Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, is in the midst of a humanitarian and natural disaster.
Hurricane Fiona, a Category 1 storm, made landfall Monday, knocking out power to almost the entire island and dumped more than 30 inches of rain in some areas of the island, according to a Monday Politico article.
“Just so [Spartan Daily] readers know, we are talking about a full blown disaster in Puerto Rico,” said William Armaline, San Jose State sociology associate professor and director of the Human Rights Institute, an SJSU research and policy program.
The hurricane came almost five years to the anniversary of Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 hurricane that made landfall on Sept. 20, 2017 and left 3,000 people dead and damaged 80% of the power grid, according to a Monday New York Times article.
Hurricane Maria decimated Puerto Rico’s power, water and healthcare systems, which have never fully recovered, according to the Politico article.
As of Wednesday night, more than a million Puerto Rican homes were without power, according to PowerOutage.us, a website that says it collects, records and aggregates live power outages across the U.S.
In June 2021, a private consortium known as LUMA Energy took over distribution and transmission of power to every single home in Puerto Rico with the awardment of a 15-year contract. LUMA has initiated 225 projects with FEMA totaling more than $5 billion in public funded projects according to the same Politico article.
LUMA’s ability to effectively distribute power to Puerto Rico has left much to be desired by locals. Ever since LUMA took over, it has had new and old appliances broken or made unusable by brown-outs and power surges, according to a 2021 New York Times article.
Migdalia Reyes, SJSU social work professor and former director of Puerto Rican Studies at the University of Connecticut, said power outages cause major problems on the island of Puerto Rico.
“It's a huge epidemic,” Reyes said in a phone call. “There’s a lot of demonstrations taking place because, Puerto Rican people, if anything, [they] are very resilient.”
She said there are demonstrations constantly in Puerto Rico, in which residents have recently begun leaving broken appliances in front of Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi’s mansion and on the capitol building steps.
Reyes said Puerto Rico residents have been doing that as a means of protest against unfair representation and no decision-making power in their infrastructures.
Puerto Rico has no voting representation in the senate and only a non-voting representative in Congress, according to the Monday Politico article.
“There's just basically this dynamic, your typical system of power and oppression,” Reyes said.
Reyes said the question of independence for the island or statehood is a question most Puerto Ricans have been trying to grapple with for the past 50 years.
“There is no easy answer when you have a country that is colonized and people have a colonized mentality and there are very little resources and the entire economy is based on this other external system,” Reyes said. “It's practically impossible to survive as an independent country.”
William Armaline said Puerto Ricans are powerless within the context of being represented by the U.S.
“I think we're not really doing ourselves any favors and avoiding the obvious, which is Puerto Rico remains a colony, they’re U.S. citizens without full citizenship or the full rights of U.S. citizens,” Armaline said.
The newly created congressional Financial Oversight and Management Board is the only political entity responsible for managing Puerto Rico’s fiscal budget as well as the only oversight for LUMA Energy.
The Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico was created under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act of 2016. The Board consists of seven members appointed by the President of the United States and one ex officio member designated by the Governor of Puerto Rico according to the boards about web page.
The oversight board has been criticized for imposing austerity measures in a September 2021 report by the Action Center on Race and the Economy and the Center for Popular Democracy, nonprofit organizations that both say they strive for political change and collective action, according to their respective websites.
The September 2021 report states that the Financial Oversight and Management Board has imposed austerity measures that have been devastating in Puerto Rico, while negotiating unsustainable debt restructuring plans that enrich Wall Street and “hurt Puerto Ricans.”
“These are consequences of policy decisions to favor capital and privatization over the absolute civil and human rights of actual human beings and populations, who are all U.S. citizens,” Armaline said. “So it's extremely concerning.”
