potentially permanent loss of tourist flights from Hong Kong with the Trump administration in April, including a direct appeal to the White House, but the situation was not immediately resolved. He said this led him to believe the CNMI’s tourism-based economy needed to diversify — and a closer relationship with the U.S. military, like that enjoyed by the CNMI’s neighbor Guam, might be the ticket.
“Tourism can’t be our only engine,” Palacios remarked. “Guam and Hawaii have federal investments through the military. We need our own pathway to stability.”
Palacios said during a visit to Washington in March 2024 that his islands were in a “lonely” place because the Biden administration was pressuring him to break ties with China and give up the CNMI’s unique status as the only U.S. territory that allowed visa-free visits by Chinese nationals.
The amount of Chinese investment and tourism the CNMI stood to lose by pivoting toward Washington was significant but Palacios was determined to make that effort — and also develop closer ties with “regional allies” Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. He experienced a good deal of resistance to his efforts from local political opponents who feared he would never be able to cadge enough business from Japan and Taiwan to make up for lost Chinese tourists and investors.
“On a weekly basis, twice a week, you have editorials, you have people saying, ‘if we only had the Chinese tourists back, would we be in this situation? Why is the governor taking this position?’” he said in 2024.
More than money was at stake, even as the CNMI’s economy contracted sharply over the past two years. Palacios was openly suspicious of the Chinese as a security risk and concerned that Beijing would interfere with the CNMI’s politics. He warned against “malicious influence from the Chinese Communist Party” and advised both the Biden and Trump administrations to make investments in the CNMI to hold China at bay.
The Chinese Communist regime sneered that Palacios’ security concerns were merely “ill-intentioned fabrications without any evidence” and warned the governor he would pay dearly for turning away Chinese tourist money.
Palacios was nonetheless unwavering in his determination to turn away from China and embrace the United States.
“First of all, we’re American citizens,” he explained in 2024. “We are in this situation with a country that is not friendly any more.”
The governor is gone now, and it remains to be seen if his successors will remain committed to the geopolitical course he set.
The CNMI is a self-governing collection of 14 islands in the Pacific that began as a U.S. trust after World War II, then voted to become an American commonwealth in 1975, fully achieving that status in 1986. The largest of its islands, Saipan, is only about 46 square miles in size.
Before it was entrusted to American administration by the United Nations in 1947, the Northern Marianas were a Spanish colonial possession, sold off to Germany at the dawn of the 20th century. Japan captured the islands during World War I, ruling with a heavy hand until Allied forces recaptured the Marianas. This eventful history left the small island territory with a complicated population mixture.
The Allies fought hard to capture the Marianas from Japan because they provided a base for bombing missions against the Japanese home islands. The most consequential of those missions took place on August 6, 1945, when the B-29 bomber known as Enola Gay took off from Tinian, the second-largest island in the Northern Marianas, bound for Hiroshima, Japan.
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