Mainstream media here in the U.S. quickly moved on from the brief flurry of stories about Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico, since it was sandwiched between the Queen of England’s death and Hurricane Ian hitting Florida. But the situation on the island hasn’t really changed.
Many people who currently have power lose it, off and on, every week, while thousands of “customers,” according to untrustworthy data from by LUMA Energy, haven’t even gotten it back yet. But “customers,” as a category, doesn’t actually reflect how many people are affected—just the number of account-holders—much less the danger the outages pose for those who depend on having electricity to stay alive.
RELATED: Puerto Rico lawmakers demand answers from LUMA on ongoing post-Hurricane Fiona power outages
Just like before Fiona, Puerto Rican activists continue to voice their anger and frustration with Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, the political party in power, LUMA Energy, the U.S.-appointed Fiscal Control Board (known as La Junta), the Trump and now Biden administrations, FEMA, the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court … the list of ‘plaints is a long one. Even longer? The five years that have gone by since Hurricane Maria, which left behind damage that has never been repaired. Longer still is the century-plus since Puerto Rico became a stepchild colony of the United States in 1917.
There are, however, far more stories being posted to alternative media sources these days, by Puerto Ricans who have had enough and who are openly arguing for independence—not statehood. So when the issue of having “no power” is raised, it isn’t simply an issue of electricity: It goes directly to the heart of the island’s colonial status. Puerto Ricans are watching the amazing U.S. support for Ukraine’s struggle not to be swallowed up by Russia, and yet they feel they have been swallowed by the very government so intensely supporting Ukrainians’ right to maintain their freedom and autonomy.
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This story presents the views of Puerto Ricans who do not support statehood for the island. Statehooders have a huge lobbying fund and “shadow government,” headed by deposed ex-Gov. Ricardo “Ricky” Rosselló, and hold most of the island’s highest offices, including the current position of governor, and the resident commissioner’s (non-voting) seat in Congress is held by Republican Jenniffer González, who claims she is no longer an avid Trump supporter. The pro-statehood forces have a big media platform, more access to mainstream media, and by virtue of power and position, they’re the ones who get the photo ops with President Joe Biden and members of Congress.
And so, here are several voices from the other side of the statehood conversation.
This discussion between CBS reporter David Begnaud and Puerto Rican political anthropologist Professor Yarimar Bonilla is insightful.
Sadly, there is no CBS transcript of this conversation with Bonilla; however, there are a few quotes in the longer story. Bonilla also authored an opinion piece for The New York Times this week. For those who don’t subscribe or have maxed out their free articles, I’ve gifted the story below.
Bonilla writes:
After Maria, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sank more than $1 billion into a doomed program called Tu Hogar Renace, or Your Home Reborn, which was meant to provide essential repairs to affected residences in Puerto Rico, reducing the demand for other shelter options. The program focused on basic repairs like fixing broken windows and doors but didn’t prepare structures to withstand future storms. Worse, it was gamed by contractors who charged exorbitant prices for shoddy subcontracted work.
Public works have been similarly challenged. The most visible example is a temporary bridge, built by FEMA contractors in Ohio and placed in the town of Utuado in 2018, at a cost of nearly $3 million. It was supposed to last 75 years, but last month, Fiona’s surging floodwaters washed it down the river. The irony is that the bridge Maria had destroyed was also a temporary one built after Hurricane Georges in 1998.
Puerto Ricans deserve more than Band-Aids that will be ripped away by the next disaster. We also need and deserve a faster recovery. It is unjustifiable and untenable that after a storm, residents are expected to spend weeks without electricity and years living under blue tarps. In the early months of the Covid pandemic, cash payments were released by the federal government with little bureaucratic friction because there was a clear sense of urgency. The same urgency needs to be brought to attending to a natural disaster.
Bonilla was also interviewed in late September by NPR’s Morning Edition, and expanded on some of the problems with FEMA noted above.
YARIMAR BONILLA: Well, part of it has to do with climate change. Of course.
LEILA FADEL: Yeah.
BONILLA: That means that these storms are coming faster and faster, but it also has to do with the fact that emergency response hasn't adapted to climate change. It's not rebuilding in time. And so some of the recovery in Puerto Rico has been extremely slow, part of it because of the bureaucracy of FEMA that takes a long time to release funds, that often does patchwork, temporary solutions, like this bridge that we all saw wash away like a twig because it couldn't even stand, you know, a Category 1 storm.
FADEL: And this is a bridge that was rebuilt after...
BONILLA: After Maria.
FADEL: ...It was destroyed by Maria. Yeah.
BONILLA: Yes, but it was a temporary bridge, and the permanent bridge, you know, was not even started yet. And, you know, part of it was also that FEMA funds, they're always slow, but they were overly policed when it came to Puerto Rico. They were held back. They were extremely vetted. And I'm talking here at the societal level. At the individual level as well, a disproportionate number of individuals never received FEMA payments from Maria in the first place to rebuild from Maria. And so we know that there were still people in their blue tarps or people who were never able to really fully repair their homes.
Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor of Future Perfect, also examined the obstacles faced by Puerto Rico this week.
… a major reason why Puerto Rico’s uptake on adaptation plans has been slow lies with the unique bureaucratic obstacles it faces because of its territorial status and pre-existing debt. Despite the money it did ultimately receive, Puerto Rico’s infrastructure is no better today than it was before María. In fact, it’s even worse. While Fiona was a much smaller storm than María, the hurricane revealed just how vulnerable the island remains. “Given that our collective ability to overcome these events has actually diminished since Hurricane María in 2017,” Raúl Santiago-Bartolomei, a professor of urban planning at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, told me by email, “both federal and local government policies in these areas have proven to be failures.”
Puerto Rico’s vulnerability to hurricanes goes beyond its location on a highway of tropical storms. The island is a poor place by any calculation — with a median household income at $21,000 and a poverty rate hovering around 40 percent, Puerto Rico is twice as poor as Mississippi, the most impoverished American state. And poverty is what can help make natural disasters so deadly and dangerous. But much of the reason why Puerto Rico is so poor boils down in large part to the long-term consequences of colonialism, which has held the territory back from making progress.
Although Biden likely has a better-intentioned game plan in mind for Puerto Rico’s recovery than his predecessor, the problems on the island run much deeper than poor electricity infrastructure and sea walls. According to activists and scholars in Puerto Rico and in the diaspora, adaptation plans alone won’t be enough to improve the lives of everyday people living on the island. There will need to be a major reevaluation of the colonialist underpinnings — the debt crisis and Puerto Rico’s political structure, for one — in order for any kind of climate-resilient infrastructure to happen.
A Sept. 22 opinion piece in The Seattle Times, by political scientist Jennaro Abraham, points out the negative impact of colonialism.
Acquired by the U.S. in 1898 by right of the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico’s economy was molded to fit the extractive interests of the United States. Whether it be through the sugar industry (1900-1930s), industrial initiatives (1930s-1970s), tax exemptions reserved for intellectual property (1970s-2000s), or more recently, tax exemptions afforded to high-net-worth investors via the Act 20/22 (2012-present), Puerto Rico’s ability to develop an effective tax regime to fund basic government services has been compromised.
The colonial state’s historical response to inadequate tax funds — coupled with prohibitive import costs imposed by a U.S. shipping monopoly — has been to indulge in unsustainable bond emissions, thus, resulting in a $73 billion-dollar public debt. As debt quickly accrued and tax revenue remained insufficient, operational funds for public services suffered, resulting in massive layoffs. These issues further perpetuated a longstanding brain drain which continues to shrink the archipelago’s tax base in the present. And as the nation’s ability to invest in basic infrastructure has dwindled, so has its ability to respond to — let alone rebuild — after hurricanes.
Before this debt crisis, Congress — Puerto Rico’s ultimate legal authority — responded by imposing a fiscal oversight board to ensure debt repayment. However, rather than helping the nation prosper, the congressionally appointed board decided to withhold necessary funds to education, essential government services and even disaster recovery funds after hurricane Irma and Maria had hit, all while privatizing the nation’s electrical grid, thus complicating the nation’s sustainability even further.
Last, but certainly not least, Puerto Rican author Jaquira Diaz issued a plea for independence in The Atlantic: “Let Puerto Rico be Free.”
The quest for independence has a long history in Puerto Rico, going back to Spanish colonial times. The U.S. has spent more than a century discrediting independence movements on the archipelago and at times criminalizing them. Pro-independence sentiment has not always been openly expressed. In a Washington Post /Kaiser Family Foundation survey conducted in Puerto Rico in 2018, only about 10 percent of respondents said they favored independence. But I am not alone in believing that support for independence is growing. In the 2020 gubernatorial election, two parties advocating for self-determination and decolonization—one of them calling for full independence—collectively garnered more than a quarter of the vote. Hurricane María was not just a natural disaster; it was a political event that, I believe, is provoking a historic shift. Americans do not appreciate the sheer scale of the trauma. To give one example: In the three months after María, a Puerto Rico Department of Health hotline received approximately 10,000 calls from people considering suicide—a huge increase over the previous year. Of those, almost a third said they had already tried—an even greater increase. María also made it clear to ordinary people, during the worst disaster in the archipelago’s modern history, that self-sufficiency and, essentially, self-governance were the only things Puerto Ricans could truly rely on.
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There are constant reminders in Puerto Rico of its powerlessness. On April 21, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law that denies Supplemental Security Income benefits to Puerto Ricans who are blind or disabled, even though Puerto Ricans are ostensibly U.S. citizens. Vieques and Culebra—two small islands that are part of the archipelago—were long used by the U.S. Navy for bombing practice and munitions dumping, and the Navy left behind thousands of bombs, grenades, and other live ordnance. The devastation on Vieques and Culebra—including contamination of the groundwater by hazardous substances, such as perchlorate—is so significant that the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates the cleanup will continue through 2032.
This quote from the piece is also powerful.