Cadet Pedro Santiago Bonilla ’21, Military Intelligence

Pedro, an International Relations major from Puerto Rico, won the Anna Sobol Levy Scholarship to study national security in Israel. A 2018 participant in the American Service Academies Program (ASAP), which takes a group of service academy students to New York, Washington, DC, and Poland to study Jewish heritage and the Holocaust, Pedro has since participated in the MAPP this fall, and took HI 463, doing impressive work on Puerto Rican nationalist thought. In early 2020, he led a group of cadet participants in a program on the Holocaust and Populism at the US Coast Guard Academy. On stage in front of over 1,000 students and faculty and with less than a few hours advanced notice, Pedro eloquently spoke of seeing the harms of extreme nationalism while studying the Holocaust in Poland, and of the need to be particularly sensitive to how identity and political mobilization interact. Pedro has been highly active in helping non-English speakers register to vote and to understand the mechanisms of governance. At West Point, he led the Domestic Affairs Forum, which sponsors monthly lectures, faculty panels, debates, trips, engagements with policymakers, and other functions related to race, identity, and national security issues. Prior to the 2020 election, he worked with Dr. Frey to help develop materials for cadets on voting and permitted political activity (a guide to the Hatch Act).