hey are stealing our present. The UPR is not for sale,” read a large banner at the gates of the oldest and largest of the 11 campuses that make up the University of Puerto Rico system. Early in the morning on Monday, October 18, students gathered to join the protests in front of Puerto Rico’s Capitol in San Juan, holding colorful signs: “They violated our past”; “They are stealing our present”; “They are mortgaging our future.”

On the other side of the island in the western town of Mayagüez, where the STEM flagship campus of the system is located, students were starting a one-day strike. Some had planned to join their peers in San Juan, but those who were unable to do the two-and-a-half-hour drive would attend local protests. The campus in Aguadilla organized a local march in support. Students from campuses such as Ponce and Cayey came to the Capitol in rented buses. They started with a march from the campus to the town hall and ended with plena music and an open mic. The night before, hundreds of students held a pleno—an informal, grassroots assembly—to make decisions and plan the day’s events, with thousands more joining virtually using social media. The discussion was orderly but emotional, and it went beyond the logistics of the protests and into a deeper conversation about the importance of resistance and showing up to the events of the day.

The pleno included comments like the following: “They are destroying our university. They keep hiking tuition costs. They want to force us to pay a debt that is illegal, a debt that is not ours.” “We are paying more for fewer services, but this is not just about us. It is also about the elderly, about the teachers, about everybody…. I don’t want my children to have to leave Puerto Rico like so many in my family have done…. What we are doing here is also about our children, our grandchildren, about the generations to come.”

The trigger of these protests was a bill now before Puerto Rico’s legislature, PC1003, designed to implement the “debt adjustment plan” presented by the Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected body imposed on Puerto Rico as part of the PROMESA Law passed by the US Congress in 2016. Called simply “La Junta” by most Puerto Ricans, and charged with “helping” Puerto Rico structure its debt, this group has spent the past five years pushing austerity measures and consistently prioritizing the interests of bondholders over the pensions and essential services needed by the island’s people. Since January 2017, the FOMB—under the cover of two hurricanes, a series of earthquakes, and the Covid pandemic—has been implementing “adjustment” measures that include slashing the public university’s budget in half, increasing tuition threefold, closing a third of the island’s public K-12 schools, and privatizing part of the public electric utility. The FOMB has done this with the complicity and support of three different governors, as well as many local politicians and administrators, The Puerto Rican population has been rapidly dwindling, while wealthy investors, mostly from the United States, buy luxury properties and coastal land on the cheap and move to the island to take advantage of generous tax exemptions.

While the FOMB describes its debt adjustment plan as a sure way to usher in a “new era of stability and prosperity,” activists, experts, and legislators from opposition parties have pointed out its negative impact on retiree pensions, municipal services, and the UPR. This plan and the bill fix the latter’s yearly budget at $500 million–about half the budget that the institution would have under the formula defined in Puerto Rican law since 1966. If PC1003 becomes law, many argue, it will result in a decrease in the quality of education provided, further tuition increases, and the unavoidable closure of some of the smaller campuses, which serve some of the poorest students on the island. Many experts believe that all of this damage from the plan and PC1003, supposedly for the sake of progress, will sink Puerto Rico further into debt and lead to another default. Moreover, some, or even most, of the debt that Puerto Rico is being forced to pay could very well be illegal, but the FOMB and Puerto Rico’s government have consistently avoided a comprehensive audit.

Rolando Emmanuelli, a lawyer that specializes in bankruptcy and one of the experts that testified in the project’s public hearings, told me that, “simply put, the plan is not even viable. In a legitimate bankruptcy process, the debtor does not pay for an uninsured or illegal debt. In this case, the FOMB never carried a proper audit to identify potentially illegal debt and did not even try to eliminate uninsured debt. Puerto Rico’s legislature has the responsibility, the duty, to push back against the FOMB’s plan.” Pushback, however, seems unlikely: On Sunday, after meeting behind closed doors, governor Pedro Pierluisi, House speaker Rafael Hernández, and FOMB president David Skeel announced that they had reached an agreement. And on Thursday, October 21, in somewhat opaque declarations, the interim UPR system president, Mayra Olavarría, told the press she endorses the bill because, in her view, it puts a stop to the FOMB’s cuts, but at the same time she recognized that the budget would still be “insufficient.”

Economists in Puerto Rico and elsewhere have opposed the FOMB’s cuts to the UPR since the start and agree that the contributions the UPR makes to Puerto Rico’s economy far outweigh the public’s investment in its operation. But in spite of its important, even essential contributions, the UPR and its students have been one of the main targets of the FOMB’s austerity measures since 2016. The university’s budget has already been slashed by over 400 million; tuition has increased threefold; and accreditations for some programs have been lost. Administrative positions are increasingly being filled by party loyalists, and shared governance structures are being ignored. Students participating or simply being seen at protests have been victims of online surveillance, physical violence, and, in some cases, years-long legal persecution. While the UPR has been subject to such drastic cuts, the opposite seems is true for the cops. A new report by Kilómetro Cero, an organization that advocates for police accountability in Puerto Rico, has revealed that the police budget increased by 26 percent between 2017 and 2021.

But students were not the only people present. Hundreds of UPR faculty and staff, school teachers, union members, and more showed up to denounce PC1003, the presence of the colonial FOMB on the island, and the complicity of Puerto Rico’s politicians. Members of the Colectiva Feminista, a vibrant grassroots organization that played a crucial role in the massive 2019 protests that culminated in the ousting of then-Governor Ricardo Rosselló, were there, and so were human rights groups—including Brigada Legal Solidaria, whose members were providing students with legal advice and keeping track of potentially illegal police behavior, such as pushing or photographing protesters.

These events came after the massive protests on Friday, October 15, when thousands of Puerto Ricans marched against the constant blackouts and price hikes that have become the norm after the energy distribution side of the public electric utility was privatized and taken over by LUMA, a Canadian/American company. Students have said that if PC1003 is approved, these protests will be just the beginning. Campus and system-wide student assemblies are being planned for late October and early November.

At the time of publication, students in at least six other campuses have joined Mayagüez in declaring short-term strikes (paros), and protesters are still standing, marching, and chanting in front of San Juan’s Capitol, awaiting the bill’s final vote in the Senate. In a display of the kind of creativity that has long characterized protests in Puerto Rico, the paros include poetry, bomba and plena dancing, art workshops, teach-ins, street theater, and performances by campus choirs, bands and dancers.

And as they wait for tonight’s pleno, where the decision to extend the strike will be debated, a student protesting in Mayagüez tells me how they feel about the bill, and about the situation: “We are closing down this campus because the PC1003 is catastrophic. It places the burden of the debt on the shoulders of Puerto Rico’s most vulnerable sectors, on precisely the people that have already been most affected by austerity and neoliberalism, people who had nothing to do with the debt’s creation to begin with. The Junta [FOMB] only has the bondholders’ interests in mind. The bill and its language do not guarantee the university’s survival–on the contrary, it guarantees its destruction.”

On July 10, journalist Sandra Rodríguez posted on her blog several pages of leaked texts between Puerto Rico’s Governor Ricardo Roselló and some of his collaborators. Three days later, Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism released all 889 pages of these messages. The texts were misogynistic, homophobic, and fat-phobic. The men joked about bodies decomposing in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and the chat log contained abundant evidence of corruption. The leaks triggered demonstrations across Puerto Rico and a viral social media campaign with hashtags such as #RickyRenuncia. One by one, the cabinet members in the group chat stepped down, and on the night of July 24, after 11 days of continuous, island-wide protests, Roselló himself resigned. The demonstrations continue, though, as islanders demand accountability from the candidates for interim governor, a comprehensive audit of Puerto Rico’s debt, and curtailment of austerity measures.

During this month’s protests, the use of police force has been excessive and unchecked. In at least five instances, the riot police—under the euphemism “crowd dispersion”—tear-gassed and attacked peaceful protesters in front of the governor’s mansion in San Juan, according to Mari Mari Narváez, executive director of Kilómetro Cero, an organization that works to foster state and police accountability in Puerto Rico.

In one case, on July 18, police warned protesters over loudspeakers that the Constitution no longer applied. Those of us watching events unfold on local TV heard officers announce, “Su actividad ha dejado de estar protegida por la Constitución,” or “Your event is no longer protected by the Constitution,” shortly before they shot tear-gas canisters and rubber bullets at nonviolent protesters and struck them with batons.

Observers from the ACLU and Amnesty International have described the arbitrary termination of protests as a de facto and illegal curfew declared by the police chief. Stating that a protest is no longer protected by the Constitution, they say, was a pretext to attack protesters—one more typical of totalitarian states than of democracies. “This is a police force that is acting more like a protective squad for the governor, what we call in español the ‘Escuadrón de Rosselló,’” William Ramírez, executive director of the ACLU of Puerto Rico, told Buzzfeed News.

It’s no wonder, then, that on July 22, as part of the largest demonstration in Puerto Rican history, protesters “tucked in” the First Amendment at 11 pm. Protesters distributed about 200 children’s books written by Puerto Rican authors and read aloud bedtime stories to the Constitution.

So far, Kilómetro Cero has documented 37 instances of violent use of force or questionable arrest since these protests began—almost certainly a massive undercount. Videos posted to social media and by the mainstream press show repeated examples of police brutality. In one clip, a riot officer confronts two unarmed youths and shoots them with rubber bullets as they hold their hands high and ask for clemency. Another video shows police shooting Rocío Juarbe in the back with rubber bullets, even as she was asking other demonstrators to refrain from throwing water bottles and empty canisters at the officers. Police also struck one bystander with their batons, as he screamed, “I was just standing here, I was not doing anything!” The man required medical assistance, and video of the incident was published the next day.

Making the situation even more dangerous, police have been blocking streets during rallies, making it difficult or impossible for protesters to obey orders to leave. This is especially hazardous when the police launch tear gas into a crowd—something they have been unapologetic about. In response to the common chant used by demonstrators, “¡Somos más y no tenemos miedo!” (we are more, and we are fearless), an officer posted a selfie of a group of riot police wearing masks with the boast “la calle linpiecita [sic] y eso que eran más y no tenían miedo se les olvido que nosotros somos menos pero tenemos mucho gas” (“[look at] the street now so clean [of people] they said they were more and had no fear but forgot that we are not so many but we have lots of [tear] gas”).

The police commissioner, Henry Escalera, told the media that the police attacked crowds only in response to protesters who threw tear-gas canisters and fireworks. While demonstrators have mostly been peaceful, a few have thrown objects at the police. But video footage shows police officers trying to pull unarmed protesters inside the perimeter where they would be vulnerable to attack, and tear gas being deployed every night at 11, regardless of demonstrators’ behavior. And those canisters that were supposed to prove protester violence? They were the same brand and type used by the riot police. Escalera’s other attempts to pin violent actions on the protesters have also been discredited. For instance, police initially accused demonstrators of setting alight a car that was seen burning in several videos; police now admit that a canister they launched sparked the fire.

This kind of police behavior is cause for indignation, but Mari-Narváez said it’s not surprising: “The police in Puerto Rico have a history of extreme repression of dissent. Our ‘law and order’ institutions have historically killed, persecuted, incarcerated, and blacklisted dissidents, particularly anti-colonialists and pro-independence activists, and there’s a lack of independent oversight and accountability mechanisms to keep the police in check. The right to free expression is particularly important, since we are currently democratically cornered, subject to another country’s congressional power and with civil rights violations cases halted in courts due to the debt restructuring process.”

In other words, the imposition of austerity is not only affecting pensions or institutions like health and education; it’s also preventing Puerto Ricans from seeking recourse for police violence.

Puerto Rico is currently in the middle of the fraught process of installing an interim government. Moving forward, given the evidence of recent police repression of free speech rights and the history of police abuses, it is critical that mechanisms to monitor abuse and keep police accountable are put in place. According to Erika Guevara, director for the Americas for Amnesty International, “The new authorities in Puerto Rico must prioritize the investigation of the police response to the recent protests and take all measures to fully guarantee the right to freedom of expression. Never again must the authorities repress social protest.”

Investigating these and other cases will not be easy within existing structures, and turning to the FBI for help is hardly a good alternative. The FBI has historically collaborated with the Puerto Rico Police Department in the abuse and persecution of dissidents and even helped shape some of its most appalling practices. “The chat itself,” said Marisol Lebrón, scholar and author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico, “reveals that for the past five years, the federal government did not work with the local authorities or the appointed federal monitor to address police repression or stop human rights abuses. I would be very suspicious of their motivations if they start doing so now.”

Mari-Narváez agrees, and suggests some mechanisms: an independent oversight board with citizen participation and funded by but independent from the state; the appointment of an independent special prosecutor; and better police training. One thing is clear, though: Roselló may have resigned, but the protests are not stopping. And unless something is done, neither will the police abuse.

s the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) begins a new semester, its future is anything but certain. Hurricane María dealt a blow to its infrastructure last year; now, both the federal and local governments seem intent on further damaging the island’s public-university system rather than repairing and strengthening this crucial asset for Puerto Rico’s socioeconomic development. In a territory with soaring poverty and unemployment rates, students face a 100 percent increase in tuition alongside the elimination of the waivers traditionally offered to athletes, choir members, and other students providing services to the university—all at an institution that for over a century has been the island’s main channel for upward mobility.

The ongoing bid to reduce Puerto Rico’s government spending—what the non-elected Fiscal Board appointed by the federal government euphemistically calls “right-sizing”—threatens not only the UPR’s autonomy but its very existence.

In the weeks following Hurricane María, the US Department of Education made $41 million available to support students at colleges and universities impacted by the hurricane, of which the UPR system received only 20 percent. Meanwhile, institutions in Louisiana and Mississippi were able to access $190 million after Hurricane Katrina. A considerable portion of the María relief funds were distributed to private institutions like New York University and even some private, for-profit institutions like Grand Canyon University, to host a relatively small number of students who came from Puerto Rico.

In addition to making few funds available to rebuild UPR, the federal government has also gutted essential aid programs, like work-study grants, with little explanation. In Puerto Rico, where the median annual household income is below $20,000, and jobs increasingly difficult to attain on an island still recovering from a natural disaster, these policies are particularly damaging: Many students will have to drop courses in order to secure a livable income.

But austerity for UPR has been a long time coming. Long before Hurricane María, the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (a body, locally referred to as “La Junta,” with nearly absolute powers over Puerto Rico’s finances, appointed by then-President Barack Obama) had begun their work restructuring the island’s debt by targeting the university as a site of fiscal reform. Following a familiar script of austerity measures and privatization, the board, often in collaboration with the local government, implemented a number of dramatic changes, including pension reductions, school closures, the relaxation of environmental protections, and budget cuts to public services such as public higher education. What these changes say is clear: The federal and local governments have abandoned the university as a social priority

The University of Puerto Rico is one of the strongest contributors to upward mobility and the local economy, and one of the public agencies that has best managed its own debt. Despite this, La Junta demanded cuts equivalent to about a third of the UPR’s total budget, with no rationale offered for this decision.

One can speculate, however. The university has been historically a site of resistance to neoliberal reforms, and its role as a cradle of island-wide political movements casts it as a threat to the highly unpopular Junta. Higher education is strongly linked to increased political participation: A study in Puerto Rico carried out by Yarimar Bonilla, one of the authors of this piece, found that those who attended public institutions had much higher rates of what social scientists describe as “political knowledge” than those who attended private institutions—something that would be of interest to a government body intent on slashing public resources. The University of Puerto Rico, moreover, is known for a robust student movement that has vigorously protested colonial intervention since 1948 and spearheaded national resistance to austerity measures in 1984, 2010, and, most recently, against La Junta in 2016.

Members of La Junta were making public declarations about the need for huge cuts to the public university’s budget as early as January 2017. The actual numbers were a moving target: first $350 million, then $450, then $500. The rationale for each calculation was never made public, but the cuts represented roughly a third of the system’s total budget. After more than a year of ignoring feedback and alternate budget plans drafted by the university leadership as well as student and faculty groups, La Junta imposed its own plan in April 2018, which led to an immediate doubling of tuition costs, with increases of up to 175 percent soon to come. The plan also unveiled a euphemistically described “campus consolidation” that will likely result in the closing or significant shrinking of seven campuses, and a dramatic reduction of the student body, faculty, and staff. Ironically, La Junta itself will cost Puerto Rico over $1,530 million in five years—almost the same amount it will cut from the university’s budget in that period.

iven Puerto Rico’s historical juncture, one would expect the government to facilitate and encourage research initiatives in all areas after Hurricane María, from the creation of new solar technologies to the treatment of social trauma. The UPR is a crucial center for research, generating over 70 percent of the scientific research output in the island. Despite carrying heavy teaching loads with few of the resources that faculty in the continental United States take for granted, the University of Puerto Rico has a world-class faculty that includes award-winning humanists and scientists, and has been an important site of scientific innovation and critical thinking. While many universities in the states struggle to increase the number of STEM degrees they produce, particularly among Latinx students, the UPR is one of the top schools in the country graduating STEM students at the baccalaureate and graduate levels.

But rather than promoting and strengthening public resources, the government seems intent on outsourcing services to foreign companies and fueling private profit at the expense of the public good. Important local facilities like a state-of-the-art Comprehensive Cancer Center—which would play a crucial role in Puerto Rico’s recovery, and also bring much-needed funds to the UPR—stand idle because of government inaction, and initiatives like the “posterriqueño,” which would cut the cost of public lighting in half, are thwarted by local bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the newly appointed UPR president, Jorge Haddock Acevedo, has declared the draconian budget cuts imposed by La Junta to be “manageable.” The local Governing Board of the UPR, guided by partisan politics and dominated by political appointees, has done little to defend the institution. The complicity between the UPR Governing Board and La Junta means that the legal efforts to resist these drastic cuts, under the Title III bankruptcy clause of the PROMESA law, are being led not by university trustees or administrators but by a coalition of faculty that is already stretched thin. A lawsuit filed by the APRUM (La Asociación de Profesores y Profesoras del Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez) argues that the university must be protected as an “essential service” and seeks a budget amendment to ensure its continuity, particularly in this time of crisis.

The tuition increase has been justified by La Junta and its local supporters by pointing out that tuition at the UPR is much less expensive than at public universities in the 50 states and should change to be on par with them. But when you take into account variables such as net price and median income, Puerto Rican students actually pay more, not less, than their counterparts in the states. Forcing them to take out loans to pay tuition in the context of Puerto Rico’s depressed job market just adds insult to injury. Moreover, the shrinking or closing of smaller campuses in the name of “efficiency” will have a negative, cascading impact on the regional economy and job markets of some of the most depressed parts of the island, forcing students who can’t afford to move to either stay out of college or turn to the predatory for-profit college industry.

his attack on the public university, a widely respected institution that a member of La Junta himself recently described as “essential,” cannot be viewed in isolation. It needs to be understood as part of a broad, violent takeover of disaster capitalism, where those who stand to profit from Puerto Rico’s tragedy have been gifted not by one but two disasters: Puerto Rico’s unpayable debt (around $72 billion in bonds and $50 billion in pension obligations), and two hurricanes, Irma and María, with estimated damages of $ 90 billion ($ 133 million for the university) and a death toll in the thousands.

Indeed, we still don’t know the full extent of the death toll (although study after study has shown it to be in the thousands), and the government has ignored local attempts at documenting and analyzing the impact of Hurricane Maria, preferring instead to outsource this effort to researchers at the private George Washington University—itself an example of how all aspects of Puerto Rico’s recovery are fueling the transfer of resources and basic services from public to private hands. Similarly, private, non-Puerto Rican firms were given large contracts to carry out the process of rebuilding after Hurricane Maria—often with disastrous results. At present, plans are underway to sell Puerto Rico’s electric utility, and a portion of the public-education budget will be funneled into the coffers of private and charter schools.

How this will play out for UPR is less explicit but perhaps more sinister. In an island where over 40 percent of the population and over 50 percent of children live under the poverty level, the students affected most by these cuts are precisely the ones with the greatest need. This is not only because of the increased tuition, but also because the regional campuses targeted for closures largely serve low-income, place-bound students in poorer municipalities. These students are likely to be absorbed by a for-profit college industry similar to the one in the 50 states that already markets heavily to them—and with some of the very same actors. Unsurprisingly, these companies are lobbying heavily and successfully for decreased regulation and more freedom from public scrutiny. Most ironically, some of the firms that own for-profit colleges in Puerto Rico are owned by holders of Puerto Rico’s bond debt. This is the case, for example, of Apollo Education Group, the corporation behind the University of Phoenix, which is partly owned by Apollo Global Management, a bondholder in Puerto Rico’s debt.

The dangers faced by students at for-profits in Puerto Rico are the same as those that have been described in the 50 states. With a few exceptions, for-profits often have dismal graduation rates and offer low-quality degrees. Students who attend them are often left with no degree, no job, and in debt. The UPR, by contrast, has the opposite track record: It boasts among the best overall graduation rates in Puerto Rico, and has been recognized by many scholars as an engine of social mobility that helped move previous generations out of poverty and into middle-class status. While student advocates in the United States denounce the fact that only around 10 percent of the American public flagship institutions are affordable for low-income students, at the UPR’s flagship campus, 64 percent of the student body is low income. In fact, Puerto Rico has the highest Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, in the Americas and ranks third among 101 countries overall, surpassed only by Zambia and South Africa. Contemporary economists agree: The current attacks on the university—and on the Puerto Rican public education and economy as a whole—will decrease upward mobility, hamper economic growth, and increase the already soaring social inequality.

Members of La Junta have said that the University of Puerto Rico must become like the “universities of the north,” meaning that they should receive minimum support from public coffers. They have justified the attack on the UPR saying that it is a burden to the state and needs to follow the model of universities in the 50 states. But perhaps those universities should be following the UPR’s model instead. Throughout their history and to this day, the people of Puerto Rico have viewed their public university not as a cost or as a burden but as a public good and an investment—the kind of investment most needed in times of economic crisis.

Six months after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans are understandably frustrated with their government officials. One might expect discontent to center around the head of the power company who oversaw months of blackouts or the governor who awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in private contracts with little or no oversight. But instead it is the secretary of the department of education, Philadelphia-native Julia Keleher, who has become the focus of people’s anger. In the past few weeks, Puerto Ricans have been calling for her resignation, making her the object of a viral hashtag campaign, #JuliaGoHome. On Monday, the school system was paralyzed by a strike as thousands of teachers protested the education-reform bill her office has spearheaded.

For observers from the 50 states, it might come as a surprise that Puerto Rico’s secretary of education hails from Philadelphia. Indeed, it is the first time a non–Puerto Rican has held the job since the colonial appointees in the period after the US took possession of the island in 1898. But in the four years leading up to her appointment, Keleher’s education consultancy firm, Keleher & Associates, had been awarded almost $1 million in contracts to “design and implement education reform initiatives” in Puerto Rico. The results of those efforts were never described to the public, but when Governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares tapped Keleher for the position in January 2017, the selection was initially met with some guarded optimism. Some hoped that a non–Puerto Rican would be able to rise above local politics, end corruption, and lead the agency with professionalism and expertise.

From the beginning, many critics expressed concerns about her sizable salary, which at $250,000 is more than 10 times the average salary of a teacher in Puerto Rico. In an island beset by an unpayable debt and austerity measures, Keleher has managed to secure an income that is more than double that of her predecessors and over three times that of Rosselló, the governor that appointed her. It’s even 25 percent greater than that of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of the US Department of Education, and larger than that of 95 percent of education leaders around the world.

As secretary, her salary is capped by law, so in order for Keleher to receive this level of compensation, she was given additional contracts that established her as an adviser to her own agency. These contracts were facilitated through the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF), the agency created in 2016 to manage the island’s fiscal crisis and implement austerity measures. As with other controversial appointments, such as that of the fiscal-board director Natalie Jaresko, the exorbitant salaries are rationalized as necessary to recruit the kind of talent needed to resolve the island’s financial crisis.

Those who supported Keleher’s confirmation responded to criticisms over her eye-popping salary by insisting that she had the kind of “world-class” skills and credentials that Puerto Rico’s education system sorely needed. She was hailed as a gifted technocrat and an expert in the use of data-driven, evidence-based practices and performance metrics. She was also described as someone who, precisely by virtue of not being from the island, would be immune the kind of partisan politics that corrupted the work of previous secretaries and the performance of the government as a whole. That appears not to be the case, with Puerto Rico’s Civil Rights Commission already investigating her office for ethics violations and political favoritism.

As it turns out, her policy and practice reforms have also been anything but transparent, and the “data” of her “data-driven” rationale has not been made widely available. One of her very first moves, for example, was to shutter more than 150 schools. But she never explained how she chose the schools that would be closed beyond a vague reference to “loss of students” due to migration.

Both this decision and its timing offer cause for concern. Puerto Rico, for starters, lacks an efficient public-transportation system, and the department of education operates very few school buses. In an island where the majority of children live in households below the poverty level, many parents lack the means to drive their children to a school that’s farther away. Critics question the need to consolidate schools and are weary of the impact this will have on children still dealing with the trauma of the storm. Not to mention the imminent loss of teaching jobs that closing schools implies.

With the assistance of DeVos’s office, Keleher’s department has now produced an education-reform bill designed to increase “school choice” through measures such as the creation of charter schools and school-voucher programs. In the Senate hearings leading up to the bill’s approval, the University of Puerto Rico’s dean of education testified against the widespread adoption of charter schools using research-based arguments. He has since been removed from his post. Monday’s protest sought to keep the bill from being passed in the Senate, but it sailed through anyway. A final version of the bill is expected to be approved by the governor in the coming days. The bill would accompany the closing of an additional 300 schools—over a third of the island’s public-school system. A separate law enacted last year allows for the fast-tracking of so-called “church schools,” which have been celebrated as a way to bring together religious freedom and school choice.

It is hard not to read this combination—the elimination of public schools and the creation of charters and voucher systems—as anything other than a large-scale privatization of the education system. For her part, Keleher denies that this is the main goal, and the final bill is vague around these issues: Charters may or may not be for-profit, vouchers may or may not be used at sectarian schools, and charters and private schools may or may not accept special-education students.

This last point, about students with special needs, is particularly crucial. Unlike in the 50 states, where about 13 percent of the student body qualifies for special-education services, in Puerto Rico 40 percent of the student population requires them. But research suggests that charter schools are less likely than traditional public schools to enroll and retain students with disabilities.

Keleher has been confronted with these and other questions pertaining to the changes she proposes at teacher forums and press conferences. Her responses have been inadequate and often rude: She tends to answer with curt, unsubstantiated, or sarcastic statements. She once simply got up and left a meeting because she was not happy with or prepared for teachers’ questions.

Her reaction to criticism of the recent $16.9 million contract given to the California-based Josephson Institute of Ethics to teach “values” in Puerto Rican schools is telling: After justifying the closing of the first 179 schools as a necessary $7 million cost-saving measure, she shrugged off the much-larger Josephson contract as representing less than 1 percent of the agency’s budget. But to many Puerto Ricans—when there is no funding for teaching materials, computers, and other educational necessities—the five-month contract seems like an extraordinary sum. When reporters asked her if Puerto Rican social workers employed by the school system were not already doing the job of imparting values, she replied that they, like most individuals in the department of education, lacked the necessary leadership and managerial skills. The Puerto Rican chapter of the National Association of Social Workers has suggested this indicates her lack of knowledge about the unique role and presence of social workers in the local system.

Later, when queried about why she had selected the Josephson Institute in the first place, she retorted “porque si,” or “just because,” later adding that the organization had evidence and data proving great results. This, however, is debatable: The institute has never carried out a program of this size, and the only evaluation that we could find, which was self-funded, suggested modest results at best. When asked how she even learned about the institute to begin with, Keleher claimed not to remember, but later it was revealed that a loyalist from Rosselló’s New Progressive Party (ironically from the department of ethics) had pushed for the contract. Past clients for this “values” program include the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the CIA, although the company acknowledges that the Puerto Rico program is the largest and most lucrative one they’ve ever had.

When pressured on these matters, Keleher and her supporters accuse her critics of prejudice—of not liking her because she’s a white American or of not understanding her because Spanish is not her first language. Her defenders stress that she is trying her best, and that it is as discriminatory to suggest that a person from Philadelphia could not run the department of education as it would be to suggest that someone from Puerto Rico could not do the same in one the 50 states. These claims gloss over the power differentials between Puerto Rico and the United States: It would be unthinkable for a Puerto Rican to be appointed to run a state’s department of education without perfect English fluency and knowledge of US history and politics.

Given her own admission of cultural incompetency, Keleher is perhaps unaware that the United States initially deployed US teachers to the island in the 1900s with the explicit intention of altering local language, culture, and historical memory to transform Puerto Rico into a more palatable “Porto Rico.” Local teachers were central to the resistance against the imposition of English-only education and were key to maintaining Puerto Rican history and cultural traditions within the curriculum.

Any appointment of a person from the mainland to a position of power on the island sends a message that Puerto Ricans suffer from native incompetence, a lack of preparedness, and faulty ethics, and that the solution to these deficiencies is having someone else—preferably someone from the United States—come in to fix the mess that Puerto Ricans have supposedly created for themselves. Lately, the message that Puerto Ricans are unable to govern themselves has been repeated frequently, from the imposition of the federal fiscal-control board to Keleher’s department recruitment of senior managers directly from the continental United States.

It’s important to see how Keleher and her policies fit within the landscape of post-Maria Puerto Rico. Although her nomination raised some eyebrows, it also paved the way for other less debated appointees, such as Walter Higgins III, recently chosen to lead the power authority down the road to privatization, and Brad Dean, who was named CEO of the island’s new Destination Marketing Organization, nonprofit private agency that does work previously done by government-sponsored tourism agencies. The creation of this agency speaks to the broad transfer of responsibilities and resources from the public to the private sector that is taking place following the storm.

It is clear that privatization and the influx of private capital are being imagined as the driving motors of Puerto Rico’s recovery. Even before Maria, the emphasis of the local government and the federally appointed fiscal board was on downsizing government agencies, luring foreign investors through tax incentives, privatizing public services—including essential ones like education, energy, and health care—and securing profits for bondholders and private investors. It is perhaps not surprising that Puerto Rico’s bonds have rallied since the storm.

This traditional, albeit accelerated, model of disaster capitalism where public funds are pillaged for the benefit of specific economic interests is reflected in Keleher’s actions: granting lucrative contracts to private US-based companies (while diminishing and dismissing available public institutions and resources in Puerto Rico), redirecting public funds to create private schools, and closing schools and firing teachers to make public funds available for her reform plan.

Julia Keleher is neither an exception nor an anomaly. What remains to be seen is if the calls of #JuliaGoHome will turn into a larger groundswell of discontent against the dismantling of Puerto Rico’s resources and the hardening of colonial forms of rule.