How New York Can Help End the Global Debt Crisis

In January, Columbia economics professors Martín Guzmán and Joseph Stiglitz published a report, “How New York State Lawmakers Can Help Address Debt Crises in the Global South,” to support legislative attempts to reform the state’s role in debt restructurings for countries with distressed economies. The report includes recommendations that legislation should blunt incentives for vulture funds, which profit from buying defaulted bonds and litigating full repayment through the courts, and reduce the interest rate accrued by creditors during the time between default and settlement.

These efforts are crucial, explain Guzmán and Stiglitz, because 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt service than on health. Countries with the highest debt load include Sri Lanka, Zambia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ecuador, and Pakistan. Debt burdens can also prevent low- and middle-income countries from accessing international markets and lending, which limits their ability to secure investments for critical infrastructure, clean energy, and climate adaptation. Since about 50 percent of global sovereign bonds are issued under New York State law, the state is the world’s most important jurisdiction for debt restructuring.

Legislative reform would contribute to resolving ongoing debt crises in the developing world. This would lead to more stable economies that would ease migration pressures as well as mitigate global trade impacts that cause inflationary pressures and increase costly government aid to distressed countries, all of which can also have a cost for New York taxpayers.

The attempt to restore the “champerty” defense, which international debtors can use against vulture funds, has long faced pushback from Paul Singer’s Elliot Management. Champerty, derived from English common law, prohibits buying up debt for the sole purpose of suing to recoup it. Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and major Republican donor who pioneered the vulture fund model, had successfully lobbied for a 2004 New York State law that eliminated champerty for transactions over $500,000. While bills introduced in both the State Assembly and the Senate last year that address champerty and debt frameworks failed to pass, they are expected to be reintroduced this session.

I sat down with professors Guzmán and Stiglitz to discuss the roots and possible solutions to debt crises in the developing world; their involvement in the upcoming Jubilee Commission, which is cosponsored by the Vatican and Columbia’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue; and the specter of the Trump administration’s economic policies.

—Ed Morales

Early on in her masterful book Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer alludes to a double meaning embedded in her subtitle: “History in the first sense refers to what happened; in the second, to what is said to have happened.” Cuba’s history, Ferrer tells us, is likewise two histories. It is simultaneously a narrative of freedom (as well as of its absence from historical memory) and a chronicle of the ways in which those who have struggled for liberation understood their history and were ultimately able to change it materially.

Ferrer’s project is an ambitious one, encapsulating a long view of Cuban history that begins with Columbus and concludes with the socialist island’s tenuous present. Among the book’s central revelations are Cuba’s role as the nexus of a New World economic system after the Haitian Revolution; its status as a constant object of desire for the United States; and its role as a trailblazer in creating a multicultural identity that, as in Haiti, tied the desire for independence from European colonialism to the overthrow of slavery. It also presents those historical narratives that have been elided by many American historians and right-leaning Cubans and Cuban Americans, who prefer to cast Cuban history in one-sided terms. While the country’s tumultuous revolutionary insurrection in 1959 is remembered most often as a rebellion against a string of corrupt US-backed dictators, Ferrer shows that it was also the culmination of an unresolved desire for decolonization that stretched back before US intervention. She also does not shy away from the particular nature of creolized Cuban history, noting that much of the country’s past is intertwined with the history of slavery and racial hierarchies and the struggles to abolish both. Ostensibly multicultural and multiracial, Cuba has at times been strictly stratified according to race, Ferrer notes; its most important liberation movements have therefore been centered on this struggle for true racial democracy.

uba: An American History’s narrative begins with the poorly named Age of Discovery and the early Indigenous rebellions, when Columbus set out on his fateful voyage and found Caribbean islands like Hispaniola and Cuba but never actually arrived in “America.” For the Indigenous peoples living on these islands, this so-called discovery proved deadly: By the early 16th century, the Spanish were barbarically enslaving the local population on Cuba, continuing the genocidal pattern they had established in neighboring Hispaniola. The Indigenous population either fled or resisted, and one of the first stories Ferrer tells is that of Hatuey, a 15th-century Taíno leader who, when offered the chance to go to heaven if he converted to Christianity before being executed, declined when he was told that Spaniards would be there.

From the initial Spanish conquest, Ferrer turns to the evolving catastrophe of colonization, weaving together tales of Spanish conquistadors, the Taínos’ political and sophisticated agricultural organization, and the advent of Caribbean pirates. The Spaniards assigned each of the local Taíno caciques (community leaders) to a Spanish settler, who would use Taínos as slaves to harvest gold on the island. Spanish law insisted on a code of moral conduct called a requerimiento, but it was usually flouted by these settlers, who often read the code in Spanish to people who didn’t understand the language. Not obeying the requerimiento would justify “war” against the Indigenous, and it allowed Cuba’s first Spanish governor, Diego de Velázquez, to rapaciously plunder the island, even though he was admonished for this by the king. Because of disease and the harsh conditions of slavery, the Indigenous population, which numbered 100,000 in 1511, had dwindled to less than 5,000 by 1550.

The cruel and barbarous Spanish colonization also set the stage for Cuba to become a strategic way station for gold harvested in Mexico and Peru on its way to the motherland. Cuba’s position as a mercantile nexus had the effect of making it a cultural center as well. By the late 16th century, Havana had usurped the island’s original capital, Santiago, and developed a “secular, commercially oriented cosmopolitan culture.” The third-largest city in the Americas, behind Mexico City and Lima, Havana was larger than any of the cities in the British colonies of North America. It was also, like much of the so-called New World, a place where slavery became the predominant mode of wealth extraction. Slaves were administered under a 13th-century Spanish legal code called Los Siete Partidas, which allowed them to sue their masters, but this did not mean that slavery in Cuba was any less brutal than elsewhere. Under the code, slaves could also purchase their freedom and that of their children and loved ones, which produced a growing population of free people of color—by 1774, some 40 percent were free.

Even if the North American colonies had a different slave system from that of Cuba, each profited mightily from the work of its enslaved laborers, drawing them into a symbiotic relationship. This was especially true starting in the late 18th century, when Cuba achieved hemispheric dominance in sugar production. Ferrer recounts how, between 1790 and 1820, more than 270,000 Africans were taken to Cuba, doubling Havana’s population and making the island’s population majority Black. The need for more enslaved labor was also a result of France’s retreat from Haiti and its subsequent banning, along with England, of the slave trade.

Trade took off between the United States and Cuba in this period. “By 1820–21,” Ferrer notes, “more than 60 percent of the sugar, 40 percent of the coffee, and 90 percent of the cigars imported into the United States came from Cuba.” New York City became a center for sugar refining, with Cuban raw brown sugar processed there “into refined white sugar, and then sold it at a significant profit in the domestic market and even for export abroad.” Ferrer cites the story of Moses Taylor, a New York sugar broker who eventually became president of the National City Bank of New York, which preyed on several Caribbean islands, advanced credit to Cuban sugar growers, and took a speculator’s cut on the slave trade.

he Monroe Doctrine was outlined in 1823. It made explicit the United States’ interest in ensuring that all territories in the Western Hemisphere remained free of European interference; it also made explicit the United States’ interest in the region as a place where it might interfere as often as it desired. In Ferrer’s telling, the doctrine was particularly motivated by the United States’ need to keep trade with Cuba unfettered as well as to preserve the island as a possible future slave state. In this way, the US “stacked the deck—not just against a potential British takeover of Cuba, but also against the possibility of a Cuban takeover of Cuba.”

The Monroe Doctrine also set in motion an essential dynamic of Cuban politics and national identity formation. The Cuban elite, caught between Spain’s desire to hold on to the last vestiges of its decaying empire and the United States’ desire to expand into the Caribbean, opted to stick with Spain for fear of a slave rebellion, while also forging ties with the US to enhance such “protection.” A culture of Black resistance, with icons like Plácido, a poet who was assassinated in 1844, helped inspire a string of slave rebellions in Cuba, even as US politicians and businessmen increasingly bought prime Cuban land to establish their own plantations.

This fragile balance had begun to shift by the second half of the 19th century. Carlos Manuel Céspedes freed his slaves in 1868 and began a 10-year war of independence against the Spanish, declaring that “all men are our brothers, whatever the color of their skin.” He was joined by Antonio Maceo, a Black general who “had grown up listening to his father read the novels of Alexander Dumas and biographies of Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture and South America’s Simón Bolívar.” The war ended in 1878 with a pact that guaranteed neither independence nor the end of slavery, setting up the final chapter of the struggle.

A work by José Martí marks this turn in Cuban history and national identity formation. The son of a Spaniard, Martí wrote the 1891 essay “Our America,” which through its declaration of transcendent multiracialism functioned as a critique of US hegemony in the hemisphere, down to its monopolization of the word “America.” Written in New York, where Martí was then working, the essay called out the United States for not including the rest of the Americas in its worldview, warning of an impending US intervention in Cuba, a land it refused to know. “Our America” at once presaged the imperial period of the United States in Latin America and reawakened Bolívar’s earlier call for regional unity. “The essay, which never mentioned Cuba, was an ode to Latin American unity,” Ferrer writes. “It was also a warning. The hour is near when [our America] will be approached by an enterprising and forceful nation that will demand intimate relations with her.”

The United States demanded those “intimate relations” in 1898, as Cuba’s War of Independence from Spain came to its conclusion. Sweeping in with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, the US Army sought to take control of the island, and the United States also monopolized the process of the Treaty of Paris, which brought the Spanish-American War to an end. In Cuba, the victorious Cuban forces were denied entrance into Havana. The United States gave Cuba a nominal form of independence, but it also occupied the country and, through the Platt Amendment, which remained in effect until 1934, reserved the right to intervene even after the US Army left. The US naval base in Guantánamo remains from that period.

The war with Spain liberated Cuba from Spanish imperialism, but it also served to cement US control over Cuba’s politics and economy. The country became a playground for the rich and famous, including Amelia Earhart, Irving Berlin, Charles Lindbergh, Gary Cooper, Gloria Swanson, Langston Hughes, Albert Einstein, New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker, and the presidents of Coca-Cola and Chase National Bank. Ernest Hemingway, who is still revered in Cuba, made his notorious comment about how great the island nation was for “both fishing and fucking,” as hordes of average Americans came to visit, escaping restrictive Prohibition laws as well as the vestiges of Victorian morality that persisted from the end of the 19th century.

Yet the conditions for workers, many of whom were Afro-Cubans toiling in plantation-like conditions, only worsened. Ferrer describes how the predictions of catastrophe associated with the coming of Halley’s Comet coincided with the formation, in 1908, of an extraordinary political party: the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party of Color). Demanding racial justice reforms, the party embraced a vision of “a harmonious nationality, as Martí had envisioned and for which [Independence Army Gen. Antonio] Maceo…and a whole illustrious pleiad of Cuban blacks spilled their blood.”

errer deftly paints a portrait of early-to-mid-20th-century Cuba as a nation struggling to liberate itself from US control while at the same time accommodating US consumerism. It was also an era of swift liberalization. A new constitution written in 1940 had a section, championed by the Black Communist Salvador García Agüero, stating that “all discrimination due to sex, race, class or any other motive harmful to human dignity is declared illegal and punishable.” Yet at the same time, American organized crime, led by figures like Meyer Lansky, a major investor in Havana’s fabulous Hotel Nacional, successfully sought influence at the highest level of Cuban politics.

A string of political leaders, from both the right and the left, were incapable of avoiding the corruption that came with US and foreign capital dominating the sugar industry, the railroad, and the utilities. The government changed hands between Fulgencio Batista, a military man who occasionally embraced reform for political purposes, and Ramón Grau, who despite his pro-worker and pro-women’s-rights positions is described by Ferrer as presiding over an “orgy of theft” involving close cooperation with Lansky’s drug-smuggling activities. This conflicted political landscape led Eduardo Chibás to found the Orthodox Party, which broke with Grau’s sputtering Auténtico Party to seek a restoration of its revolutionary goals by eliminating corruption. A young lawyer from Oriente Province, Fidel Castro, made his first public appearances at meetings of the Orthodox Party, and after Chibás’s spectacular suicide—broadcast live on his popular radio show—the die was cast for Castro’s swift rise to power.

Ferrer tells the story of the Cuban Revolution as one that finally brought sovereignty to Cuba by removing US power, while completely restructuring the country’s economy and society. At the time the revolution began, Batista—who had regained the presidency in what Ferrer calls a “sham election”—was overseeing the further Las Vegas–ification of Havana. Meanwhile Castro and his fellow Moncada Garrison insurrectionists (including, of course, his brother Raúl) were organizing a guerrilla war—an audacious plan they eventually carried out, landing in Cuba on a boat sailed from Mexico. Ferrer notes that nothing about the revolution appeared inevitable at the beginning, as she describes the near defeat of Castro and his comrades early on, the reports in The New York Times incorrectly announcing his death, and the eventual deterioration of Batista’s position, which allowed the revolutionaries’ triumphal entry into Havana in January 1959.

Ferrer also describes the litany of tactical errors made by President John F. Kennedy’s administration in the wake of the revolution, in particular the CIA’s poor intelligence and planning failures in the run-up to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The Cuban missile crisis, which is remembered now as the last time there was a serious confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and which could have involved an exchange of nuclear weapons, is recounted here in detail, reminding us that—much as had happened with the Cubans when the US defeated Spain—Castro and his revolutionary government were excluded from the agreement between Kennedy and Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev that ended the crisis.

Ferrer also reassesses the legacy of the Cuban Revolution. The revolutionary government implemented a number of drastic changes almost immediately. “In its first nine months,” she writes, “the new government enacted some fifteen hundred laws, decrees, and edicts. It raised wages, cut telephone and electricity rates, reduced urban rents, seized property of past government officials, and, as its defining act, passed a long-awaited agrarian reform.” The programs to end illiteracy on a massive scale served over 1.25 million Cubans, at once empowering people while immersing them in the ideological tenets of the new society. The institutionalization of universal free health care and higher education gave Cuba the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America and trained legions of health care professionals.

Ferrer also discusses the mass executions of Batista government collaborators and notes some of the revolution’s early failures, in particular its projected “10 million ton harvest” of sugar in 1970. The yield turned out to be only 8.5 million tons, and it came at a time when the price of sugar was less than half what it had been years before. By the 1970s and ’80s, not only had Castro’s policies stalled industrialization, but he had inadvertently helped return Cuba’s economy to its state under colonial exploitation, at one point suggesting that Cubans should be willing to do “as free men what they had to do as slaves” to reach the government’s annual sugar harvest goal. While the United States’ refusal to buy sugar from Cuba—to say nothing of its long-standing embargo against the island, which had begun in 1962 under the Kennedy administration—had severely damaged Cuba’s ability to create a self-sustaining economy, the sugar harvest failure deepened the country’s dependence on the Soviet Union, which would ultimately prove disastrous once the USSR collapsed.

Even as Cuba struggled economically and internal dissent was meticulously stifled, the Cuban Revolution’s egalitarian spirit went abroad, as Cuba involved itself in the decolonization struggles in Africa, some of which spanned decades. Over 430,000 Cubans participated in the fighting in Angola between 1975 and 1991, for example, and while most of that number were soldiers, there were also legions of doctors (indeed, many Cuban doctors are still active today in various countries in Africa). After thriving to an extent in Moscow’s orbit, Cuba was relegated with the end of the Cold War to a protracted period of difficulty. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to what became known as the Special Period, as the end of Soviet aid resulted in an era of economic crisis and scarcity. “In the early 1990s, the average Cuban adult lost an estimated twenty pounds. In three months in Havana in 1992, even with access to hard currency, I lost about ten,” Ferrer recalls. And while Cuba eventually rebounded in the last decade or so because of its government-led shift to tourism (mostly from Europe and Canada) and cheaper oil from Venezuela, Castro’s decision to relinquish the presidency in 2008 because of his declining health (he died in 2016), and the stepping down from power by his brother Raúl in 2018, has created a period of uncertainty.

Last summer’s unprecedented demonstrations involved many Cubans from the generation raised during the Special Period, for whom the revolution and its aging leaders are figures from a distant past. The members of this generation, much like the millennials in the United States, are concerned about their dwindling prospects for stable employment and a viable economic future. Spurred by scarcity as well as a political system that struggles not only with economic development but with monetary policy—last year’s currency reform has led to a crippling inflation, predating the current world crisis—this generation has also found ways to work outside the government-controlled media in order to popularize and publicize their demands. Will this be enough, however, to successfully retool a system that is still inflexible and riddled with inefficiency? In 2019, Miguel Díaz-Canel, a long-time party loyalist with a background in engineering, rose to the presidency as Raúl Castro’s successor, intent on maintaining the revolution’s continuity under increasing pressure from US sanctions and worldwide economic crises.

errer ends her book with Joe Biden entering office, musing that what his administration will do for Cuba “remains an open question.” In May, after a year and a half of inaction, the Biden administration moved to roll back the increase in sanctions and denial of cash remittances imposed by Donald Trump, also loosening travel restrictions for Americans and restarting visa-approval operations at the US Embassy in Havana. Meanwhile, Díaz-Canel lacks charisma and, at age 62, a direct connection to the original revolutionaries, limiting his appeal. But Cuba’s 2018 constitutional reform appears to suggest a wave of democratization and liberalization in the country’s future: Limiting Díaz-Canel’s term in office, it also recognizes private property and foreign investment and asserts women’s and LGBTQ rights. Despite such reforms, however, supply issues have made basic consumer items difficult to find, and problems with infrastructure—most recently a series of black- outs—have tested the average Cuban’s limits, which was a factor in provoking last year’s demonstrations. (The recent disastrous fire at a major fuel storage facility in Matanzas, will surely exacerbate the current crisis with rolling blackouts and electricity rationing.) A new law, Decree 349, has been heavily criticized for giving authorities the power to shut down art exhibitions, since it could be used to repress dissent—many of the central figures of the San Ysidro movement, which led last summer’s protests, are Black artists.

Ideology aside, Cuba’s problems remain rooted in its tenuous ability to sustain its economy. Despite Biden’s rollback of some of the destructive Trump sanctions, the US embargo remains in place, and the Cuban government continues to struggle to provide essential goods for its people. Those revolutionaries still in power—and there are very few—are the ones who, for the last several decades, have asked Cubans to find solace in incremental change, and it is now clear that more flexibility in the country’s socialist model is needed. A new generation, Internet-savvy and armed with WhatsApp chats and a greater understanding of the outside world than ever before, recognizes this need too—but, perhaps because of a government intent on repressing dissent, it struggles to find a coherent voice, as well as the power to renegotiate the revolutionary status quo.

Both within and outside the United States, it has become increasingly obvious that the need for wealth redistribution—“the issue that blocks the horizon,” as Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth—is the central issue for any future era of progressive change. Wealth inequality has accelerated throughout the world over the past four decades in what many perceive as the triumph of neoliberalism: Individuals and nations are rewarded or punished according to their ability to accumulate wealth and participate in the financialization of all aspects of their existence.

When it comes to Puerto Rico, the questions of wealth inequality are central to both the everyday life and the colonial reality of the island, as Rocío Zambrana argues in her new book, Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico. The island’s status as an unincorporated territory and de facto colony has made it vulnerable to an extreme form of austerity imposed on it by the United States. But this austerity comes with high personal costs, too, undermining the very health of the island’s people.

In Zambrana’s account, Puerto Rico’s debt is symptomatic of both imperial practices—in that its agriculture, trade, and taxation have been refashioned to favor US interests—and a neoliberal colonialism of capital extraction through tax exemption and bond speculation. Offering an account that weaves together philosophies of debt, American exceptionalism, and a description of attempts by various coalitions of leftists, students, women, and workers to resist, Zambrana not only details the experience of economic exploitation in Puerto Rico but confronts its particular effects on an array of marginalized groups, thereby showing that debt knows no divisions between identity and class and that the inequalities it imposes or creates must be met by an equally undivided left.

n the United States, the politics of debt has mostly focused on personal debt and, in particular, student debt. Recent figures show that Americans owe just over $800 billion in credit card debt, and when you add in mortgages, car loans, and student debt, the total rises to over $15 trillion. Beginning in the years after Occupy Wall Street, activist groups like Andrew Ross and Astra Taylor’s Debt Collective have lobbied for aggressive student debt forgiveness—a policy that was originally part of the 2020 Democratic Party agenda but now seems to be flagging as a serious consideration for the Biden administration as it struggles to maintain the party’s majorities in Congress in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections.

Yet debt has become a central engine of the US economy, not only for consumers but for cities and states. In the US, local municipalities take on onerous amounts of debt to keep functioning. Meanwhile, throughout the world, debt is employed as leverage that allows wealthier countries to extract concessions from poorer ones. This practice was evident in the United States’ “dollar diplomacy” interventions throughout the Americas in the early 20th century, justified under the Monroe Doctrine, and has been repeated in the 21st century through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the European Union in order to sustain a capitalist hegemony over most parts of the globe.

In Colonial Debts, Zambrana situates Puerto Rico’s current turmoil within the politics of debt. The island had accumulated $74 billion in bond debt and $123 billion in debt overall, with pensions included, which spurred Congress to create PROMESA, a law designed to restructure and reduce the level of debt so that Puerto Rico can eventually reenter the sphere of capital markets and resume borrowing in a supposedly more responsible fashion. On March 15, a debt restructuring plan approved by the PROMESA-mandated Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) officially kicked in, ostensibly bringing Puerto Rico “out of bankruptcy,” but the plan’s austerity measures are still provoking protests and discontent. “Debt is an exchange that has not been brought to completion,” Zambrana writes. “During the time that the debt remains unpaid, the logic of hierarchy ‘takes hold.’” In Puerto Rico’s case, this hierarchy is embodied by the FOMB, which has had the effect of eroding democracy on the island.

For Zambrana, the story of PROMESA is really the story of colonialism reinventing itself. The debt crisis in Puerto Rico is not a simple case of an incompetent government borrowing beyond its means; it is the result of the many years in which the island served as a profit machine for US corporate interests, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a tax shelter for businesses and, increasingly, individuals. Puerto Rico’s debt grew, Zambrana shows, because most of the profits generated there were siphoned off into US and offshore banks, not reinvested in the island, and because a series of laws allowed US interests to treat it as an American state when it was convenient and as a foreign country when it wasn’t. Unable to make autonomous trade arrangements with its neighbors, and subject to laws like the 1920 Jones Act, which made it overly dependent on US maritime commerce, Puerto Rico could never grow enough economically to create an adequate tax base and keep its government out of the red, even after it developed a manufacturing industry in the postwar years.

As an appendage of the US economy, Puerto Rico, which had enjoyed a period of prosperity in the 1950s and ’60s, ran into trouble with the economic convulsions of the 1970s, and it began to borrow in the form of bond issues in the millions of dollars just to pay for essential government services. The market for Puerto Rican bonds has grown rapidly since then as banking was deregulated and bond investment became more volatile in the 1980s, while in 1984, Puerto Rico’s status under Chapter 9 bankruptcy law was changed to that of a state, which had the effect of making it ineligible to declare bankruptcy.

As the island became increasingly shackled to its debt, Puerto Rican bonds became more and more attractive for speculators. Since 1917, with the passage of the Jones-Shafroth Act, the bonds have been triple tax-exempt, and as speculators jockeyed for position in the 1980s, they became a hot investment, especially for Wall Street underwriters and hedge and vulture funds, the latter always on the hunt for “distressed” economies from which to extract profits.

Zambrana tells this story of colonial manipulation and financial speculation, but she also does something else interesting: Fusing the theorist Aníbal Quijano’s idea of the “coloniality of power” with Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “afterlife,” she argues that Puerto Rico’s “decolonization,” ostensibly accomplished in 1950 with the creation of its “commonwealth” status, allowed its original colonization to have an afterlife in the form of this debt. It was more than just a way for Wall Street speculators to get rich, Zambrana notes; Puerto Rico’s debt was a means to reassert US dominance over the island “within and through the strictures of financialized neoliberal capitalism.”

hifting from the past to the present, Zambrana then turns to the Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato to examine how debt and debt crises not only exploit and discipline Puerto Rico but also transform its everyday life. In his books The Making of the Indebted Man and Governing by Debt, Lazzarato argued that a new debt model emerged in the 1970s and ’80s that reversed the midcentury Keynesian model of deficit spending. This model created not only new states but new subjects: Instead of going into debt itself, the state began to pass that financial burden on to individuals. Individual life became a “site of value creation and extraction,” imposing on the people not just the guilt of living on an indebted island but that of being personally indebted, too. In this way, debt became “at once material and ‘affective.’”

As Zambrana shows, Puerto Rico’s debt has had many devastating effects on the average Puerto Rican. The 11.5 percent sales tax—the highest of any US state or territory—is one of the strategies that enable Puerto Rico to circumvent the limits in its Constitution in order to sell bonds, but it also overburdens consumers. A mortgage crisis exacerbated by the island’s economic woes has pushed realtors to favor wealthy Americans who want to buy property in places like San Juan, squeezing out the local residents. The privatization of the island’s electrical authority, airports, and toll roads and the breakup of its telephone company have allowed entities that were once administered in the public interest to be run in pursuit of private profit.

Zambrana examines how personal debt crises have taken a particular toll on women and queer people in Puerto Rico. Using the work of the Argentine activists Verónica Gago and Luci Cavallero, who wrote about how debt often “does not allow us to say no when we want to say no” during their own country’s crises, she shows how women’s bodies are threatened and subjugated by economic burdens and the imposition of patriarchal morality. The rates of femicide and violence against women have skyrocketed during the debt crisis, and there is currently a mass mobilization of teachers, most of whom are women, in Puerto Rico protesting ridiculously low wages and diminished pensions, both of which are concessions to the debt adjustment plan.

The debt crisis has also undermined the limited democratic control that Puerto Ricans did have. The privatization of the electrical authority was carried out with little public input, and the contraction of the educational system, with its numerous school closures, as well as the deterioration of the University of Puerto Rico system, has been widely condemned. Despite proposed legislation in the US Congress about the resolution of the island’s territorial status, debt has made Puerto Ricans’ desire for either independence or statehood less achievable.

o how can Puerto Rico escape from the debt trap? Zambrana’s answer is simple: politics. Soon after Puerto Rico’s debt was declared unpayable by then-Governor Alejandro García Padilla in 2015, a movement that brought together various sectors, from university students to labor activists, emerged demanding a forensic debt audit in order to expose the unfair conditions imposed on the island. As I reported in The Nation at the time, a preliminary investigation by these groups showed that much of the debt was illegal—violations of constitutional limits, which had been subverted by Wall Street’s machinations in concert with Puerto Rico’s government bank. The FOMB commissioned a report in 2018, but it fell far short of revealing the depth of the irregular practices that created the island’s $74 billion debt. The debt commission, which had been initiated by García Padilla, was disbanded by his successor, Ricardo Rosselló, just months into his term.

While the protests calling for a forensic debt audit did not achieve their goal, Zambrana argues that protest is still the most effective way to liberate Puerto Rico and its residents from debt—pointing as an example to the protests that pushed Rosselló from office in the summer of 2019, which also called for the removal of the Financial Oversight and Management Board. In the meantime, Zambrana adds, Puerto Ricans can take matters into their own hands in a multitude of ways: by occupying public beaches; by establishing mutual aid organizations like the Apoyo Mutuo centers, which exist in several municipalities; and by demanding that the debt not be paid until it is forensically audited. Given the island’s current status of “belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States,” Zambrana writes, Puerto Rican activists can also lead the way in showing how all Americans can resist austerity. After all, what happens in the colony almost always has a way of returning to the metropole itself.

As I sat through a screening of West Side Story at a Lincoln Square movie theater—literally in the same neighborhood portrayed in the film—I couldn’t escape a growing realization. These days, we are trapped in a cycle of repetition, one in which the gnarled conflicts and perhaps small triumphs of the postwar era repeat themselves over and over again, sometimes with profound new expression and sometimes just as shiny objects of entertainment consumption. In Steven Spielberg’s new “reimagining” of West Side Story, we get a film that offers a far more inclusive vision of postwar America, but one that still retains its flawed view of working-class tribalism.

The original West Side Story was itself born out of the repetition of a repetition. Conceived by Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents in the 1950s, the musical was originally going to be a a tale of an ill-fated Catholic/Jewish romance based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But worried that this would repeat the story of Abie’s Irish Rose, and becoming interested in Los Angeles’s Mexican American gangs, the quartet had a change of heart: They would make the musical about New York City’s West Side gangs, specifically downwardly mobile whites and recently migrated Puerto Ricans. The story, for the most part, would remain the same: It would tell the tale of star-crossed lovers—Tony, a Polish-Irish boy, and Maria, a Puerto Rican girl—who meet a tragic end, but now the lovers would be caught up in a world of street violence.

The product—first a Broadway play, then a wildly successful film—was at once an all-time mainstream crowd-pleaser and a dismayingly sordid representation of Puerto Ricans. For New York Puerto Ricans, West Side Story stung particularly deep. For me, this sting was also close to home: I grew up on these streets with Puerto Rican migrant parents who shuddered at the mere mention of the film and wanted to shield me from its distorted portrayal of our presence here.

But watching the film, I always sensed an underlying tale being told. The structuring principle of West Side Story is the conflict between European ethnic groups recently assimilated after an earlier era of being othered but still unable to escape the creeping gentrification of the city planners, and a Latinx group that was arriving in great numbers as the only escape from a US program to restructure Puerto Rico’s economy. The 1961 film relayed a story of the binary oppositions that ran through American society: There is an “us” and a “them,” natives and aliens, those who have made it in and those have not, those who are “American” and those who are not. By doing so, it also solidified the notion in me and my peers that as racial others and colonized citizens, Puerto Ricans were a threat to American identity.

he new production tries to avoid many of the worst features of the original. Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner hired language and accent experts. They enlisted the involvement of City University of New York professor Virginia Sánchez Korroll and the archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies to get detailed insight into the lives of New York Puerto Ricans in the 1950s and ’60s. The pair even went to the island territory itself to speak with and gather insights from its residents, even though many of them had little to do with the migrants of the postwar period.

The results of this effort are for the most part welcome and satisfying, giving new life to a narrative that once felt awkward and superficial. Gone are the clumsy accents of Natalie Wood’s Maria and most of the rest of the Sharks, who were mainly played by non-Latinx actors. Even more gratifying is the extensive use of untranslated dialogue, perhaps intended to allow the characters to speak more fully for themselves without an English filter and to defy the constant demands from the Jets and the police to speak English. For the first time I was able to hear, in a Hollywood movie, one of my favorite disparaging epithets—zángano—as well as La Jara, a code word for New York’s then mostly Irish police force (many with the surname O’Hara), immortalized by the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe in concert with the Fania All Stars.

Yet some of the amendments, although well-intentioned, seem off. Having the Sharks sing the patriotic hymn “La Borinqueña” before their first battle with the Jets didn’t ring true; likewise for the constant display of Puerto Rican flags hanging from windows and fire escapes, something that became more common in the late ’60s/early ’70s era of the Young Lords. More importantly, the true colonial nature of the US relationship with Puerto Rico, which was a direct cause of the migration in the first place, is not at all acknowledged. Kushner’s earnest attempt at authenticity and inclusion doesn’t entirely (or even adequately) address the deeper colonial wound.

The character of Anita, played by Rita Moreno in the 1961 version, is reconceived here as an Afro-Latina played by Ariana DeBose, who was in the stage version of Hamilton, as an effort to address the unseemliness of having the light-skinned Moreno wear dark makeup in the original. The new Anita even calls out light-skinned Latinx racism directly in Spanish when she admonishes her boyfriend, the Sharks’ leader Bernardo, for implying that she is not a member of the family because she is Black.

Still, the presence of Afro-Latinos in the rest of the cast is muted, and neither version of West Side Story makes reference to the fact that San Juan Hill, the neighborhood that was condemned for slum clearance to make possible the construction of Lincoln Center, was one of New York’s most significant African American neighborhoods, home to Thelonious Monk. The erasure of African Americans in the new film echoes the failings of both Hamilton and In the Heights, musicals that ignore the founding role of African Americans in the United States in favor of a drama about assimilation, which was denied to African Americans almost by definition. The narrative of how natives define who is American and who is not is also a feature of classic American films like Gangs of New York and Saturday Night Fever.

ooking more closely at the different immigration experiences of the families of the play’s creators and its subjects is another way to understand some of the missteps of the original West Side Story. In the original version of the signature song “America,” Anita asserts that she would be happy to see Puerto Rico sink into the ocean—an attitude that better fits a Jewish immigrant fleeing persecution and racism in Europe than a Puerto Rican who had reluctantly fled their island home as a result of a colonized, underdeveloped economy.

The new version corrects much of this, and it offers a more complex reading of the Jets as well: Once a rowdy group of miscreants trying to assert their own gang’s dominance, they are now drawn as the prototypes for white nationalists, often vocalizing a “they will replace us” trope. They are also presented as the losers of the New Deal, defined largely by social pathologies that make them the predecessors of a certain strand of downtown punks. The original version’s tomboy, Anybodys, is reinvented here as an assertive nonbinary character. As the victims, along with the Puerto Rican migrants, of the collapse of New York City as an industrial manufacturing center, they are faced with annihilation.

This reimagined version of West Side Story certainly brims with technical brilliance, from the blue and gray hues bathing the Jets as they perform the quirky “Cool” on West Side docks to the dreamlike Gimbels set populated by Maria and her coworkers for the repurposed “I Feel Pretty,” to the claustrophobic salt shed fight scene, eerily reminiscent of Kara Walker’s 2014 installation at the old Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. The cast, particularly Ansel Elgort as Tony, Rachel Zegler as Maria, and DeBose as Anita, are winning, and the songs still pack some potency despite their familiarity. The recasting of Moreno as the widow of the original Doc, the candy store owner who gives the final moralizing speech in the 1961 film, is the screenplay’s intended masterstroke: Her “Somewhere” redux, delivered after we have to sit through yet another sexual assault against Anita, is about the limits of this reimagining. Now, all she can offer is a plea to “find a way of forgiving”—despite the contention of Chino, the zángano who avenges Bernardo’s death, that “sooner or later gringos kill everything”—while Anita concludes that she is not an American but a Puerto Rican.

The overwhelming power of forgiveness and love are frequently proffered in the new West Side Story as a solution for tribal conflict, but in the end, despite all of the film’s gestures toward inclusion and liberal reconciliation, we also realize they might not be enough: For Maria, while still not losing her cool, finally understands the hate as something that is not going away—a fitting, if bleak, end for a film made in the Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene era. Hollywood may seek to offer a more inclusive vision, but ultimately West Side Story leaves us with a vision of perpetual conflict, not reconciliation.

Throughout his fiction and nonfiction, Francisco Goldman has mapped the many border lines that pervade his life. Some of his novels have mined his Central American family connections. His journalistic work has uncovered the genocidal policies of the US government and its Guatemalan government collaborators. Sometimes he has adopted the detached demeanor of a forensic investigator looking into horrible crimes.

Other times he has reveled in arch wittiness or an achingly sad prose filled with regret about personal loss, the kind that every human feels. His portrayal of his mixed identity, however, is not mired in lament about his tragic, internally warring selves, but rather is defined by a celebration of the fully realized intersections that make up an individual. Guatemalan, Jewish, American, Latinx, widower, father, novelist, journalist, Northeasterner, Mexico City denizen—Goldman embraces them all.

With his latest novel, Monkey Boy, he returns to these many identities in an uncanny work of autofiction in which Goldman becomes Francisco Goldberg, a Jewish Guatemalan American novelist and journalist born in the Boston area and living in Brooklyn. Like most creatures of autofiction, Goldberg is not Goldman exactly, but he does allow Goldman to confront the trauma and pain that haunted the past of both of his parents as well as his own childhood. Like Goldman, Goldberg grew up in a Boston suburb, an “idyllic-seeming town off Route 128,” and is the product of a Jewish father who fled Ukraine because of its violent anti-Semitism and a Guatemalan Catholic mother forced into exile, as a result of US intervention and the country’s own pogroms. Monkey Boy is a way to confront, work through, and even embrace these dark and unhappy legacies, to find meaning and joy in them.

Monkey Boy has larger ambitions as well. It seeks not only to tell us a story set in “America”; it asks us whether there ever was such a place. Breaking Goldberg’s identity into its constituent parts—English- and Spanish-speaking, of Latinx and Jewish ancestry, residing in large cosmopolitan cities and in the suburbs of New England—Goldman’s narrative suggests that America has never been one thing or another, but rather a constantly shifting constellation of socially constructed affiliations, stitched together in memory and experience. Goldman has used the strategy of autofiction in the past, most notably in his novel Say Her Name. But in Monkey Boy, Frankie Goldberg is more than Goldman’s alter ego; he is a stand-in for a growing number of Americans who identify as multiracial.

Goldman came of age before there was much language to describe such a state, and, through Goldberg, he is determined to read this multiracial identity back into a childhood where he was not even sure if the fact that his classmates called him “Monkey Boy” was racist or something else. Like his Spanglish-purveying contemporaries Sandra Cisneros and Junot Díaz, Goldman ably maneuvers a skill set of bilingual expression, code-switching between English and Spanish, not to resolve the tensions found in his identity so much as to make the reader feel comfortable with navigating its contradictions. After all these years, Goldman seems to believe that his life, like many of ours, is a riddle, and that, he insists, is OK.

onkey Boy takes place over five days and follows Francisco Goldberg’s return to the Boston area, where he catches up with an old girlfriend, an old family employee, and his estranged sister, while visiting his mother in a nursing home. His jokey musings give way to elegiac descriptions of his childhood in New England, dotted with references to the faceless towns off Route 128 and the grimy underpinnings of gentrified Boston, from Back Bay to South End.

Goldberg is an extremely fluid, knowing narrator. His grasp of Boston and of New York City, particularly the Upper West Side and Brooklyn, is that of an insider. Yet the cool, calm, collected way he moves through and describes these cosmopolitan and urban spaces only makes his revelations about his father’s cruelty all the more unnerving. As Goldberg slips backward and forward through the path of his life, as he moves from Boston and New York to Guatemala and Mexico, he also offers us a tale of his father’s violence toward him and his mother.

In one particularly disturbing passage, Goldberg describes being detained by police from a neighboring town after he and his friends crash a party. When his father comes to pick him up, rather than defending his son, he assaults him inside the police station. “I’d never felt such shame, such a helpless rage of my own, had never experienced anything so sordid as being on that police station floor being beaten up by my father,” Goldberg recalls with a kind of anguished nausea.

Goldberg’s narrative allows you to believe that this violence, alluded to several times, is at the root of his inability to reconcile his many identities. Apparently stemming from his father’s frustration with his mediocre career as a designer of false teeth, it also has deeper roots: The violence and terror his father experienced as a Jew in Ukraine during the pogroms in the early 20th century followed him to the United States, and he became the perpetrator of it at home.

But Goldberg’s father is not the only one who fled trauma and political upheaval. Goldberg’s mother, whose family had a toy store business in Guatemala City, was forced to stay in Boston after the CIA’s overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz set off turmoil in 1954. Once in the United States, his mother doesn’t reveal much about the darkness in Guatemala or her family’s ambivalent position as small property owners. But Goldberg embarked on a project of investigative journalism on the strength of his early fiction writing, moving to Guatemala and writing about what was happening there through the “eyes of [his] primas and their friends.” Later, he finds himself reversing the path of his mother’s migration, staying in Guatemala while writing investigative articles on the country’s civil war in the 1980s.

In these examinations of Guatemala’s past and present, Goldberg also explores a secret his mother and family had long hidden: the identity of a Black ancestor, his great-grandmother. It’s a different kind of violence, one often denied by Latin Americans in many countries, who have been socialized to believe that their mixed-race societies no longer need to confront issues of race and, in particular, the ways in which some families have sought to hide their own Black heritage. Goldberg recounts his mother “giggling” at his suggestion that her grandmother was Black; she responds by saying, “Ay Frankie, that’s not true.” With Monkey Boy, Goldman at once explains how trauma is passed on through his parents’ experience of mid-20th-century America and—particularly through his passionate rejection of its “American Dream” and the violence of American-backed dictatorship—offers an unsparing critique.

he end result of Goldman’s autofictional journey is a study of both the violence inflicted on his parents’ families and his own efforts to better understand this difficult past, which leads Goldberg to reject the American assimilation that his parents groomed him to embrace. Forgetting where one came from—once the model for the children of immigrants—was a strategy his parents used to escape the pain of their pasts. But for Goldberg, remembering is a way not only to honor his many identities but also to confront the United States’ foreign policy during the Reagan era and beyond.

To connect with his “difference,” Goldberg dedicates much of his energy to researching the genocidal anticommunist and anti-Indigenous campaigns of the 1980s in Guatemala. After several years away from journalism, Goldberg becomes absorbed in an investigation of the assassination of a human rights activist bishop by the Guatemalan government in 1998, mirroring the one in the recent HBO documentary The Art of Political Murder, based on Goldman’s reporting. The bishop story haunts Goldberg, and it follows him back in Boston too: Goldberg meets up with a friend of his family, María Xum, who works in a laundromat in East Boston, and finds himself disheartened as María tells him that a woman she knew was threatened by the henchmen of then-General Otto Pérez Molina, whom Goldberg refers to as “Cara de Culo” (“Assface”) and who is suspected of being responsible for the bishop’s murder. “;Now Cara de Culo sends his emissaries all the way up here to wait in a parking lot outside a supermarket in order to threaten to turn poor Zoila and her relatives into invisible murder clouds; they come with visas, welcome, enjoy your stay.”

Goldberg’s investigation into Guatemala’s history also leads him to realize that his mother had long been living a double life, even in the United States: “My mother, like so many other immigrants, has lived her life between two cultures and countries.” Even “after enough years had passed, she may have felt that she didn’t quite fit in either, never in the United States, no longer Guatemala.”

Despite his mother’s efforts to help ease his path into an America working on an outmoded “melting pot” idea, Goldberg finds comfort in not belonging: “One of the strangest things I’ve done with my own life has been to follow her path, in a sense willfully divesting in order to pour myself into the mold of the divided, not quite belonging anywhere.”

Goldberg finds himself caught in a state of neither-here-nor-there transnationalism, an experience familiar to many recent Latin American immigrants and migrants, who can no longer expect the US to fulfill its postwar promise of a steady, unionized job and are confronted instead by the neoliberal ethos of gig-economy entrepreneurialism, exploitation, and constant migration.

ven if Goldberg’s ambivalence about his American identity is a central theme in the first two-thirds of the novel, it’s not until more than 250 pages into Monkey Boy that Goldberg directly engages with his sense of liminality, taking inventory of his many dualities: his Jewishness and Catholicism, his American and Guatemalan identities, the “whiteness” of his Jewish Ukrainian father and the “mestizoness” of his Latinx mother.

Goldberg recalls how in Brooklyn he was perceived as Puerto Rican and in Britain as a Pakistani, and how in Havana, Spanish tourists mistook him for a Muslim. Shifting from one marginalized identity to another—and none exactly his—Goldberg comes to identify with all of his identities at once and none in particular.

Goldberg’s most “genuinely religious” experience, he tells us, comes in a syncretic “widows’ Mass” in a Mayan town in the Central Highlands of Guatemala, where “hundreds of widows of men murdered in war” gathered secretly, with the Mayan priest performing the Catholic ceremony in his native K’iche’. Like the half-Catholic, half-Jewish writer Natalia Ginzburg, who claims to be “fully one, fully the other at the same time,” Goldberg declares himself to be “three-quarters Jewish and three-quarters Catholic,” keeping “a quarter secret only for myself.”

Goldberg’s rejection of his own binaries is refreshing. In American identity discourse, the use of “halfness” has so often been framed as a tragic dilemma of being divided into two. “Just as Jesus Christ was both fully a man and fully God, rather than the Son of God dressed up as a young Jew or anything like that,” he muses. “E pluribus unum implies a mestizo unity, neither a melting together nor an Ann Hunt library of white and a pushed-off-to-the-side infinity of separately shelved selves.” As much as white supremacy tries to reassert itself by insisting that we must be one thing or another, Goldberg insists that we can take control of defining our racialized selves and maybe come a little closer to the truth.

Yet even as Goldberg insists that he can find such liberation, he cannot entirely escape the past: The horror of Europe’s anti-Semitism and a genocidal military dictatorship cannot be fully erased, and they are also coupled with Goldberg’s own memories of his parents, who were unable to fully come to terms with these pasts. Goldberg is deeply moved by Proust’s claim that the second half of a man’s life could be the reverse of the first, and his rewriting of America’s immigrant narrative, as well as its racial one, serves that purpose. But by the end of the novel, we begin to realize that it is the parts of his life that he can’t control, and that he can only remember, that are the true zones of in-betweenness—zones of pain and regret but ultimately also of creativity. In his efforts to create an archive of the past where all the voices in his life speak at once, he finds not only the violence of his parents’ Ukraine and Guatemala, but also art. Here his various identities—Jewish, Catholic, Guatemalan, Ukrainian, and American—all can share a border.

Over the past 20 years, Raoul Peck has emerged as one of his generation’s leading filmmakers and intellectuals. Beginning with Lumumba and Sometimes in April, his unflinching examinations of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Peck has shown us the horrors of late-stage decolonization and postcolonialism. With his last two feature films, I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin, and The Young Karl Marx, he produced startlingly original and moving portraits of two of his main muses, setting the stage for his latest work, an epic four-part docuseries for HBO, Exterminate All the Brutes.1

For Peck, each of his films is as much a vehicle for political argument and posing philosophical questions as it is a way to offer alternative historical narratives. Even as he attempts to reinvent the documentary genre through innovative storytelling, employing a kind of dreamlike melancholy akin to jazz improvisation, as he did in Negro, he is a formalist committed to inventing new cinematographic modes. Although he built his career by assuming the role of journalistic or directorial objectivity and prefers to show rather than tell, he’s unafraid to step out from behind the camera and challenge the underpinnings of those Western myths that shaped his education and continue to define so much of contemporary political life.2

With Exterminate All the Brutes, a hybrid documentary that combines rare archival footage, stunning still photography, first-person narration, and scripted, harrowing set-pieces, Peck embraces formalistic play and experiment in a way he hasn’t in the past, successfully merging feature-film-style vignettes with documentarian flourishes of text, image, and collage. The series’ four hour-long episodes—“The Disturbing Confidence of Ignorance”; “Who the F*** Is Columbus?”; “Killing at a Distance or… How I Thoroughly Enjoyed the Outing”; and “The Bright Colors of Fascism”—do not so much focus on themes as use them as jumping-off points that allow Peck and his characters to riff on the jagged edges of colonialism, slavery, the mass displacement and destruction of Native Americans, and the normalization of genocide. While this might seem an impossibly broad task, Peck makes his nonlinear lament work, the coherent force residing in its investigation of memory and a precise distillation of visual and aural affect.3

y turns deeply disturbing, engagingly personal, and darkly amusing, Exterminate All the Brutes is a sweeping journey across time and continents. The series takes its title from a book by Sven Lindqvist, who used the famous line—scrawled at the bottom of a report to an ivory trading company by an increasingly deranged Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—to launch his own ruminations on the colonial mindset. In his preface, Lindqvist tells his readers that these words were intended by Conrad to describe what was really behind the “civilizing task of the white man in Africa”—that is, identifying “inferior races” for destruction. For Lindqvist, this horror show of genocidal violence was carried out on four continents before coming home to roost with “Hitler’s destruction of six million Jews in Europe.” Peck’s project embraces the grand scope of this past, but he also keeps his viewers focused on its legacy today.4

Peck establishes this line of inquiry early in the first episode, when he directs the viewer’s attention to three themes that he will return to again and again: civilization, colonization, and extermination. These are central parts, he argues, of the world’s Westernization. The essence of colonialism is a belief in a civilizing project that celebrates the beneficence of a superior race in its subjugation of inferiors, which often entails mass murder and displacement. For this reason, Conrad—before introducing Kurtz’s unambiguous call for extermination—has Marlow recall the text of report that Kurtz was writing: “We whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on.”5

For the typical HBO viewer, Peck’s frankness about violence and colonialism might be difficult to comprehend, though the increasing recognition of the structural nature of racism gives it a kind of inevitable logic. Peck offers us three authors as his guides: Lindqvist, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. In Lindqvist, a longtime friend and collaborator and the rare “European who dares see the beast for what it is,” Peck finds a world traveler doggedly uncovering the excesses of genocidal violence. In Dunbar-Ortiz, the author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, he finds a scholar of Native American history who has focused much of her work—especially Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment—on the use of guns and slave patrols to displace and discipline Native and African Americans.6

As a fellow Haitian, Peck finds in Trouillot’s classic work of historiography, Silencing the Past, a reflection of his own frustration with Haiti’s marginalization and the more general silencing of those who resisted their extermination. A book that seeks to reveal how historians often erased the Haitian Revolution, “the only revolution that materialized the idea of enlightenment, freedom, fraternity and equality for all,” Silencing the Past also gives Peck a rallying catchphrase: “History is the fruit of power; whoever wins in the end gets to frame the story.” Peck embraces Trouillot’s assertion that erasing the Haitian Revolution was essential to the modern Western historical narrative, even if many historians denied that fact. The revolution “created the possible,” Peck notes, by playing an important role in the collapse of the system of slavery. “It was the ultimate test of the universalist pretensions of both the French and American revolutions.”7

xterminate All the Brutes begins by exploring the mindless brutality of the colonial project. We are introduced to a leader of the Seminole Nation (played by Caisa Ankarsparre) and Gen. Sidney Jessup, one of Andrew Jackson’s henchmen (played by Josh Hartnett), and follow them as the Seminole leader seeks to hold on to territory she shares with Maroons. When Jessup stops her in the middle of a field, she confronts him bluntly: “You call human beings property? You steal land, you steal life, you steal humans? What kind of species are you?” Jessup replies, “This kind,” and then pulls out a gun and shoots her.8

The camera pulls away from her in silence, and Peck later explains why: “Our job as filmmakers is to deconstruct these silences.” At the end of the second episode, he embellishes a graphic rendering of Choctaw people dying in snowdrifts with a quote from Tocqueville, who witnessed the Trail of Tears: “No crying. All were silent.” A cringe-worthy sequence focusing on a photo shoot of the journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley and his enslaved adopted child Kalulu uses silence to reveal a kind of terror. In fact, the continuing silence of those who have benefited from colonialism in the face of such violence and exploitation is the series’ most chilling silence of all.9

Peck himself, however, is noticeably not silent. Early on, he acknowledges the necessity of putting himself into the story, his gravelly citizen-of-the-world voiceover replacing Samuel Jackson’s sonorous gravity in I Am Not Your Negro. Using home-movie footage of his family’s trip to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, Peck begins to tell us his own story. “It’s not about you, unless the story is bigger than you,” he intones, adding, “Neutrality is not an option.”10

s the series develops, we come to realize how far from neutrality Exterminate All the Brutes is—and with good reason, given its subject. The show is a relentless attack on racism, genocide, colonialism, and the extractive nature of imperialist and post-imperialist forms of capitalism. It tells the story in longue durée to remind us of the immensity and depravity of this history, from the dawn of African slavery to the marketing of displaced Native Americans’ land to the rubber plantations of the Belgian Congo that helped sate the growing European thirst for bicycling. It’s about what Walter Mignolo called “the darker side of Western modernity.” Like I Am Not Your Negro, the style is fluid, nonlinear, fond of using Barbara Kruger/Jenny Holzer–inspired text slogans, at times zanily posted, as on an egregiously racist clip from the Hollywood staging of On the Town, or paired with Anita Ward’s post-disco classic “Ring My Bell.”11

In some ways, Peck’s style resonates with Adam Curtis’s story-driven hybrid docs, in which he uses BBC-footage collages and flashing title cards layered with an ironic musical soundtrack to frame big ideas and dark truths about empire. Curtis’s latest, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, tries to explain the current apocalyptic overhang by juxtaposing historical figures like Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, New York Black Panther Afeni Shakur, Soviet dissident Eduard Limonov, and conspiracy theorist Kerry Thornley. Curtis incorporates more Black characters than usual, and the ending of episode two concludes with a fiery Stokely Carmichael speech punctuated by the Mekons’ “Where Were You?” But Peck’s style embodies a Black historical materialism—one that charts the passage of time through the lens of Baldwin and Marx rather than Freud. Like Curtis, he knows the Western world prefers a fantasy to reality, but he is also interested in how this fantasy is realized in hyperreality. “I know this story is painful, but we need to know it,” he says with sober recognition at the end of episode one, after flashing clips from Apocalypse Now and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and he isn’t kidding.12

Exterminate All the Brutes is not an easy series to watch: Much of what we see is disturbing, from a montage of photographs listing various genocides to the uncomfortable staging of Hartnett as an enforcer on a Congo rubber plantation cutting off a rebellious worker’s hands, to the more psychological revelations of the way this sort of violence is embedded in quotidian culture. In one sequence, Peck moves from home movies of Adolf Hitler kicking it in the countryside with Eva Braun to an explanation of how settler colonialism “requires violence and the elimination of natives,” before reaching a climax of sorts with a quote from William Carlos Williams: “The land, don’t you feel it? Doesn’t it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves to steal from them some authenticity as it must be clinging even to their corpses?”13

When Peck comes across a reference—“kill the brutes”—to Kurtz’s dictum in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, he lingers on the idea that Wells’s protagonist found a kind of titillating terror in smashing and killing the subhuman Morlocks. Moving on to Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, he muses about the scientist “civilizing the animals with torture.” “The nightmare is buried deep within our consciousness,” Peck adds. “It says who you are and what you have become.”14

As we come to the series’ end, Exterminate All the Brutes forces us to consider how American mythology accepts the westward expansion as a tragicomic struggle between cowboys and Indians, when in reality it was soaked through with bloody carnage. It suggests that behind the manufacture and distribution of benign household products lies the figurative or literal dismemberment of slave labor. Peck argues that buried in the Western mindset is the notion that the burden of privilege and of imposing civilization requires the frequent spilling of blood.15

he hybrid aspect of Exterminate All the Brutes works well, for the most part, from a scene set in the Congo in 1895, where Hartnett is bathed by an expressionless Black female slave as Ella Fitzgerald croons “The Man I Love” in the background, to a scene in London where people of color dressed in 21st-century fashions walk out of an 1866 lecture on racial categorization by the Darwinist philologist Frederick Farrar, to a scene in which a Black priest watches while young white slaves are whipped. The vignettes serve as a way of increasing the viewer’s uneasiness, as a rote recounting of atrocities gives way to a gnawing uncertainty about how they might be depicted in one of Peck’s fictional set-pieces.16

The richly textured layers of the series also reflect the auteur himself, whose detached analytical narrative slips at times into a personal, confessional style, and whose earlier films were already a cross between genres. In the third episode, he wrestles with a Du Boisian “double consciousness,” even a triple or quadruple one—as a Brooklyn Black man taught never to go on the wrong side of the tracks; a “good soldier, a perfectly well-educated student of Western humanistic civilization”; a Haitian who has traveled extensively in Africa; and a precocious student who learned about Marx while studying film in Berlin, where he lived for 15 years. Peck is aware of his relative privilege, but he also remains wedded to an internationalism that allows him to see the tentacles of slavery, colonialism, and domination in the Americas, Europe, and Africa rather than a project confined to just one area of the world.17

Among the many themes developed here, Peck is particularly effective in weaving a narrative thread between the construction of race and racism and the current state of endless worldwide war. He begins with the “originators of the project,” the late medieval Spanish, and their classification of Black and Indigenous people as “other.” He visually quotes Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe’s film Dispute in Valladolid, about the 16th-century de las Casas–Sepulveda debate that found Indigenous people worthy of religious conversion, shifting enslavement practices toward Africans.18

Later, Peck offers a reading of how “the West” distinguished itself from “the rest” through the development of weapons: first cannons, then automatic rifles that “killed long before the weapons of their opponents could reach them.” In another extended passage, he explores the genealogy of the US arms industry, beginning with America’s first corporation, the Arsenal of Springfield, founded at the Springfield (Mass.) Armory in 1777, where the assembly line and interchangeable parts became the essence of America’s industrial revolution. The military-industrial complex, a term coined by Eisenhower almost two centuries later, is nicely illustrated by a montage of revolving-door figures like Norman Augustine of Lockheed, John C. Rood of Raytheon, and former vice president Dick Cheney, among others.19

Peck also follows the story of how, in the 19th century, scientific racism became the law of the Western land. After Darwin’s theory of evolution proved useful to race scientists like Herbert Spencer and Georges Cuvier, “genocide became the inevitable by-product of progress,” Peck argues. The idea of “killing at a distance” emerged out of the easy Dutch and British victories against the Spanish Armada; continued in the late 19th century with Winston Churchill reporting for the Morning Post on the lack of excitement in the British subjugation of Sudan in the bloody Battle of Omdurman in 1898; and had its climactic moment, of course, with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which Peck punctuates with Elmore James’s plaintive guitar riffing on “The Sky Is Crying.” “The only language they seem to understand is the one we use when we bomb them,” President Truman’s recorded voice says over the music.20

For Peck, the horrifying mass slaughter at the end of World War II comes out of the horrifying evolution of weapons and imperial tactics that allowed the West to dominate in the first place. Now we are back at the beginning—at Lindqvist’s insistence that the Nazis’ atrocities against Europe’s Jews, Romani, Slavs, and homosexuals stemmed from the centuries of genocide and racialized violence in the Americas and Africa that preceded them, and that they represent, as Aimé Césaire observed in Discourse on Colonialism, how fascism was colonialism turned inward on Europe.21

What comes next? Exterminate All the Brutes does not say, other than that “the past has a future we never expect.” The key, for Peck, is that we must refuse to forget what happened. We cannot let that past fade from our memories in the future, either. As Baldwin said to Dick Cavett on a late-night talk show excerpted in I Am Not Your Negro, “All your buried corpses now begin to speak.” I think of George Floyd and the other Black Americans killed by the police over the past year, and how throughout this film, Peck also allows us a way of hearing them speak, too—and how this speech may help us construct a better future.22

On July 26, Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo, the head of UTIÉR (Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego), Puerto Rico’s electrical and irrigation workers’ union, tweeted from one of the island’s power generation stations. From Costa Sur Unit 5, near the southern coast, he posted a video of an open porthole that allowed people to peer into a massive boiler made of decaying metal and see streaking blue and orange flames, the stuff of electric power generation.1

“This is the plant that failed on January 7th, 2020,” he wrote—referring to the day a 6.4 earthquake hit southwestern Puerto Rico—“the one José Ortiz said would take a year to repair.” Ever since the quake, Ortiz, then the CEO of the government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), had been saying the agency did not have the capacity to get the damaged plant back up and running until then. (Ortiz stepped down from PREPA in August.) According to Ruth Santiago, a lawyer who works with renewable energy advocacy groups, Ortiz had been looking into leasing temporary electricity generation from a private company to the tune of $70 million per month. Along with UTIER, the groups that Santiago works with support Queremos Sol, a civil society proposal for a clean energy transition. By posting this video of the generator, back online less than seven months after the earthquake and at half the cost of the proposed private contract, Figueroa Jaramillo was sending a shot across the bow of privatizers like Ortiz, saying, Give us the time and the resources to repair and improve Puerto Rico’s failing infrastructure and stop with the unnecessary contracts that are draining the island of desperately needed resources.2

Hoy 26 julio de 2020 a las 3:25 pm prendió la caldera de la Unidad 5 de Costa Sur. La que se averio el 7 enero 2020 y que José Ortiz indicó que tardaba un año en reparar. Por la lucha de funcionarios públicos de labAEE y la discusión pública evitamos contratos innecesarios. pic.twitter.com/UYzYlKsDjp3

— Angel Figueroa Jaramillo (@jaramilloutier) July 26, 20204

5

Figueroa Jaramillo’s message—keep public goods public and give Puerto Rico a fair chance to right its economy without punishing austerity—is a popular one on the island, but it hasn’t received the same coverage as the endless parade of government scandals and this year’s fraught gubernatorial contest. Since 2016, when, in response to the island’s spiraling debt, the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) was signed into law, many of its major decisions have been in the hands of the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), which many call simply “the Junta.” The FOMB is tasked with restructuring the territory’s $72 billion debt; its main tool, a brutal austerity regime. Hundreds of schools have closed, government workers’ pensions are threatened with cuts, municipalities are being defunded, and PREPA is slated to be fully privatized as part of the solution to its $9 billion debt.6

The fate of PREPA, then, is deeply bound up in the fate of Puerto Rico. The territory is in an exceedingly fragile state after a succession of political and natural disasters in recent years: devastating hurricanes in 2017; a political scandal that led to massive street protests and the resignation of the governor, Ricardo Rosselló, and several of his colleagues last year; and the massive earthquake and a series of aftershocks this January that knocked out the Costa Sur power plant and caused widespread damage. Figueroa Jaramillo’s confrontational stance against the CEO of PREPA is therefore at the center of a conflict that reveals the ways multinational corporations, aided by the federal government, are using the precarious situation to extract profit through privatization. This privatization scheme, urged on by the unelected FOMB, is speeding up a dangerous deterioration of democracy on the island at a time when it can little stand yet another crisis.7

“I see the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board as kind of like the epitome of the neoliberal dream to have a nonelected government body with full authority to protect corporate interests and markets, unaffected by people’s preferences, opinions, and needs,” said Ingrid Vila, the head of Cambio, an organization that promotes sustainable energy in Puerto Rico, in an interview with The Nation.8

Figueroa Jaramillo and UTIER, along with other supporters of Queremos Sol, want to bring Puerto Rico and its fossil-fuel-dependent energy infrastructure into the future, but they are up against powerful forces promoting the use of natural gas. The PREPA privatization is a case in point—a push to turn the public utility into a profit-making company for a few outside interests while providing no tangible benefit for the island’s inhabitants. Under the cover of the PROMESA debt restructuring, the government has welcomed an army of high-priced consultants, tax-evading billionaires, and real estate speculators, even as the austerity measures imposed by the oversight board are resulting in a drastic decline in the quality of life for most Puerto Ricans.9

So who gains from PROMESA? The major beneficiaries of the FOMB’s debt restructuring, privatization, and austerity-imposing directives are investment companies like Golden Tree Asset Management, Taconic Capital Advisors, Monarch Alternative Capital, their arrays of lawyers and lobbyists (perhaps most notably Proskauer Rose, one of the board’s principal law firms), and the management consultancy McKinsey & Company.10

Real estate firms that have been involved in speculation on the island for years, like Caribbean Property Group and Paulson & Co. (owned by 2008 housing crash profiteer John Paulson, with major holdings in hotel and luxury properties), also benefit from PROMESA’s push for outside investment. Local politicians and bureaucrats take advantage of the law’s mandate to shrink the government and defund municipalities. And the effort to privatize PREPA will put money in the pockets of liquefied natural gas (LNG) providers such as billionaire investor Wes Edens’s New Fortress Energy.11

n some senses, this is just more of the same for Puerto Rico. The unincorporated territory, despite becoming a commonwealth in 1952 with at least nominal control over local affairs, has been deprived of the full rights and protections of the US Constitution since Spain ceded it to the United States in the 1898 Treaty of Paris. Because Puerto Rico is not a state, its more than 3 million residents have never had voting representation in Congress and cannot vote for president. But in other ways, the austerity regime that PROMESA has ushered into being is new: The seven voting members of its oversight and management board, chosen by the US president and both houses of Congress, are largely unaccountable to the island’s residents. The board has leeway to make sweeping changes to major aspects of Puerto Rico’s economy, all with the goal of restructuring the island’s debt and ensuring that payments can be fulfilled—not with improving the lives of its inhabitants.12

The privatization of PREPA is a major piece of settling that debt. It is one of many government entities that are in the red. Last summer then-Governor Rosselló and many in his administration became embroiled in the so-called Telegramgate scandal, which arose from leaked messages that he and key allies—including his representative on the PROMESA board, his chief of staff, and his secretaries of state and the treasury—exchanged on the chat app Telegram. The chat logs were rife with homophobic remarks and misogynistic slurs and revealed a flippant attitude about the deaths caused by Hurricane Maria, leading to mass protests that ultimately prompted Rosselló’s resignation. But his ouster didn’t come soon enough for PREPA. A year earlier, he signed a bill that would privatize the utility by creating public-private partnerships for power transmission, distribution, and services, including billing and meter reading.13

On June 22 of this year, Puerto Rico’s Public-Private Partnerships Authority announced that LUMA, a consortium between Houston-based Quanta Services and Canadian-based ATCO, two firms previously involved in the Keystone XL pipeline, would operate PREPA’s distribution and transmission systems. The contract also includes the retention of North Carolina–based Innovative Emergency Management, a company involved in the responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, apparently to manage the massive input of Federal Emergency Management Agency funds—as much as $18 billion—for repairing and renewing the authority’s systems.14

The LUMA consortium was chosen over three other bidders (Duke Energy, Exelon, and PSEG Services) that were announced in January 2019 by the Puerto Rican government. After the cancellation of the disastrous Whitefish contract—the tiny Montana company was awarded $300 million to repair the island’s electrical infrastructure after Hurricane Maria, a task it was apparently unequipped to carry out—and a recent revelation that fossil fuel companies have for years been charging PREPA exorbitant fees for low-quality oil, the opaque process by which LUMA won the contract has done little to improve public faith in the future of the utility.15

The awarding of the LUMA contract has drawn a sustained outcry, not least because of the veil of secrecy that obscured the full scope of the arrangement from public view. “There has been no stakeholder engagement and no public participation, to the point that the documents related to this transaction have not been available until after the transaction was concluded,” said Cambio’s Vila. In an interview with The Nation, Figueroa Jaramillo said that he became aware of LUMA’s selection only on June 12, when a local reporter asked for his reaction, and that the Puerto Rico Energy Board, an independent regulatory body, had knowledge of the agreement as early as May 18 and “had not informed the public.”16

The secrecy around the contract is perhaps understandable considering what UTIER lawyer Rolando Emmanuelli Jiménez characterized as its “extremely one-sided” nature, adding that its intent is to deconstruct PREPA and permanently eliminate the public-owned utility. Renewable energy advocates call it a sweetheart deal for ATCO and Quanta, because it requires no initial investment and requires PREPA to pay $125 million a year to the consortium—far more than a properly funded PREPA, utilizing a full complement of local workers, would cost to operate. Emmanuelli Jiménez sees the LUMA agreement as nothing more than a windfall for high-salaried executives. “Six of them will earn more than $400,000 per year, two more than $600,000, and in PREPA now, the biggest wage earner is José Ortiz at $250,000. So you can see the level of wealth they’re looking for in this transaction,” he noted.17

“PREPA will be paying the $125 million [to LUMA], so if you have a bankrupt utility that now has a deficit, how do you cover that?” asked Santiago, the lawyer supporting Queremos Sol. “Either the Puerto Rico government has to pay for it, which will mean tax increases or taking away money from another public service, or you increase rates, which is the more likely thing.” Citing a report by London Economics International based on figures from the existing restructuring support agreement of the PREPA debt plan, Santiago estimated that rates for consumers would increase to as much as 27.8 or 30 cents per kilowatt hour, “even with the investment of federal funds”—which would give Puerto Rico some of the most expensive electricity in the country. (New York’s electricity cost consumers 17.9 cents per kilowatt hour in 2019, and most states’ rates are much lower.) A report last year by Baruch College sociologist Héctor Cordero-Guzmán stressed that rate increases affect “the poor and vulnerable more as a proportion of their incomes.” According to the study, which used rate increases in PREPA’s 2019 restructuring support agreement as a guideline for LUMA pricing, “the average household in the bottom 20% of the income distribution will pay, after the fourth increase, an average of $991.25 per year in electrical charges”—a hefty bill, given that the island’s median annual household income is only $20,166, much lower than that of any state.18

n top of the looming rate increases, there’s the issue of what will happen to PREPA’s 8,000 workers, more than half of whom are members of UTIER. Despite LUMA’s stated intention to hire much of the existing PREPA workforce, there is no requirement that it do so, and those who are hired will lose their seniority as PREPA workers, their collective bargaining agreement, and medical insurance for preexisting illnesses. There’s also no guarantee that LUMA will assume their pension payments, a lifeline for many of these public sector workers. A sticking point for Emmanuelli Jiménez and Santiago is the many provisions in the contract that LUMA can use to terminate the deal through its force majeure clause. To give just one likely example, if there is another major hurricane (a certainty for the region), LUMA could walk away, leaving Puerto Rico to pick up the pieces of whatever electrical provision remains.19

At a hearing in late July of the House Committee on Natural Resources, Puerto Rico Public-Private Partnerships Authority executive director Fermín Fontanés, one of Rosselló’s last appointments before he was forced from office, claimed that the clause was standard and that “this [hurricanes] is what the LUMA team excels at. These are the companies that are called in to work in disasters not only in the United States but all over the globe.” Santiago was more skeptical. “Under no stretch of the imagination is it a standard clause. It’s the broadest I’ve seen,” she told The Nation. “A change of law can serve as the basis not to provide service. They have experience responding to hurricanes, and that’s why they’ll find a way out.”20

Emmanuelli Jiménez and other advocates don’t see how the contract and PREPA policy conform to the law—passed with much fanfare under the Rosselló administration—that aims to convert Puerto Rico’s energy production to 100 percent renewable power by 2050. Queremos Sol, the civil society proposal that includes signatories like Vila, Santiago, Figueroa, and Arturo Massol, director of the legendary alternative energy and cultural center Casa Pueblo, has long called for solar rooftop structures and battery packs to decentralize the energy system and provide renewable, clean electricity. ”I don’t see anything in the contract that gives LUMA incentive to implement that,” Emmanuelli Jiménez said. “Right now we have 2.3 percent renewable. It will be impossible to meet the benchmark of 40 percent by 2025 because the contract for Eco-Electrica [an LNG provider] is supposed to generate 20 percent of energy until 2032.”21

The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently awarded $9.6 billion toward LUMA’s grid modernization plan for PREPA, which calls for an increase in fossil fuel infrastructure for liquefied natural gas. Since mainland US fracking now produces more gas than can be used domestically, the Trump administration has pushed for increasing LNG exports. In 2019, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, Jenniffer González-Colón, a Trump supporter, cohosted the American LNG Summit with Florida Representative Ted Yoho, who has been calling to make its export easier. Above all else, Santiago said, the LUMA contract “perpetuates centralized generation with imported fossil fuels, especially new natural, highly explosive, methane gas infrastructure.”22

he privatization of Puerto Rico’s electrical utility has been at the heart of the FOMB’s agenda since the board’s inception, but if it succeeds, it will be traveling down well-trodden but perilous roads. In the past few decades, Puerto Rico has attempted several times to privatize its Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, creating opportunities for higher-priced private water distribution systems. It has privatized San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, handing it over to the Mexican company Aerostar. The privatization of its health care system in the 1990s caused the eventual deterioration of an innovative decentralized system of local health care clinics. It has privatized the tolling system on its highways; the authority that operates the ferries between the main island and two small islands, Vieques and Culebra, which serves mostly lower-income Puerto Ricans; and even the beaches, which have long been open to all Puerto Ricans. In April, the FOMB ordered the privatization of the government-owned public television station. With schools shuttered due to Covid-19, the effort to close public schools and allow for more charter schools has stalled, and the education secretary who oversaw that effort, Julia Keleher, will face trial next year on several counts of fraud.23

PROMESA has only increased the push to privatization. Many of the sources I spoke with felt that the FOMB has created a kind of dark parody of what democracy is supposed to be. “PROMESA, the law, talks about preserving essential services, but they’re not defined,” said Nicole Díaz González, who works with Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico, which assists people in danger of losing their homes in the island’s accelerating mortgage crisis. In May, Representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona put together legislation that, among other reforms, would force the FOMB to define essential services. Days later, FOMB executive director Natalie Jaresko refused to do so, saying it would give the impression that the board should “only limit themselves to subsidize the minimum required government services.”24

Vila said the LUMA contract was even worse because of PROMESA: Previous privatization deals, like the one for the San Juan airport, at least required a sizable up-front investment. LUMA’s does not. “The deals made before PROMESA, like the one for the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, failed. They actually left us with two EPA consent decrees,” she said. “But in that case, when there was a change in administration, the government was able to cancel that contract. Since the LUMA contract is incorporated into the FOMB fiscal plan, I don’t know if a new government has the authority to cancel it unilaterally.”25

Díaz and others said that in the PROMESA era, even normal legislative proposals lack a rigorous debate process, and what reaches the floor has already been affected by what legislators believe will fly in the current atmosphere. “At the beginning with the FOMB, there was an attitude of ‘Let’s see what you’re going to do, and I’ll tell you if that complies,’” said Emmanuelli Jiménez. “Now the attitude is ‘No, you have to do this, and [the FOMB is] not going to give you the budget if you don’t.’ From the onset of the pandemic until now, [the FOMB has] written more than 200 letters saying, ‘This yes, this no, this you can do, this I prohibit, I will revoke this.’”26

The distortion of the democratic process is also playing out in the strange theater between the government and the board. At times the government resists it for political purposes, while the FOMB wants to shift the onus of imposing austerity onto the government so that it can act as the impartial arbiter as the government endures scandal after scandal. “I think that the Junta has served as an experiment with another form of governing, a mode of governing that is more comfortable for the local government,” said Ariadna Godreau-Aubert, the head of Ayuda Legal. “For the local government, it’s more convenient not to have to define essential services and push austerity. They hang back and say, ‘Someone else can do that.’”27

But as the PREPA privatization moves forward, the FOMB is faltering. In July, FOMB chair José Carrión and member Carlos García—both suspected of conflicts of interest because of their previous involvement with, respectively, the Government Development Bank and the Puerto Rican bank Santander, which was instrumental in accumulating the $72 billion debt in the first place—announced their resignations from the board. In August a third member, José Ramón González, also previously involved with Santander, stepped down. In fact, all of the board members’ terms were up over a year ago; they have remained in place only because Trump did nothing to start the process to replace them.28

In Congress, Grijalva has proposed amendments to PROMESA that would prohibit conflicts of interest among FOMB members; allow federal funding for the board, which is currently paid for by the Puerto Rican people; promote economic growth; improve access to information; provide relief from some of the unsecured public debt; and restart a comprehensive public audit of the debt. A Democratic-controlled Senate—still possible given Georgia’s two runoff elections in January—could make some of these reforms a reality.29

Still, they are reforms and would not change the antidemocratic nature of the FOMB and its control of government expenditures. Economist Stephanie Kelton, the author of the best-selling book The Deficit Myth, said she is convinced that under modern monetary theory, the Federal Reserve could easily issue $100 billion to Puerto Rico and wipe out its debt—which would be much more efficient in helping to create real internal economic development. It would make sense for US voters to push their representatives to investigate this, not only for the relief it would provide to Puerto Ricans but also for the precedent it would set for the rest of the country. This spring, as state economies shuddered to a halt during the coronavirus lockdowns, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell began muttering that states should “declare bankruptcy.” As the pandemic continues to ravage the country and many states’ debt burdens are skyrocketing, it’s not impossible to imagine Republicans trying to impose fiscal control boards on underwater states.30

Fiscal oversight boards have a long history in the United States, going back to the ones imposed on local jurisdictions in Missouri in the wake of the fiscal crises of the 1870s. They were used during the Great Depression in states like Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Oregon, and the oversight board imposed on New York City in the 1970s was key to cementing the idea that government borrowing to stabilize social programs is irresponsible and detrimental to economic development. Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in the early 2010s (something Puerto Rico, as a territory, doesn’t have access to), putting the city at the mercy of a draconian debt restructuring regime. More recently, several states—including Connecticut, Illinois, and New Jersey—have been teetering toward fiscal collapse, while California, which closed a $54 billion deficit in June, faces a renewed threat of a $600 million deficit.31

The coronavirus-induced economic crisis and the hard line the Trump administration has taken toward supplying desperately needed relief funds to localities is placing a huge swath of Americans at risk of the imposition of fiscal supervision and its attendant austerity policies.32

he warm glow of Puerto Rico’s 2019 summer rebellion has dimmed a bit, and Governor Wanda Vázquez’s strict curfew to control the spread of Covid-19—the strictest in all the states and territories—has had a chilling effect on street protest, outside of some interventions by Figueroa Jaramillo’s UTIER and a Socialist Workers Movement–led attempt to shut the San Juan airport to visitors, many of whom are mainlanders who refuse to wear masks. After losing the New Progressive Party (PNP) primary to Pedro Pierluisi this year, Vázquez’s term is nearing its end, but Puerto Rico’s long-term problems remain.33

Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican government is again up to its ears in scandal, with an independent investigation of Vázquez under way over her handling of supplies sent there for earthquake relief. The island had to have a second primary voting day in August because many ballots were not delivered on time, causing great embarrassment and calls for the resignation of the election commission’s president. During the summer the PNP’s María Milagros Charbonier, a member of Puerto Rico’s House of Representatives and a onetime Ethics Committee head, was arrested by the FBI for a bribe-and-kickback scheme, and in November another PNP representative, Néstor Alonso, was arrested on similar charges.34

As for the governor’s office, Pierluisi—who tried to claim it after Rosselló’s departure in what amounted to an attempted coup—won the November 3 gubernatorial election by a percentage point. Pierluisi has been criticized for having been a lawyer for the FOMB as far back as 2017 while working for the firm O’Neill & Borges, which is receiving the second-largest monthly fee for legal services from the FOMB, after Proskauer Rose.35

November’s elections in Puerto Rico showed a continuing erosion of the dominance of its traditionally powerful parties, even as voter participation keeps declining. The pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party and the pro-statehood PNP are being increasingly challenged by the Independence Party and the fledgling Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (Citizens’ Victory Movement), which received a combined 28 percent of the vote. (A week after the election, nearly 200 boxes of uncounted votes were found, making the winners of some races still unclear.) A PNP-warped referendum on statehood, which framed the question as merely yes or no, leaving out other possible options, received 52 percent yes votes, but as long as McConnell retains control of the Senate, congressional action on the issue remains highly unlikely. Representatives Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have proposed a status convention to allow Puerto Ricans to debate their future, which greatly resembles the one proposed by Moviemiento Victoria Ciudadana.36

With Trump’s departure from the White House imminent, Puerto Rico’s fate remains unclear. On September 18, in what was interpreted as a gambit to gain Puerto Rican votes in Florida, Trump announced the approval of $12.8 billion in aid to rebuild the electrical power system and the education system. But this “aid,” unlikely to be reassessed by Democrats in what will be an extremely difficult transition of power, is merely a fast-tracking of funds for LUMA’s takeover of PREPA, a spur to the privatization of one of Puerto Rico’s most important public services. “This commitment,” LUMA said in a statement, “is a crucial step in carrying out the transformation of the electric grid on the island.”37

Perhaps the most emblematic image of Puerto Rico’s encounter with Tropical Storm Isaías last week was one of a National Guard soldier carrying a young boy on his back through Barrio Sábalo in the western town of Mayagüez, rescuing him from a rising torrent of brown water from nearby Caño (Canal) Majagual. That area, as well as Barrio Buenaventura, vulnerable to Rio Hondo and other smaller streams of water, was among the most visible recipients of Isaías’s heavy downpours as the storm swept the region on Thursday.

“It had been raining here all week,” said Ian Seda-Irizarry, a John Jay College economics professor who has roots in Mayagüez and has been visiting with family since May. “The ground was saturated with water, and the storm caused landslides. Fallen trees and electrical posts were strewn on the ground.” Hundreds of thousands of people, and 23 hospitals, were left without power in the wake of the storm. The littering of electrical transmission cables and posts recall the disastrous landscape following 2017’s Hurricane María, and for many around the island, they triggered memories of a very difficult recent past.

Just three days before Isaías hit, Thomas Van Essen, the regional administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wrote Puerto Rico Governor Wanda Vásquez a letter informing her that in FEMA’s opinion her government “is not prepared nor has the ability to respond and manage a major event.” Citing a variety of reasons ranging from lack of emergency staffing to funding, communications, and planning, Von Essen’s revelations were not a surprise to most Puerto Ricans, who in early July learned that the governor was to be investigated by an independent prosecutor over an alleged mismanagement of supplies following January’s series of earthquakes.

Even though Vásquez—a reluctant governor who took office after last summer’s “people’s removal” of scandal-ridden Ricardo Rosselló through a quirk in succession rules—is an easy target, there are clearly many factors at work that keep Puerto Rico vulnerable to climate-crisis-induced devastation. “It doesn’t surprise us that FEMA would come out and say something like this, but at the same time, I don’t want to place the entire blame on the Puerto Rico government,” said Deepak Lamba Nieves, research director of the San Juan–based Center for the New Economy.

Puerto Rico’s recovery from Hurricane María has been greatly hampered, if not sabotaged, by its own government’s inability to reform inefficient and at times corrupt practices, but also the questionable FEMA-funded contracting and the austerity policies driven by the Federal Oversight and Management Board imposed by Congress’s PROMESA legislation of 2016, ostensibly designed to restructure the territory’s $72 billion debt.

“We’ve already been living through almost 15 years of austerity policies since the economy began shrinking in 2006,” said Lamba-Nieves. “And when you think of the cumulative effect of budget cuts, downsizing, what the board calls right-sizing entities and institutions, you see a storm that would normally seem like a tropical storm with not much damage creates widespread havoc on the population.”

Case in point might be the loss of electrical power in the Mayagüez region due to flooding around the Puerto Rico Electrical Power Authority’s Acacias substation. Guarionex Padilla Marty, graduate student in history at the University of Puerto Rico and cohost of the influential Plan de Contingencia podcast, tweeted a photo of Acacias surrounded by flood waters in the aftermath of the storm.

“The plant, which was constructed near the Guanijibo River, distributes electricity to other substations in the Southwest,” he said. “This is a large agricultural valley straddling the towns of Cabo Rojo, Hormigueros, and San Germán. It’s always suffered flooding.” On Tuesday, the Puerto Rico Department of Agriculture reported $47.5 million in losses due to Tropical Storm Isaías, including almost $2 million from San Germán and Mayagüez.

In May 2019, PREPA CEO José Ortiz announced that $3.5 billion in FEMA funds would materialize by August of that year to help build a more resilient electrical distribution system. Of those funds, he insisted, $308 million would be set aside for the relocation or reconstruction of 18 substations, including Acacias. “Evidently, nothing happened,” said Padilla. “The substation is flooded and has made impossible the restoration of electrical service to Southwest towns.” As of Tuesday night, Padilla says that many regions are still without power, including Cabo Rojo.

Ruth Santiago, a lawyer based in nearby Salinas who works with Queremos Sol, a group of renewable energy activists pushing to move island residents to solar power, said that, according to the Fiscal Plan filed with the island’s Fiscal Oversight and Energy Board, PREPA had received only $1.42 billion in public assistance funds as of April 2020. “So it doesn’t look like they received the $3.5 billion,” she said.

On Monday, Ortiz resigned, effective on August 5, closing another chapter in the public utility’s troubled history, which last fall included a misadventure with an outfit called Cobra Energy that resulted in the indictment of two FEMA officials on the charges of fraud and bribery in receiving $1.8 billion in contracts. Just last week, Ortiz seemed to go off the rails when he claimed that another set of power outages, days before Isaías’s arrival, were caused by an “act of terrorism.”

“He had lost all credibility—he said 99 percent of power would be restored by Friday,” said Santiago. “What we saw during Isaías shows how weak the whole transmission and distribution system is. There’ve been so many of these events and so much lack of funding. It’s definitely true that we’re not ready for a serious storm.”

When considering debates about political formulations as nebulous yet as desperately crucial as “the Latinx vote,” it can be vexing to consider those Latinx who vote Republican. In the age of Covid-19, Black Lives Matter protests, and radical right Trumpism, how could they exist? What common ground could Latinx voters possibly find with the Republican Party and its current fusion of fascistic nativism and deadly bottom-line billionaire capitalism? After all, are Latinx not, in the eyes of the Trump faithful, the living embodiment of the dire threat that Samuel P. Huntington saw to “the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers”?

Viewed from New York City, the center of the Northeast left-liberal bubble, where Latinx politics has long been driven by Puerto Rican Democrats, it can be easy to forget that going back to the 1960s, a substantial number of Latinx voters nationwide have consistently voted for Republican presidential candidates. And while Hispanic Republican support peaked at 40 percent for George W. Bush in 2004, the sobering reality is that Trump’s Latinx support was somewhere between 20 and 30 percent in 2016. This hasn’t waned considerably, even after three years of incessant immigrant bashing: In a poll conducted by Latino Decisions and published in late April, in the middle of the coronavirus crisis, 23 percent of Latinx voters said they were either voting for Trump or leaning toward doing so.

Geraldo Cadava tries to shed light on this thorny subject in The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Identity, From Nixon to Trump, which, along with Benjamin Francis-Fallon’s The Rise of the Latino Vote: A History, illustrates just how complicated this story is. Starting their narratives in the early 20th century, when most Latinx voters (like their African American counterparts) shifted away from the Republican Party during its rightward turn, both books discuss how the Democrats and Republicans alike sought to organize disparate national and ethnic groups living in different regions into one “Latino” constituency by appealing to them through class interests—as workers/activists or as businessmen/property owners—as well as through their views (often stereotyped) on family unity and Christian morality. Situating the story of these voters in the context of a broader history of Latinx in the United States, both books offer important additions to this history’s growing canon, which is beginning to chip away at long-standing narratives by giving a fuller account of the ambiguous yet undeniable historical reality of Latinx as a political constituency.

At the heart of any argument about “Latino” or “Hispanic” politics, of course, is also a discussion about those labels themselves, especially since political strategists and advocates and marketing consultants have played such a big role in creating the notion of a monolithic Latinidad. By carefully examining archives from underutilized sources like the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, along with the archives of Hispanic Republicans like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Manuel Luján, Cadava and Francis-Fallon show that Latinx voters in both parties embraced the idea that Latinx should envision themselves as a national constituency in order to wield more power than individual groups could. Both books also show what was lost by creating one constituency out of many and offer new historical insight into the evolution of terms like “Hispanic” and “Latino,” which remain contested in local communities and the mass media.

Hispanic Republicans, Cadava argues, trace their origin to the shift in American politics in the New Deal era. When many African Americans transferred their allegiance from the Republicans to the Democrats, many US Latinx did so as well. But some grew disenchanted with the Democrats: Starting in the 1950s, small but noticeable numbers of Mexican Americans, frustrated by their perception that the Democrats were more concerned with African American votes, began to move back to the Republican Party. Groups like Latinos con Eisenhower and Viva Nixon (a group cochaired by I Love Lucy star Desi Arnaz) garnered support, mostly among the Mexican American–dominated Latinx populations in Texas, California, and the Southwest and offered a counterpoint to centrist groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens and progressive workers’ groups like El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española.

Likewise, years before the Cuban Revolution, recent South and Central American immigrants—particularly those who identified with Spain and were opposed to anti-American nationalism in Latin America—embraced some of Cold War conservatism’s anti-communist politics. At the onset of the Cold War, John Flores, a public relations representative whom Cadava credits with being “the first Hispanic to articulate a national vision for Hispanic Republican mobilization,” founded Latinos con Eisenhower. Despite being slighted by the president, who dismissed his request to be considered for the position of deputy assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, Flores argued that Latinx could play a key role in fighting communism in Latin America. Thanks to their knowledge of the “language, customs, and traditions of Latin America” as well as his “relationships with “anti-Communists south of the border,” they could help the United States more efficiently stave off leftist populism there. As Cadava shows, this anti-communist politics, far from being the sole province of Miami Cubans, was prevalent among a much wider range of Latinx.

ispanic Republicans, while still a minority of Latinx voters, also began to craft an identity for themselves around Republican principles—in particular, small-business entrepreneurialism, patriarchal family values, and the rejection of the welfare state in addition to anti-communism. Their movement intensified in the late 1950s and early ’60s around Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, when he ran for president in 1960, and it reached an apex with his victory in 1968. This support was premised on a politics of social conservatism and anti-communism, but Nixon was also willing to appeal to Latinx voters as part of his strategy to make up for his lack of support among African Americans. Public relations campaigns that painted Nixon, a native of Whittier, Calif., as “once a poor white man who worked alongside poor Mexicans in the orchards and fields” only further solidified this relationship. At the same time, some New York Puerto Ricans became supporters of the state’s liberal Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, and were brought into the party by his softer strain of conservatism. Others were attracted to even more extreme right positions and supported Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964. Cuban exiles in Miami, who felt betrayed by the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, were especially drawn to Goldwater.

The realization that Republicans needed Latinx voters because black ones had mostly abandoned the party shaped an evolving so-called inclusion policy after Nixon’s election in 1968. In a highlight of the book, Cadava examines Cuban American and Mexican American involvement in Watergate, which was not limited to the “plumbers” who raided the Democratic Party’s offices but also included the “Brown Mafia,” a group of Mexican American and Japanese American operatives who managed the patronage politics for the GOP in California and became involved in the tangled web of financial transactions associated with the Committee to Re-elect the President. The Brown Mafia was led by William Marumoto, a Japanese American raised in the LA barrio, and Benjamin “Boxcar” Fernández, who founded the Republican National Hispanic Assembly in 1974 in order to gain influence in the GOP as well as to encourage Hispanic participation in local party politics. Besides handing out federal contracts to supporters in pay-for-play schemes, these men tried unsuccessfully to bribe people like New Mexico land-rights activist Reies López Tijerina, an influential Chicano leader and the founder of La Alianza, a land rights group, to get them to blunt their anti-Nixon stance.

Postwar Hispanic Republicanism never won over a majority of Latinx voters, and as Cadava shows, it eventually found a home in neoconservatism. But even as President Ronald Reagan slashed social spending and used the War on Drugs to massively incarcerate poor people of color, he still courted Latinx voters with offers of immigration reform. In the 1990s the anti-immigration extremism of figures like John Tanton, the founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform; the nativist presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan; and a series of anti-immigration laws passed in California and Arizona began to erode this support.

But “compassionate conservatism” returned with George W. Bush (whose brother Jeb Bush had married a Mexican national), who openly courted Latinx voters and won over 40 percent of them in 2004—a peak in the success of the inclusion strategy. In the 2008 election, however, this strategy could not be sustained by Arizona Senator John McCain (who, Cadava notes, declared “Build the danged fence!” in one of his campaign ads) as the Republican anti-immigration wing gained ascendancy, and Latinx voters showed just how vital they were to the Democratic coalition by helping to put Barack Obama in the White House for two terms.

adava’s book deftly makes clear that there is not one type of Hispanic Republican but rather many: Cuban American, Mexican American, Central and South American, and to a lesser extent Puerto Rican. He reminds us that each of these groups of Republican voters, while often a minority in their own communities, were drawn to conservative politics for different reasons—historical, cultural, political, or economic. Cadava also does a good job of telling the story of the many different Hispanic Republican activists on the ground, writing compellingly about Fernández and his forgotten presidential campaign; Linda Chavez, who worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and once campaigned to make English the official language of the United States; and two US treasurers, Romana Bañuelos and Katherine Ortega. (The former suffered the indignity of an Immigration and Naturalization Service raid on her tortilla business, and the latter was roundly criticized for her uninspiring speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention.)

Yet Cadava largely does not address the way questions of race within and outside the Latinx community were manifested in Hispanic Republican politics. While it’s true that Mexican American politicians had a history of seeking to define their communities as legally white, by the time Hispanic Republicans came on the scene, many Mexican Americans were shifting away from an assimilationist understanding of their identity toward a Chicanismo that stressed indigenous roots. The Cuban migration to South Florida and the subsequent rise of the Cuban Republican voter also had a strong racial dynamic to it, since many of the middle- and upper-class Cubans who fled Castro’s revolution had a relatively easy path to citizenship through the Cuban Adjustment Act and avoided the racialization of noncitizen status.

The labels “Hispanic” and “Latino,” while often used synonymously, have sometimes also been encoded with racial undertones that can at times explain the differences between Hispanic Republicans and Latino Democrats. In the context of politics, “Hispanic” is sometimes used as a way to signal Spanish (hence European) origins, while “Latino,” a somewhat more recent term, is often used to allude to a mixed Afro-Indio-Iberian identity and has represented a kind of Bolivarian melting pot of mixed-race Caribbean and South American migrants—although in the Southwest it has also been used as a label that avoided the indigenous identity of Mexican Americans, or Chicanos. (Recently two new terms have come into use as well: “Latinx,” a label that proposes a new inclusivity for gender-nonbinary folks, and the acronym “BIPOC,” for “black, Indigenous, and people of color.”)

Likewise, despite the fact that many US Latinx identify as people of color, the mestizaje ideologies that both of these terms promote have, in many countries in Central and South America as well as in the United States, supported a notion of inclusion that does not disrupt a culture of white supremacy. The gains made by people of color during Latin America’s pink tide have been checked by a recent surge of right-wing racism in countries like Brazil, Guatemala, and Bolivia. In Brazil, which has historically claimed to be a racial democracy, a right-wing nationalist like Jair Bolsonaro has been able to take power and avow a racialized politics with a striking resemblance to Trump’s America, while in Guatemala a former blackface comedian, Jimmy Morales, took office, and in Bolivia, the coup against Evo Morales was carried out with the use of anti-Indigenous rhetoric.

y taking on the full spectrum of political history and examining the far larger majority of Latinx Democrats and left-wing activists, Francis-Fallon’s book helps fill in the other side of the history that Cadava explores, charting some of the tensions among Latinx voters who were loyal Democrats and found Republicanism antithetical to their ideals, as well as the GOP’s determination to convert some of these voters to its cause. The Rise of the Latino Voter takes us back to the jockeying for position between Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans during the John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter years. While Francis-Fallon weaves fascinating details about the careers of Democrats like San Antonio’s Henry Gonzalez, Los Angeles’s Eddie Roybal, and New York’s Herman Badillo into a broader story about the formation of a political constituency, he also considers the role of Latinx movements that worked outside electoral politics.

Providing insight into the way that attempts to organize Latinx nationwide resulted in these movements seeking to foreground class- and race-based oppression as well as reject American exceptionalism and imperialism, Francis-Fallon shows how Latinx voters helped change not only the Democratic and Republican parties but also the egalitarian and internationalist politics of the American left. He cites El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española in the 1930s, which was inspired by other multiracial Popular Front groups and “fus[ed] class and culture consciousness…[and] advocated for striking workers as it demanded an educational system that nurtured its members’ language and heritage.”

Francis-Fallon begins his story with the United States’ annexation of Mexican territories in 1848, which created an emerging sense of collective identity among Mexican Americans. He then tracks the formation of a “Hispano” identity with New Mexico’s statehood in 1912, the establishment of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the move by the majority of Latinx voters to the Democratic Party in the 1930s. Taking us into the post–World War II era, when Mexican Americans formed important political bases in Los Angeles and San Antonio, he charts the Viva Kennedy years, the civil rights movement, and the attempts to arrange a “shotgun wedding” between East Coast and West Coast groups in the late 1960s. The last few chapters discuss the limits of Latinx liberalism and the emergence of Hispanic conservatism, neatly intersecting with the subject of Cadava’s book.

The most compelling part of Francis-Fallon’s analysis comes when he documents the efforts by early Latinx Democrats to build multiracial constituencies by invoking the notion of a pan-Latinx identity, which helped bring together a variety of Spanish-speaking communities and connect them to other racial, ethnic, or social struggles. These efforts proved to be a potent political force in many cities, including New York and Chicago. But Francis-Fallon’s story of how Latinx voters and organizers helped shape a nationwide agenda is also telling for the present moment. Recounting the first Unidos Conference, held in New York in 1971, he shows how Badillo, a Puerto Rican congressman from New York, and Roybal, a Mexican American congressman from Los Angeles, helped lead a discussion on the creation of a national Latinx agenda that tried to significantly influence the Democratic Party.

Yet even in the midst of a unity conference, divisions were hard to transcend. While Badillo and Roybal were largely successful in their efforts, the fractures that appeared at the conference exposed prior divisions—ideological, cultural, and historical—that remain unresolved. For example, despite New Mexico Senator Joseph Montoya’s passionate plea for unity, Badillo was repudiated by Puerto Rican independence activists, who insisted the conference endorse their demand to decolonize Puerto Rico. “What seemed to have been most disquieting to the congressmen who had brought them together, was that many who remained until Sunday seemed genuinely poised to reject Democrats and Republicans alike,” Francis-Fallon writes.

Badillo and Roybal managed to smooth over most of these differences in the short term, especially those between West Coast Mexican Americans and East Coast Puerto Ricans, and in the years that followed they were able to develop a national Latinx platform that connected the injustice of Mexican immigration crackdowns, US colonial economic policies in Puerto Rico, and the need for normalizing relations with Cuba. But the Democratic Party did not appear ready to take up this pan-Latinx program, and many Latinx Democrats found themselves frustrated with what they saw as Carter’s unresponsiveness on numerous national issues because of his “color-blind” refusal to address “special interests.” Yet Latinx Democrats continued to stick by the party, even as it increasingly took their votes for granted.

he struggle to create a pan-Latinx identity and politics has posed challenges ever since. Latinx voters are regionally disconnected, with greatly varied class backgrounds and citizenship statuses. They are also racially dispersed: There are white, black, Asian, Indigenous, and multiracial Latinx. Yet it is also clear that Latinx voters play a vital role in contemporary electoral politics. One of the major driving forces behind Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s early support in the Democratic primaries this year came from Latinx, with 50 percent voting for him in Nevada and California and 39 percent in Texas. Moreover, Joe Biden’s success in the upcoming general election will depend, in part, on ensuring that he has their votes.

During a moment when it’s clearer than ever that the extreme rightism of Trump must be defeated, Latinx voters have seemingly no choice but to support a centrist Democrat running on an agenda that has traditionally neglected their concerns. But even if this is the case, the lessons of the Unidos Convention remain: The best hope for Latinx is a more radical politics that seeks a broad multiracial and multicultural coalition aimed at reversing the growing economic and racial inequalities found in society today. Likewise, we need a politics that seeks to remake US foreign policy, which has been a key driver of Latin American crises and immigration to the United States in the first place. Meanwhile, there’s the problem highlighted in Cadava’s book—of your tío or prima who believes that the best hope to get through the coronavirus crisis is a revival of Trump’s “record-setting economy.” Maybe Hispanic Republicans can provide them with the important insight that while the Democrats have failed in innumerable ways, the Republicans have been even worse. It’s no accident that many of us have never heard of Benjamin “Boxcar” Fernández and Katherine Ortega. After all, their party did nearly everything it could to put them on the wrong side of history.

The legacy of the Young Lords is something that has followed me throughout my adult life as a New York–born-and-bred child of Puerto Rican immigrants. The Young Lords’ unrelenting calls for Puerto Rican independence, their various interventions in local politics, their unyielding solidarity with colonized and working-class people everywhere, their stunning presence (often augmented by Che-like berets and street-style military formations) all shaped the way my generation and future ones interpreted the tumultuous late 1960s and early ’70s. They were, along with figures like Fred Hampton, Frantz Fanon, and Lolita Lebrón, a guide for my political and cultural life.1

Over the last few years, the Young Lords have again become political and cultural lodestars. Three major exhibitions in New York City—at the Bronx Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Loisaida Center—have celebrated their radical vision and activism and examined their inextricable relationship with the arts, culture, and the media. The Young Lords’ status as a model for Afro-Latinx resistance in the age of Trumpian authoritarianism has given them a moment just in time for the recent 50th anniversary of their founding.2

In her new book, The Young Lords: A Radical History, historian Johanna Fernández offers us an exhaustive and enlightening study of their history and makes the case for their influence as profound thinkers as well as highly capable street activists. There have been other books on and by the Lords (including Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, Iris Morales’s Through the Eyes of Rebel Women: The Young Lords 1969–1976, and Miguel Meléndez’s We Took the Streets) but Fernández’s distinguishes itself by providing solid, incredibly detailed historical research, including extensive interviews with the Lords and their contemporaries. It also places them in the context of the political and social debates that shaped the era and reveals how so much of their activism centered on the same issues—housing, health, education, and the marginalization of women, the LGBTQ community, and the working poor—that we face today. Perhaps most important, she offers a useful reminder of just how central anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics were to them.3

he Young Lords were established in Chicago in 1968, led by a street activist named Cha Cha Jiménez, who organized the group to fight local gentrification, police brutality, and racism. He pioneered the use of the Lords’ signature purple berets (perhaps inspired by the Sharks’ colors in West Side Story) and semi-military code of conduct. But it was only when the New York chapter was founded a year later that the group began to take off and the Young Lords burst into national prominence, adding their unique spin to the moment’s revolutionary politics. A less confrontational variation on the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the New York group and its founders—Meléndez, Morales, Juan González, Pablo Guzmán, Felipe Luciano, and Denise Oliver—were probably the most successful media communicators among these different organizations. They were also representative of two late-1960s phenomena: the Rainbow Coalition of black, Latinx, Native, and white working-class radicals emerging in the era, and the bicultural and bilingual Nuyorican generation. The Lords themselves were a rainbow, since, as Fernández notes, more than 25 percent of the group’s members were African American, including Oliver.4

The Nuyorican generation was not represented by the Young Lords alone. It operated in three intersecting spheres of influence: salsa music, which fueled a nostalgia for its Caribbean antecedents, representing the past; the Spanglish poetry of the Nuyorican Poets Café, which anticipated the future’s code-switching, rap music, and spoken-word performance; and political organizations like the Young Lords, which were inspired by the radical internationalism of their day as well as Puerto Rico’s independence struggle.5

Some key Lords—like Luciano, the group’s early chairman—inhabited all three spheres, while others had varying affiliations with black revolutionary nationalism (Guzmán), the roots of intersectional feminism (Morales), and radical students’ and workers’ movements (González). But central to almost all of their activism was the Nuyorican generation’s dedication to its cultural and political commitments. During their takeover of the First Spanish Methodist Church, when the Young Lords set up a free breakfast program for children and ran a “liberation school,” they invited Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri to perform his signature poem, “Puerto Rican Obituary.” His reading was a contemporary spin on the impromptu bembés that went on during the occupation and featured folkloric music. Years later, another Young Lord, Eddie Figueroa, continued this cultural tradition, masterminding a performance space called New Rican Village on Avenue A and Sixth Street in Manhattan, at the site of what later became the gender-bending Pyramid Club during the 1980s East Village art explosion.6

iven their influence and wide-ranging activities, perhaps one of the most surprising things about New York’s Young Lords is that for all their permanence in the Nuyorican memory, the core founding group was active for a grand total of approximately three years. There were only a few major events that marked their activism: the Garbage Offensive, in which they forced the Sanitation Department to clean the streets in Spanish Harlem; their two takeovers of the neighborhood’s Methodist church; and a couple of brief occupations of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx.7

Despite the tough image they projected, the New York Lords were not involved with street gangs. In fact, they represented the best and brightest of the city’s high school students. González, for example, was a Columbia undergraduate who was active in the SDS strike of 1968. Guzmán, Oliver, and David Pérez attended the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. By May 1970, the Lords were beginning to organize workers in the city, and they eventually broke with the Chicago chapter over its failure to “cast off the vestiges of gang culture from its daily political routine” (though this was probably unfair, given the Chicago branch’s later involvement in the first Rainbow Coalition).8

The First Spanish Methodist Church takeover proved to be the New York chapter’s formative moment, showing how the Lords synthesized ideology with practical political activity pretty much on the fly and constructed an urban version of liberation theology along the way. Fernández writes that Guzmán, the Lords’ minister of information, “crafted a sophisticated communications strategy” by combining the Lords’ “knowledge of scripture, which some had acquired in the religious milieu of their childhood, with the searing critique of organized religion they had adopted as teenagers and young adults in the 1960s.” By demanding that the conservative neighborhood church institute a free breakfast program modeled on the one created by the Black Panthers, the Lords tried to force its anti-Castro Cuban pastor to live up to a precept of Christ’s: solidarity with the poor.9

The church occupation put the Young Lords on the map in a big way. It attracted celebrity visitors like Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and Elia Kazan, along with tons of local media coverage and, more important, hundreds of recruits. From their headquarters in East Harlem, the Lords expanded into cities like Philadelphia; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and eventually San Juan, Puerto Rico. They established their influential newspaper Palante (Spanish for “forward” or “right on”), which published a number of groundbreaking essays about decolonization, racism within the Latinx community, feminism, and revolutionary nationalism.10

Hitting their stride relatively late in the 1960s, the Lords were able to react in real time to the radical experiments of the era and create some of the most forward-thinking analyses of the left’s weaknesses. They took a measured position on the use of violence, they incorporated the emerging feminist and gay rights movements into their political platform, and they offered a critique not only of American racism but also of the tension between darker-skinned mainland Puerto Ricans and the island’s lighter-skinned elites.11

The Young Lords’ racial analysis of Latinx identity reached an interested public well before the subject became a significant focus of academics in ethnic and Latino studies. It was, in fact, the activism of groups like the Young Lords that forced the creation of Puerto Rican, Latino, and ethnic studies departments in places like the City University of New York and Columbia. According to Fernández, the Young Lords’ use of “Latino” was “one of the first public uses of the term.” It was always linked to a vision of “self-determination”; for them, Puerto Rico’s fight to become independent was part of a larger struggle that included the rights of “Chicano people [who] built the Southwest…to control their land,” as well as support for the people of the Dominican Republic in their “fight against gringo domination and its puppet generals” and for “the armed liberation struggles in Latin America.”12

The strong influence of the Cuban Revolution on the Lords resulted, at first, in the lionizing of male anti-capitalist guerrilla leaders and in rooting revolutionary thinking in a kind of righteous masculinity. The 13-point plan the group issued in late 1969, modeled after the Black Panthers’, originally included this point: “We Want Equality for Women. Machismo Must be Revolutionary…Not Oppressive.” The Young Lords soon embraced feminism outright, and after some internal resistance, gay liberation as well. The women, organizing around Oliver and Morales, fought back against a dynamic in which female Lords were assigned to so-called women’s work; they adopted the practice of having consciousness-raising circles from white feminism, read Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and denounced what they called sexual fascism. They forced the inclusion of women on the group’s Central Committee and changed the point about revolutionary machismo to one that read simply, “Down with Machismo and Male Chauvinism.” The legendary drag queen Sylvia Rivera, a key figure in the Stonewall rebellion, began to collaborate with the group.13

The Young Lords peaked in late 1970 when they staged an occupation of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. Focusing on improving health care for the poor, they demanded lead-poisoning tests for children (which would result in laws banning lead paint in tenements) and worked to expose the hospital’s poor conditions and exploitative division of labor. They advocated for patients, formulating a patient bill of rights, a feature that is now standard in substance-abuse and health care programs—and hospital workers, who were mostly black and Latinx.14

ne of the more difficult aspects of the Young Lords’ history that any serious evaluation must come to grips with is the group’s painful decline. Fernández documents the troubling events frankly and compassionately. The Lords’ dissolution was largely attributable to a few key problems. Like many radical organizations of the period, their core leaders were in their early 20s, which encouraged impetuous decision-making. The Lords’ early successes caused them to overextend themselves in the United States and Puerto Rico, their shift in focus to Puerto Rican independence created an irreparable rift, and the left’s tendency toward Maoism created a mania for self-criticism and the purging of those perceived as counterrevolutionary. The group’s increasing infiltration by federal law enforcement agents under the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program exacerbated all of these factors.15

There were signs of trouble as early as September 1970, when Luciano, one of the Lords’ most charismatic and eloquent leaders, was demoted from the chair position. While his demotion symbolized the growing power of women in the Young Lords’ leadership, it also appeared to demonstrate an inflexibility and tendency toward harsh criticism that would only grow.16

During a second takeover of the First Spanish Methodist Church in late 1970, the Lords began to show more signs of strain. Ostensibly set off by the death of a popular Lords member, Julio Roldán, in the Tombs jail in Manhattan, this occupation did not have the same feel as the first one. The Lords staged the event accompanied by an announcement that they believed Roldán was murdered, despite police reports asserting that he hanged himself in his cell. Fernández carefully considers the conditions at the Tombs, the suicide data for that year, the report ordered by the city, and the evidence that Roldán may well have died by suicide—and she notes that even if it’s difficult to know for sure what happened, Roldán was murdered by the system either way.17

Yet it was not the takeover itself that caused the problems but the Lords’ display of weapons during it, which led to an acrimonious internal debate. Tensions continued to rack the Lords in the months that followed, especially as they began to shift their priorities away from local organizing and advocacy and toward the independence struggle in Puerto Rico. A faction of the group led by Gloria Fontanez, who for a period was González’s wife, wanted to focus its efforts on the island because she decided to prioritize reuniting Puerto Rico’s “divided nation” over Guzmán’s proposal to return to the Young Lords’ roots of organizing diverse urban groups in the United States. Despite pushback from the island’s light-skinned pro-independence elite, Fontanez’s stubborn commitment was perhaps a defiant insistence that the real constituency for independence was darker-skinned Puerto Ricans, like the constituency of the Young Lords’ El Caño and Aguadilla branches, which she felt had been neglected by the traditional island independence movement.18

In the end, those internal tensions proved fatal. In late 1971, Guzmán visited China with a delegation of radicals for a dialogue with communist leaders and was questioned about the Lords’ deployment in Puerto Rico. The Chinese officials argued that it was a mistake to attempt to lead an independence movement in a place where they’d never lived, and when Guzmán raised this and other issues with González and Fontanez, he was rebuffed. But he had allies, and with them he continued to insist on, as Fernández puts it, a “return to the organization’s roots,” which was what many wanted “but were hesitant to say.” The fight between Guzmán and those involved in Puerto Rican independence led to the Central Committee’s increased garbling of the Maoist principle of democratic centralism. “Debate and discussion,” Fernández explains, “were sacrificed for a greater insistence on party discipline.”19

After Guzmán was suspended from the Central Committee and he and Morales were transferred to Philadelphia, the main office of the Young Lords in Spanish Harlem was closed for several months. In 1972, Juan Ramos and Juan “Fi” Ortiz were purged because of “lazy dilettante behavior” and declared “enemies of the people, and in 1973, González was accused of “petit bourgeois tendencies” and transferred to Philadelphia. Under Fontanez’s leadership, the Lords explicitly embraced Maoism and changed their name to the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization.20

Frightful events followed, including the use of kidnapping and torture to discipline and remove members who disagreed with the leadership. Fernández briefly mentions the story of Richie Perez and his partner, Diana Caballero, who were held captive, tortured, and beaten in a New York City apartment. After Fontanez’s separation from González, she became deeply involved with Donald Herbert Wright, who headed the Revolutionary Union, a Maoist party in the United States that was a predecessor of the Revolutionary Communist Party. According to Fontanez’s interview with Fernández, Wright’s behavior was “a microcosm of the violence that gripped the organization.” Coincidentally, it was Guzmán who introduced the couple—he met Wright during his trip to China—and now- declassified documents show that Wright was an undercover FBI agent. The purpose of several of his missions was to destabilize left movements by discouraging unity among different groups representing people of color and to sow discontent by exploiting the conflict between nationalist and class-based or communist interests.21

y 1974, all the original Young Lords had resigned from the group, and eventually the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization ceased to exist, too. Despite the Lords’ lasting and powerful legacy, the group’s terrible ending has always hung heavy in my understanding of its history and my interactions with its formers members. The Perez episode was especially poignant because I began my journalism career covering his anti-police-brutality efforts, and he remained one of the most politically active Lords in the 1990s, organizing Latinos in protests against police brutality in New York.22

In the early 2000s, I attended the funerals of Perez and Pedro Pietri, probably a few weeks apart, in the First Spanish Methodist Church. Despite their passing, the two men’s unique vision—encompassing the political and cultural essence of the Young Lords and the Nuyorican generation—was embedded in New York’s Latinx community, in the movement that sought to close the US naval training range in Vieques, and among a new generation of activists, educators, and social justice legal groups.23

I think the best way to honor the Young Lords is to revisit the complex political problems they grappled with, often ingeniously and with a fearless youthful enthusiasm. One of the most debilitating debates vexing the left at present is the notion that organizing around class issues and marginalized identities (race, gender, sexual orientation) involves ideas that are somehow mutually exclusive. Either you’re supposedly a race- and gender-challenged “Bernie bro” or you’re supposedly a neoliberal “Talented Tenth” identitarian leveraging elite schooling into a powerful establishment position in New York or Washington. Most of us working in social movements and activism today know this is a false binary, and the Young Lords’ history is a reminder that this has long been the case. Although I’d almost forgotten it, the Lords had always helped me see it was possible, perhaps essential, to be both local and international, at once working-class and culturally nationalist. In the space they created, I was at ease with, even energized by, all my contradictions—the black and brown, New York–San Juan, Spanglish-speaking, materialist/spiritualist/revolutionary me.24

On July 26, still giddy after the massive mobilization of Puerto Ricans that played a major role in forcing Governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign, plena musician Tito Matos and street-theater activist/music video director Israel Lugo were in the Hato Rey business district of San Juan, walking together in a new protest march, trying to figure out what the protests should focus on next. They would have to express it through a plena, a traditional storytelling genre that has found new life in Puerto Rico in the past 10 years in funky bars and on the front lines of years of protests.

“Oye Wanda Vázquez /No te vistas que no vas / Llévate a la Junta y a Thomas Rivera Schatz,” they sang repeatedly to the insistent beat of panderetas, the small hand drums that propel the plena. The lyrics were straightforward: They advised current Secretary of Justice Wanda Vázquez, first in the line of succession to be named governor when Rosselló leaves office, not to get dressed because she won’t be assuming power, and that she should also take the congressionally imposed Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB, also commonly known as the Junta) and the president of the Senate (Rivera Schatz) with her as she leaves.

Over the weekend, Vázquez declared she had no interest in taking over as governor, probably because of various revelations about her failure to investigate possible cases of corruption in Rosselló’s government. On Thursday, after it became unclear whether Rosselló’s choice as a successor, former resident commissioner Pedro Pierluisi, would be confirmed by the Puerto Rico legislature, Vázquez reversed herself and insisted she would take on the reins as governor if necessary. Rivera Schatz, who had been planning to run for governor on Rosselló’s pro-statehood (PNP) line in 2020, has also been under a cloud since late May, when his subordinate, Ángel Figueroa-Cruz, was indicted by a federal grand jury for wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. Rivera Schatz has denied that he directly supervises Figueroa.

The chaos surrounding who will replace Rosselló has become the central story line of the moment, and a number of activists, some of whom have been fighting for a better Puerto Rico for almost 10 years, are hoping to take advantage of the growing alienation of a large swath of average citizens. Whether this was a “revolution” or a stunning display of a mobilized, diverse new political constituency depends on the next crucial days and weeks.

“Rosselló won the election in 2016 with only 42 percent of the vote, which is a weak mandate,” said Rafael Bernabe, the 2016 candidate for the Working People’s Party (PPT) and a co-founder of Victoria Ciudadana, a new political movement pushing for significant change. “The majority of the electorate now feel no loyalty to the traditional political parties. We need something new, but at the same time it hasn’t emerged yet. It’s a dangerous situation. If we get rid of Rosselló without creating something new, the old parties will remain in power.”

Victoria Ciudadana has been working toward reform since it was launched in March of this year, focusing on protesting the austerity measures of the FOMB, such as jobs and pension cuts, privatization of public institutions and utilities, and cuts to the University of Puerto Rico and various cultural centers. The group is calling for a constitutional assembly that would allow citizens to discuss new proposals for decolonization that could be directly presented to the US Congress. “We want to take away the monopoly of the status issue from the traditional parties [the pro-statehood PNP and the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party, or PPD] and return it to the people,” said Manuel Natal Albelo, a member of the Puerto Rican House of Representatives who resigned from the PPD in 2018 and was the subject of threats in the infamous leaked chats that led to Rossello´s resignation.

At the moment, Victoria Ciudadana is a big-tent affair, openly encouraging pro-statehood and pro-independence supporters to join in the discussion, as well as those who favor a new form of free association with the United States that would remove the plenary powers of the US Congress. Natal advocates the latter, while Bernabe and independent 2016 gubernatorial candidate Alexandra Lúgaro favor independence.

“The chance to defeat the old order is even bigger now,” said Lúgaro, whose candidacy got 11 percent of the vote in 2016, the largest ever for a third-party candidate. “I expect more arrests, and we’re going to see the PPD suffering as well because all these corruption schemes involve someone from both parties.” In 2016, a major PPD fundraiser said to have direct access to former governor Alejandro García Padilla and the speaker of the House of Representatives, Jaime Perelló, pleaded guilty to 14 charges of bribery, extortion, and influence peddling.

While Lúgaro asserts that the PPD will be running a primary candidate campaign with six “recycled” candidates, one of them will be San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who became a major symbol of Puerto Rico’s disaffection with the Trump administration and FEMA in the aftermath of Hurricane María. But it remains to be seen if Cruz can transcend the perception that her party is part of a political system in deep crisis.

A New Intersectional Nationalism

Lúgaro, who began her career as an attorney and ran an educational consulting firm, is emblematic of a growing fusion in Puerto Rico between feminist political concerns and issues of social class and inequality. “The fight against misogynist violence has converged with the fact that Puerto Rico is one of the most unequal jurisdictions in the world,” said Lúgaro. “We’ve found a way to cross over both narratives, and you could see it in the mobilization.”

The ubiquitous presence of Puerto Rican flags, cultural essentials like salsa dancing, the poetic improvisations in the chanted slogans, and the singing of nationalistic hymns like “La Borinqueña” suggest a resurgence of nationalism, but with a twist. “I’m an internationalist, but this is a positive nationalism,” said Bernabe. “This is not Albizu Campos [the island’s legendary mid-20th-century Nationalist Party leader]; this is something new.” Lúgaro felt the outpouring was a direct response to the Rosselló government’s acquiescence in the FOMB’s austerity program, which required cuts to cultural and educational institutions.

But undoubtedly the leading edge of Puerto Rico’s people-power mobilization is Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, which led some of the early actions, such as the confrontation with Rosselló at the airport when he returned from vacation in Europe to face the exploding chat scandal, and initiated the cacerolazos, or nightly pot-banging—used previously in various Latin American countries—that allowed people a simple way to protest in their own neighborhoods.

“We got together back in 2015, coming from socialist activism, a little tired that our organizations weren’t taking the positions we thought were necessary,” said Vanesa Contreras, founder of “La Cole,” as it is popularly known. “The Combahee River Collective text was very important to us because we wanted to combine class analysis with discourse about race. We were concerned with poor, racialized women, who had been the biggest victims of [former governor] Luis Fortuño’s austerity, whose jobs were cut, whose mortgages were underwater, who led single-family households.”

While working with social justice lawyer Ariadna Godreau-Aubert’s Ayuda Legal organization to help displaced families, La Cole also began loudly advocating for a declaration of emergency because of misogynist violence. Last November, citing the statistics showing a woman is murdered on the island every 14 days, and that 24 women—twice as much as in each of the previous three years—were murdered by intimate partners or exes in 2018, they began to demand an audience with Governor Rosselló by camping out at the now-famous barricade in front of La Fortaleza, the governor’s mansion.

“We were there for three days and began to lose patience, so we began removing the barricades,” said Contreras. “Then they hit us with pepper spray, started beating us with batons, and we had to leave. Days later [pop music stars] Bad Bunny and Residente showed up at La Fortaleza very early in the morning to discuss political issues and they let them in without a problem. This was a clear example of the machismo of the government—Ricardo Rosselló refused to see us”

“El Perreo Intenso” and the “Cuir” Body Politics of Puerto Rico

“The LGBT queer community has been organizing itself for many years,” said Contreras. “One of the biggest victories they achieved with the new administration was in 2013, when they got them to pass laws that prevented discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the workplace.” It was this law that the conservative PNP legislature tried to reverse with its Law of Religious Liberty earlier this year. Rosselló wavered on the issue, saying he was willing to sign the law into effect if there was a provision prohibiting the use of gay-conversion therapies, but eventually he refused to sign it.

The Puerto Rico people’s mobilization was filled with queer [cuir on the island] symbols and activities. One of the most iconic images from the massive July 22 protest was out pop idol Ricky Martin waving a huge rainbow flag while riding a flatbed truck in the march. There were drag queens present during speeches by Martin, Residente, and his sister Ileana Mercedes Cabra Joglar (better known as iLe) at an earlier protest at the Capitolio, and last week there was a full-on drag-queen event called La Renuncia Ball that featured voguing performers.

But the most spectacular and transgressive of the cuir interventions in Puerto Rico’s fortnight of protest was El Perreo Intenso, a kind of competitive dance-off that featured twerking contestants unashamedly flaunting their assets on the steps of Old San Juan’s most cherished Catholic cathedral. They left no doubt that Puerto Rico’s new political freedom could not happen without free sexual expression.

“For me, the queer movement embodies the liberated body, freed from social impositions and conventions,” said Bernat Tort, professor of philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico and a victim of tear-gassing during a 2017 protest. “The body queer, the body of woman, the ‘fat’ body, the racialized body, the trans body, become the standard-bearer of the new society we want; they demand that government procure the common good.”

For what it’s worth, El Perro Combativo has become one of the movement’s most popular memes because of an unironic announcement about the event by veteran local news anchor Jorge Rivera Nieves, which was turned into a reggaetón dance remix by an enterprising DJ.

A Focus on Sovereignty and the Road Ahead

The Puerto Rico People’s mobilization has been celebrated for its incredible political diversity, and its goals are many, but they all seem to have a chance to work together in a new, radical experiment in decolonization. Juan Carlos Rivera Ramos is one of the leaders of a group called JunteGente, which seeks to bring together a number of groups, such as Vamos, Amnesty International, Alianza de Salud Para El Pueblo (Health Alliance for the People), PAReS (an activist group of university professors), Se Acabaron Las Promesas (Promises Are Over), and even a local coffee joint called Latte por Latte. Rivera Ramos helped arrange talks by Naomi Klein and David Harvey, who came to Puerto Rico in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Rivera Ramos’s focus is on participatory and direct democracy, and a new notion of sovereignty. “We’re working against disaster capitalism, colonialism, and for social justice, radical democracy, and transformation. Most importantly, we want to radicalize the terms of sovereignty by talking about food sovereignty, the sovereignty of women’s bodies, energy sovereignty, people sovereignty,” he said.

“But there’s no doubt that the people have become aware that this is a class struggle, and an elite governing class has been identified. Rosselló and his affiliates defend the blanquitos, a white creole caste that has been ruling for decades in Puerto Rico. What we saw in the streets was the mirror of the Puerto Rican majority. Working-class folks, poor folks, middle-class folks and diversity in terms of Afro-descendants and sexual and gender diversity.”

This discussion of sovereignty seems appropriate because of the coincidental date of Rossello’s resignation. He did it as the clock was about to strike 12 on the morning of July 25, which was the day when Governor Luis Muñoz Marín celebrated the signing of the 1952 Constitution that would begin Puerto Rico’s existence as a commonwealth—a fictitious state of autonomy that obscured the fact that it remained an unincorporated territory subject to the plenary powers of the US Congress. The day also served to obscure the memory of the US Navy’s landing in the town of Guánica in 1898, which marked the beginning of Washington’s colonial rule.

Ricky Rosselló may have been ousted, but there is still much work to be done. “Classes will start again and a routine will begin that we didn’t have in the summer, and will not permit that on a Monday we can motivate almost 1 million people to march,” said Vanesa Contreras, who is an adjunct professor at the University of Puerto Rico. “We need to remain optimistic that we’re going to continue. The optimism of a chanting chorus of thousands of people saying we’re going to remove Ricky Rosselló was a revolutionary optimism, because we knew we were going to do it.”

This week has been unlike any other in Puerto Rican history. An estimated 500,000 demonstrators filled Old San Juan’s cobblestone streets on Wednesday to demand the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. He has lost public confidence because of mounting scandals in his government and damning revelations from a leaked trove of private chats, published on July 13 by the island’s Center for Investigative Journalism.

The staggering diversity of the demonstrators—straddling age groups, political orientations, and social class—has elicited fresh declarations of the slogan “Puerto Rico se levanta” (“Puerto Rico is waking up”). The phrase, previously used as a rallying cry for fundraising in the wake of Hurricane Maria, lost its luster as the difficult realities of recovery set in. “We’re writing history,” said Juan Carlos Rivera Ramos, an activist in Puerto Rico when I contacted him this week. “Our people, in all their diversity of colors and flavors, ideological plurality, are expressing dignity on the streets. My eyes are tearing.”

US colonialism may have designated the island as an “unincorporated territory,” but its people have always called it a país (nation), and it’s this spectacular renaissance of nationalism that has allowed for so many different constituencies to come together. The island is suffering the worst political and economic crisis in its history, four years after its previous governor, Alejandro García Padilla, declared its $72 billion debt unpayable, resulting in the creation of a fiscal oversight and management board (FOMB, though known locally as la junta) a year later to restructure that debt.

But even as the island struggles to recover and wrestles with austerity measures imposed by FOMB, the scandal is personal. The vulgar nature of the governor’s chats (in which his subordinates launch expletive-laden tirades at targets ranging from Ricky Martin to San Juan Major Carmen Yulín Cruz) showed that Rosselló’s government is more interested in protecting its power through a vicious strain of public relations than actually helping the Puerto Rican people in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

The day after the first massive Monday march, three women went to the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Rio Piedras, a municipality of San Juan, and removed the governor’s portrait from the wall in protest, setting off a series of copycat takedowns in other governmental offices. A crew of motorcyclists called to action by a social-media influencer called El Rey Charlie twice flocked into San Juan after stopping in various public housing projects, called residenciales (the crucibles for the creation of reggaetón music). Also spotlighted at marches were a committed group of radical feminists, Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, who had long been clamoring for Rosselló to acknowledge that there is a crisis of violence against women in Puerto Rico.

Prominent in the marches was a new political coalition called Victoria Ciudadana, whose central figures are Rafael Bernabe, former gubernatorial candidate for the Puerto Rico Worker’s Party; Alexandra Lúgaro, another gubernatorial candidate who won 11 percent of the vote in 2016, the largest ever by a third-party candidate; Manuel Natal Albelo, a crusading congressman who has withdrawn from the pro-Commonwealth Party; and Ana Irma Rivera-Lassen, a feminist activist and human rights lawyer. Victoria Ciudadana has tried hard not to close itself off to anyone because of party affiliation, and avoided endorsing socialism despite choosing a logo that closely resembles that of the Venezuelan Socialist Party.

The demonstrations have, as is typical, been almost entirely peaceful, with throngs of people singing and dancing to impromptu invocations of pleneros (the folkloric, storytelling genre of plena has been an ineluctable presence for years at Puerto Rico protests) and generally hanging out on streets. But the ugly specter of aggressive police violence, featuring the long-loathed fuerza de choque (riot squad), became visible on both Monday and Wednesday nights.

On both nights it appeared that the police were the ones who initiated the violence, which involved massive and inordinate use of tear gas (some of it apparently manufactured by Safariland, the same company owned by controversial Whitney Museum board member Warren Kanders) and the firing of rubber bullets. The flashpoint of the violence was on Cristo Street near La Fortaleza, the governor’s mansion, a block that had been festooned with a display of hanging umbrellas, a kind of art installation intended to attract tourists that was eventually removed by police following Monday’s violence.

Video evidence suggests that at about 8:30 pm Monday, the police fired rubber bullets at a woman who was trying to stop protestors from throwing things at the police. This incident was quickly followed by the launching of tear gas that left such a strong stench on the streets that local residents complained. On Wednesday, after thousands of demonstrators had gathered at La Fortaleza, another round of tear gas was set off at around 11:30 pm after some tension at the barricades that involved demonstrators throwing plastic bottles at police.

Police announced that the assembly was no longer legal, and after a few tense minutes, according to videos, a volley of fireworks began to explode on the police side. While there seemed to be some objects thrown from the crowd into the rows of the riot squad, the majority of the explosions occurred several yards back. ACLU Puerto Rico president William Ramírez, who has long been involved in investigating incidents involving the police, said if those fireworks were thrown from the crowd, “it must have been someone who plays for the Yankees to have an arm like that.”

Ramírez also complained that not only were there riot squad members behind the lines, but personnel from the Department of Corrections, whose guidelines don’t protect the same freedoms for prisoners as the general public. He also speculated that undercover police in the crowd dressed as demonstrators may have provoked the violence. Puerto Rico’s police department has been under consent decree since 2011, and former police monitor Arnaldo Claudio, who Ramírez felt was helping to make positive change, was among those targeted in the leaked chats.

A History of Conflict and Corruption

The crass attacks on women and marginalized groups have obscured the revelations of political scandal, fraud, money laundering, and the misuse of government funds. The crisis of confidence in Rosselló’s government began in mid-June with the resignation of his secretary of state, Raúl Maldonado, who claimed that there was an “institutional Mafia” element infecting the government. That day, his son, Raúl Jr., claimed he sat in a meeting during which Governor Rosselló ordered an accounting firm, BDO, to change a report about Unidos por Puerto Rico, a nonprofit run by the governor’s wife, Beatriz, that portrayed it unflatteringly.

The following week the governor’s secretary of education, Julia Keleher (who had been criticized for closing public schools in favor of charter schools) and four other government officials were indicted by Puerto Rico’s US Attorney Emilia Rodríguez on fraud and money-laundering charges. More bad press for the governor involved accusations of influence-peddling directed at former FOMB representative Elías Sánchez Sifonte, one of the participants of the chat, and Edwin Miranda, the most powerful public relations figure on the island.

The blame for the pervasive nature of corruption in Puerto Rico’s government can clearly be laid on the feckless politicians themselves, their privileged boys’ clubs and their private-school elitism. But Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States must also be blamed. The fact that Puerto Rico has a representative in Congress that cannot vote, called a resident commissioner, has meant that the only way it can influence Washington is through lobbying. There’s a long history there—with roots in the machinations of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff—that has blown back to poison politics in Puerto Rico. After all, many of Puerto Rico’s governors have gotten to office by springboarding from being resident commissioner, and Pedro Pierluisi, sometimes mentioned as a replacement for Rosselló, had questions surrounding his time in office just a few years ago.

New Revelations Put Rosselló Deeper in the Hole

On Wednesday night, as the record crowd surged into the old city to hear short speeches by celebrities like Residente (René Pérez Joglar), the perpetual agitator and leader of the alternative reggaetón-hiphop group Calle 13; his sister Ile (Ileana Cabra Joglar), who sang a poignant version of the patriotic hymn “La Borinqueña”; the irrepressible trap rapper/singer Bad Bunny (Benito Martínez Ocasio); and actor Benicio Del Toro (who once played Che Guevara in a Steven Soderbergh film), the Center for Investigative Journalism dropped a major story about the explicitly corrupt actions of Rosselló’s chat-room associates.

The most damaging revelations concerned lobbyist Elías Sánchez, a long-time personal friend of Rosselló’s (he was the best man at Sánchez’s wedding), who became his campaign director and formerly served as a non-voting representative on FOMB. The report revealed that Sánchez intimidated government officials to gain inordinately expensive contracts for his clients, and that Rosselló had been warned various times about this behavior.

But perhaps the worst thing about this Rosselló chat scandal is that it corroborates President Trump’s accusations that Puerto Rico’s government is corrupt and cannot be trusted with federal funds that Trump has been denying them. Congress is already moving to impose restrictions on severely needed Medicaid funds because of the crisis.

Even if you set aside the massive disapproval from Puerto Rico’s civil society, Rosselló is in an untenable political position: Many key positions in his cabinet are vacant because of the current scandal, a considerable chunk of his own pro-statehood party is calling for him to leave, and he has zero credibility as an advocate for Puerto Rican interests in Washington and vis-à-vis FOMB. Ironically, in his most recent confrontations with the board, he was strongly insistent on preventing cuts to pensions in debt-restructuring negotiations.

Still, a measure in the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act does provide for government pushback on FOMB’s agenda: “The board realizes that legislative approval is necessary for the pension cuts. It all depends on how much the government resists the board,” says Rolando Emmanueli Jiménez, an attorney who is part of a lawsuit by the UTIER electrical workers union, which is trying to prove that the appointment of the board violates the Appointments Clause of the US Constitution. The case will be heard in the Supreme Court this fall.

All signs suggest that Governor Rosselló will likely be forced to resign, despite his continued insistence that there is no proof of any legal wrongdoing in the chats, and that his only offenses were of impropriety. But the challenges of the future are extremely daunting, since the power vacuum left by a reeling government will probably be filled by FOMB.

Since the investigations of corruption and wrongdoing in Puerto Rico are all led by the US Department of Justice, and not Rosselló’s own ineffectual anti-corruption board, it seems convenient that the governor’s ruin serves Trump’s racist agenda, as well as the Wall Street sector’s quest for advantageous settlements through a board with no government to block it.

But Rosselló’s departure would empower Puerto Ricans by giving them hope that out of this historical moment will come a new consensus that will decide the island’s political and economic future. Protests will continue daily, and a national strike that intends to block major highways has been planned for Monday, July 22.

“Rosselló’s dismissal comes from the Puerto Rican people, not the federal government,” said Emmanueli Jiménez. “We have suffered a lot under his government, and the people made the connection between their misery and the political class. On the other hand, what’s occurring now is the consequence of an unchecked implementation of neoliberal policies. The people are resisting that.”

San Juan—As Donald Trump’s rule-by-disinformation strategy intensifies, three weeks after Hurricane Maria, a reeling Puerto Rico is becoming more of a sideshow for his callous stereotyping and ruthlessness. He is subjecting the island’s citizens to layers of anguish, at once revealing the resourcefulness of a sturdy rural culture and the banality of government by public relations. Puerto Ricans, meanwhile, are suffering that all-too-human affliction, the desperate need to connect.

One of the enduring images from Puerto Rico in the wake of Maria is people crowded together near outposts of cable or wireless companies, trying to get a signal so they can communicate. By now most people know that their friends and loved ones have survived; that they may in some cases have water but almost never electricity; that they may need precious medications, or may have stood online at their local pharmacy for hours to get them; that they may have lost all or part of the roof to their home. Survivors have seen their neighborhoods strewn with the carcasses of dead trees, discarded mattresses, and refrigerators; have spent hours trying to get cash out of the few working ATMs in their area or—now a less common complaint—waiting in a gas line.

Sustaining contact on an island littered with fallen power lines and cell-phone towers is difficult, and it contributes to a pervasive feeling of disconnection and chaos. This island is full of people suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Imagine finally reaching the remote mountaintop home of a close friend or relative, who sits there with a municipal government–issued packet of crackers, applesauce, and bottled water, looking up at you watery-eyed and saying, “I was wondering whether you even wanted to talk to me anymore.” The disconnection has exposed the inadequate response of the federal government as well as Puerto Rico’s executive branch, led by Governor Ricky Rosselló.

“The problem is that Hurricane Irma allowed the local government to exploit public relations and say ‘Look how well we responded to the storm; this has been a success,’” said Heriberto Martínez, an economist, radio host, and occasional political consultant, in a packed San Juan cafe. “Apparently they wanted to maintain the same standard after Hurricane Maria, and when they realized it was unmanageable, they started to look for help outside, but they wasted a week already. What has happened in that week was the self-efforting of the people, who went out on the streets with tools and small cranes to clear streets and roads.”

So it was with Melvin Encarnación, a neighbor of my mother’s in Barrio Barcelona, a remote community near the El Yunque Rain Forest. Just a day after Maria hit, he organized a brigade of local residents to clear with machetes the road that connected with 191, the artery that leads to the entrance of the rain forest park. After hours of work in hot, humid conditions, they trekked up 191 to a well that was operated by barrio residents, cutting through an intense tangle of flayed foliage. Within days of the hurricane, water was restored, just as it was in the days following Irma.

Puerto Rico has a rickety infrastructure, with an electrical grid powered by fossil fuels and tied together by a system of highways and roads that make transportation by anything other than gas-consuming vehicles inconvenient. Puerto Ricans today, unlike the islanders who slowly emerged from two powerful hurricanes in 1928 and 1932, cannot simply go back to the land. We must think carefully about how to rebuild by drawing more on the island’s natural resources—our fertile land and deep maritime ports—and connecting communities with solar and wind energy, rather than merely rebuilding what had already existed.

Martínez calls this economía ecológica, an economic system that is a subset of an ecological system. We have to recognize that what used to be considered a positive development from a traditional economic perspective—say, a garbage incinerator—generates a negative social cost and thus actually fosters underdevelopment. The idea of ecological economy that Martínez and University of Puerto Rico (UPR) economist Joseph Vogel have promoted could be applied to two crucial areas: the battered agricultural sector and the energy-production sector.

Meanwhile, the collapse of the communications system has contributed to the distortion of politics here and the meager and insulting responses from the Trump administration. The president’s visit will be remembered, of course, for the infamous paper towel–tossing photo op, his series of inane comments about how the recovery effort has been going, and the use of the military. While military vehicles have been helpful in distributing diesel fuels as well as the generators dependent on diesel, the Army’s presence has generated nonplussed reactions from locals—a far cry from the visceral, welcoming response to the stories of sacrifice and survival of community members.

The Class and Geographical Divide

The longstanding rift between metro San Juan and its far-flung municipalities is clearer after Maria, as urban areas like Condado and Guaynabo have their power slowly return, while the countryside remains blanketed in darkness and, often, desperation. Puerto Rico is famous for its gated communities, but in many cities and towns the social divide is marked by a kind of convivencia, or “living together,” where better-off residents live in close quarters with their poorer neighbors. This is evident in San Juan, where the posh Ocean Park community, which was flooded for days, is just a block or two away from neighborhoods like Barrio Machuchal, which has a large elderly and poor population.

One of the borders between Machuchal and Ocean Park is Calle Loíza, which is currently undergoing a renaissance not unlike that of Bushwick, Brooklyn, with cafes and art galleries driving a vibrant youth-culture scene. Mariana Reyes, who is the leader of La Calle Loíza, Inc., a nonprofit that tries to keep a reverence for local residents and Afro-Caribbean culture in the midst of the area’s revitalization, is a bit rattled when I meet her at a Chinese restaurant across the street from the apartment she shares with her husband, folkloric plena musician Héctor Matos. She has been using the organizational capability of La Calle Loíza to help send out volunteers to take inventory on what residents need, often trying to connect with relief efforts of diaspo-Ricans on the mainland.

“We’re trying to get a mattress for one of our 90-year-old neighbors,” she said, visibly strained from both Irma and Maria. “We organized a brigade of construction workers in the neighborhood to clear the streets—anything we can do.” She and her husband were also in the process of raising funds for the bar-restaurant they own and operate, which is ironically called La Junta, the same sobriquet used for the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), which currently controls Puerto Rico’s budgetary process and debt restructuring. The restaurant was named after a group of ex-UPR students who coalesced in New York in the 1990s: university professors, artists, and workers who remain in contact as they participate in a circular migration between New York and Puerto Rico.

“It’s hard,” said Reyes, who was tending to her small child as Matos spoke to the Jazz Foundation of America, who seemed willing to donate to repair the major damage to La Junta, which also doubles as a music and theater performance space. “We are people with some means, though by no means wealthy; but I think about the average people who live here. The people we employ are mostly at the poverty level and now have no job and no source of income, and maybe the roof flew off their house. What are they going to do?” Reyes worries how—after the gasoline shortage and diesel-distribution problems are solved, and ATMs and hospitals struggle back to full operation—people will react to a new normal of shuttered businesses that will not recover; neighbors lost to illness, death, and migration; and the prospect of sporadic electricity and spotty cellular service.

At the same restaurant, Luis Fernando “Peri” Coss drops in with his wife and child, and while he displays his usual sardonic side, he laments that the building housing the communications department at UPR, which he runs, is irreparable. He had just come back from salvaging the remnants. “I lost a lot of archives I have—ruined,” he says. “We saved about 90 computers, but that’s it. Classes are supposed to begin next week, but…” The university has suffered extensive physical damage. It had already experienced gaps in instruction because of last year’s student strike, and now it’s threatened with removal of accreditation for some programs. UPR suffered severe budget cuts in the latest fiscal plan agreed to by the administration and the FOMB.

Almost everyone I spoke with is considering leaving Puerto Rico, even if their hearts are not in it. Many say they are staying only because they have an elderly relative whom they can’t abandon and who stubbornly wishes to remain. The postal worker in charge of the annex in the small town of Palmer, where my mother receives her mail, looked at me sadly and said, “I wish I could leave, but I can’t. What’s coming I can’t imagine and am afraid may be very difficult. Of course you should take your mother back with you. You’re doing the right thing.”

Neritza Sánchez, who works as an administrator at Universidad Nacional de San Juan online education program, was eager to speak with me as I sat writing in a local cafe with electrical power. She had been on the phone for half an hour completing an application for aid from FEMA, which she was told would take 20–30 days to process. She’d come to the cafe because she has no cell reception and no electricity in her home, in the La Riviera section of Rio Piedras, a San Juan district.

“Our kitchen had two inches of water, I can’t go online to check the home insurance that we have, and my sister lost part of her roof in Arecibo,” she said almost matter-of-factly. “I’ve gone two weeks without work, which they say they’ll pay me for. I’ve considered leaving, but I don’t really want to. I love it here.” Sánchez was born in Brooklyn and went to elementary school in Bushwick until she was 8 years old. Her father lives in the remote town of Gurabo, which was flooded. He’s struggling to maintain his supply of medications and is living with a neighbor who lost his roof. “I don’t know,” she said. “If I think of leaving, it has to do with how long I’ll be without power, getting a paycheck. I’m afraid that the new normal is going to be scarcity and anxiety.”

The interventions of Trump and Vice President Pence were met with derision or indifference from many people I spoke with. The president’s infantile behavior has not surprised many, but the spirited response from San Juan Mayor Camen Yulín Cruz has earned her new respect from many locals who had not been fans. “She said some things that had to be said, and people have responded to that,” said Martínez. Pence’s remark about how the coquí, a local tree frog whose sing-songy chirping is one of the cultural symbols of Puerto Rican pride, would sing again was dismissed by many, who insist correctly that coquís have not stopped blasting out their two-tone message.

Pence’s visit had the unpleasant effect of throwing metro-area traffic into complete chaos, prompting the closure of the Baldorioty Expressway, which is something like Manhattan’s FDR Drive. With all surrounding avenues closed, I was forced to drive back toward Old San Juan, which is still without electricity (as opposed to Condado, where billionaire hedge-funder John Paulson has bought the area’s most luxurious hotel). Driving south toward Rio Piedras in the hopes of avoiding traffic, I encountered flash floods that made Avenida Muñoz Rivera a one-lane lake. Pushing on to the old Route 3 on the way back east to the rain forest, a feeling of dread overtook me as I realized that night had fallen and thousands of cars were surging along highways with stoplights that didn’t work.

Amazingly, the anxious civility that has permeated the island kept us all safe, and I maneuvered the painstaking miles through a torrent of headlights, fading cell signals, flooded roadways, and yawning potholes. The landscape had become an unrecognizable blur of fallen trees, twisted highway signs, and mangled electrical wires. Landmarks had become distorted and useless, while entire communities that had been previously invisible now emerged, ghostlike. There was no light anywhere, just a full moon that seemed to swallow all of Route 66.

The Road Ahead

Members of the opposition Popular Democratic Party are lobbying for a federal humanitarian grant of between $15 billion and $30 billion. On Thursday, the House passed a $36.5 billion disaster-relief bill—but it’s for the storms affecting Houston, South Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, as well as the wildfires affecting the West. And the relief designated for Puerto Rico comes in the form of roughly $5 billion in loans. Not only is it a cruel joke for a territory already drowning in debt; the amount doesn’t figure to leave Puerto Rico with anything close to the $10–15 billion that would seem to be the low end of Rosselló’s expectations.

Rafael Bernabe, who was the gubernatorial candidate for the Working People’s Party in 2016, has proposed that Washington apportion $7 billion this year, with a commitment to a recurrent investment of about $5 billion for several years to come. Bernabe, like many others, has also called for a permanent exclusion of Puerto Rico from the Jones Act shipping-restriction laws. So far, Washington has not shown any inclination to extend its 10-day suspension.

On Thursday, Moody’s issued a report doubting that bondholders could ever recoup the bond investments that make up much of the island’s $72 billion debt. The report estimated that 100,000 homes were destroyed, and said losses could amount to between $45 billion and $90 billion. Many are calling for its reduction, including partial forgiveness, but Bernabe proposes a significant further step. “We’ve been trying to argue for an audit of the debt to determined what is illegal or unconstitutional about it,” said Bernabe. “But in this case, after Maria I think it can be argued that the debt should be annulled, and there is precedent for that. It’s a legal concept called force majeure, in which a debtor finds that the situation has changed fundamentally due to circumstances beyond his or her control. Another principle that could be applied is that of a government that claims a debt could make it difficult to assure the life, well-being, and security of its citizens.”

Noticel editor Oscar Serrano, whom I ran into by chance in San Juan, feels strongly that the fate of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority is key to any examination of the island’s immediate future. He cites the recent Twitter exchange between Rosselló and Elon Musk to implement a system of micro-grids that would replace the awkward centralized, south-to-north delivery of power from one source in Guayanilla. It’s unclear what such a move would mean for the authority’s privatization process, set in motion by last year’s PROMESA law.

Bernabe stresses that although Washington’s colonial treatment of Puerto Rico is shot through with racism and indifference, the local government is also culpable for having no emergency contingency for the loss of communication and power, particularly when it comes to vital institutions like hospitals. The lack of planning, and FEMA’s slow response, indicate that both the federal government and the Puerto Rican government are simply not taking natural disasters, exacerbated in recent years by climate change, seriously enough.

Puerto Rico, battered from Humacao in the southeast to the northwest tip of Aguadilla, is collectively pulled over on the side of the road, searching for a signal. The breakdown in communications has also affected alternative political movements and organizing. “Only by acting as a collaborative network can we advance,” said Bernabe. “What we really need are social, collaborative responses to our problems, for the Puerto Rico that we want to reconstruct.”

Hurricane Maria has created a humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico. Much of the capital city of San Juan is flooded; there is contaminated water in the streets, shortages of gasoline and water, and looming crises for senior citizens in fragile health, reports Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz. Maria destroyed what Hurricane Irma, which struck earlier in September, did not: Virtually the entire island is without electricity, and cell-phone service and other communications are severely strained. Municipalities like Guayama, Cataño, and Toa Baja have reported massive floods and unthinkable devastation. (My mother and other family members live in a remote mountain town near the rain forest, and while I know they’re safe, their food, water, and medications will only last so long.) A damaged dam at Lake Guajataca, near the northwestern town of Isabela, is threatening thousands of residents in nearby areas. As we go to press, 16 fatalities have been reported, but thousands of citizens have lost their homes, and those figures could increase substantially when the final numbers come in. Representative Nydia Velázquez estimates that Puerto Rico will need $10 billion for a full recovery.1

The US government has declared Puerto Rico a disaster area, making it eligible for funding by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). And the Trump administration suspended the usual matching-fund requirement (currently 25 percent of the federal amount). But it denied a request from several members of Congress to lift restrictions in the 1920 Jones Act, which require that all goods transported between mainland US ports and those in Puerto Rico be carried on US-flagged ships constructed, owned, and crewed by US citizens.2

With conditions worsening, the Trump administration reacted laconically on September 25 through press spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who insisted that Tom Bossert of the Department of Homeland Security and Brock Long of FEMA needed time to conduct “a more thorough and deeper assessment of what needs there are,” to make sure “we’re actually funding the correct things.” A senior congressional aide suggested the decision would take until “the first or second week of October.” That evening, Trump himself tweeted that while “much of the island was destroyed,” Puerto Rico’s billions of dollars of debt “owed to Wall Street…sadly, must be dealt with.”3

While immediate aid is desperately needed, the Trump administration, unsurprisingly, is missing the point: It is time for Washington to abandon its austerity approach to Puerto Rico. As a result of the PROMESA bill passed by Congress last year, a Financial Oversight and Management Board has been imposed to restructure the island’s $68 billion debt, address an additional $49 billion in pension obligations, and promote economic development. To its credit, the FOMB announced on September 21 that it would allow Governor Ricardo Rosselló to redistribute up to $1 billion of the territory’s budget as an emergency fund for hurricane damages. But this is the proverbial drop in the bucket for a weary populace ravaged not only by today’s bankruptcy and storms worsened by climate change, but by decades of colonial neglect.4

The FOMB—or La Junta, as it is known in Puerto Rico—never made sense, at least as a way to kindle economic development. Its primary purpose is to allow the collection of debt by bondholders, thus preventing disruption of the municipal-bond market, a crucial area of speculation for America’s financial industry. La Junta’s austerity measures would have caused a contraction of the economy, not growth—indeed, before the storms, islanders had already seen a deterioration in their daily lives. Hurricane Maria has moved all of this into fast-forward, and the always fallacious promise of PROMESA has become a cruel joke.5

Puerto Rico is now the target not only for rapacious vulture funds trying to collect on debt, but also for exponents of Katrina—style “disaster capitalism.” A recent Washington Post op-ed suggested that companies like Home Depot would profit immensely from a major hurricane by cornering the market on home—reconstruction materials. In fact, Ken Langone, who helped finance Home Depot for its founders, is one of President Trump’s closest allies. So is the billionaire hedge—funder John Paulson, whose Hotel Vanderbilt—accused of turning away island residents hoping to cool off in its air—conditioned lobby—is currently a FEMA—approved bunker. And, of course, the notoriously unreliable electrical grid—administered by a power authority $9 billion in debt and already being primed for privatization—might not be restored for months. The power grid also affects water distribution, which depends on electric pumps. Privatization has been touted as a way to create greater efficiency, but Puerto Ricans have already experienced the negative effects of the partial privatization of the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, which resulted in increased rates and poorer service. What’s more, the goal of making utilities profitable can inhibit badly needed modernization. The island’s grid must be switched from outmoded electrical lines on poles—most of which were toppled by Maria—to underground lines, but such an investment is not profitable, at least in the short term.6

What Puerto Rico needs is the kind of massive public investment that Washington provided in the days of Franklin Roosevelt. Reacting to the deadly hurricanes that struck the island in 1928 and 1932, Roosevelt established the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, which created jobs, built schools and medical facilities, expanded the university, and enhanced the electrical infrastructure. Today’s monumental debt, an outgrowth of neoliberal excess, should be resolved with some version of the plan proposed by Bernie Sanders in his 2016 campaign: The Federal Reserve should buy back the debt from bondholders and deny the vulture funds a profit, imposing the kind of severe “haircuts” that the current Title III bankruptcy proceedings are unlikely to require.7

Puerto Rico has been hit by the double whammy of irresponsible policy driven by a lust for profit. The reckless speculation in bonds ignored not only the fact that its economy was failing, but that the island itself is vulnerable to extreme weather events resulting from climate change, caused by the irrational addiction to fossil fuels. Maria is the third Category 4 storm to hit US territory in a month, a record in modern meteorological history.8

Maria’s terrible blow reveals how Puerto Rico could be the mirror for a dystopian American future. As a recent report by the Action Center on Race and the Economy suggests, the hard-line austerity planned for Puerto Rico is a version of the strictures already imposed in Detroit’s bankruptcy, and will likely be used for troubled municipalities like Chicago and states like Illinois. On the other hand, Puerto Rico’s misery can be a wake-up call for the United States—which, ever since the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s, has gradually abandoned its commitment to the common good. Terminating PROMESA and investing billions in infrastructure, health, and education—humanely assuming responsibility for over a century of colonialism—will not only save tens of thousands of lives. It can also set a precedent and help reverse the slow descent of Trump’s America into political, economic, and social disaster.

Editor’s update: On Thursday, September 28, the Trump administration announced that it was temporarily waiving the Jones Act shipping restrictions in response to a request from Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló. The waiver will last for 10 days.9

The most recent meeting of Puerto Rico’s Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB)—known colloquially as “La Junta”—was held Friday, August 4, at the luxurious Hotel El Conquistador of Fajardo, a remote fishing town on the island’s northeast corner. Far from the urban milieu of protest in the capital city of San Juan, with few public spectators besides members of the press, bond-holding reps, and policy wonks, the meeting was held in a sterile conference room that would resemble that of any US hotel chain. Over the course of about two hours, La Junta went through the motions of hearing fiscal-plan testimony, resolution making, voting, asking each other questions, and almost robotically responding with prepared texts.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a sharp exchange between the government of Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative and members of the FOMB revealed the growing tension created by proposed austerity measures that would cut back on the hours of government workers. La Junta announced a plan that would impose furloughs on government employees of two days a month, down from its original proposal of four days a month, claiming that the savings of $218 million that would result were “necessary to ensure that the proper budget savings are achieved.”

Christian Sobrino, who, as the representative of Governor Ricardo Roselló, has no vote, strongly took issue with the move. “On the issue of furloughs the government understands that a line has to be drawn. There will be no furloughs. You can take that to the bank,” he announced without irony.

The confrontation seemed to signal that, while insisting that Rosselló’s government will for the most part cooperate with La Junta on the goals and cost-saving strategies of the fiscal plan, there will be instances when the government will assert what is left of its autonomy from the US-imposed board. The only problem is that back in March Rosselló’s PNP (pro-statehood) government openly celebrated La Junta’s certification of the fiscal plan as a triumph that left behind the “times of incoherence and improvisation” that previous governments had promulgated. In a statement issued in conjunction with the plan’s certification, the Junta added amendments including a plan for employee furloughs that were set to begin July 1 of this year but were postponed until September 1.

Junta board member Carlos García bristled in his response to Sobrino, insisting that “the government representative said nothing in March; nobody said there was no opposition. The government has known about this.”

The media and several elected officials of the pro-commonwealth and pro-independence parties reacted with increasing skepticism toward the government’s sudden decision to embrace confrontation. Crusading PDP (pro-commonwealth) Representative Manuel Natal Albelo called it an attempt to “save face with public servants,” an argument to cast La Junta as “the bad guy. But the reality is that they are both the mother and father of this.” Even Sobrino joked about his outburst, when, as the press assembled for a Q&A following the Junta meeting, he remarked, “If this were a drama we would be nominated for an Oscar.”

Triggered by this halting performance of bad political theater, a kind of gloomy uncertainty has settled over the island. While lacking the spectacular chaos and violence of the crisis in Venezuela, there are times that the precariousness of life in Puerto Rico can sneak up on you slowly, unnervingly. La Junta, while not exactly the colonial viceroy of Erik Prince’s fantasies, is increasingly seen as an oppressive force, even as it faces criticism from bondholders for being too soft in its austerity measures.

Yet the furlough plan and other reductions to come will undoubtedly create a multiplier effect, as government workers will cut back on spending, which will affect local businesses and retailers. Puerto Ricans are losing their homes at an increasing rate, with more than 34,000 repossessed since 2008 and the yearly rate increasing from about 4,500 in 2015 to 5,600 in 2017. On the strip malls that dot the island’s slowly deteriorating highways, store closings are mounting, this time not cherished family-owned small businesses but big chain outlets like Sam’s Club, Radio Shack, Zales, and the Walmart-owned supermarket Amigo. Middle-class capitalism in Puerto Rico is gearing down, anticipating a dearth of consumers.

Electric-Shock Doctrine

Electrical-power outages are becoming more frequent. That same Friday I found myself two towns down from Fajardo, inching through highway intersections with no operating traffic signals, hoping oncoming traffic would stop long enough to let me through. Citing a study done by his office, PPD Representative Ramón Luis Cruz Burgos claimed that during the first 20 days of July 65 percent of Puerto Rico’s municipalities reported blackouts. Since the problems began to escalate last year, UTIER, a labor union that represents 3,600 of the 9,500 employees of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), has accused PREPA, whose bankruptcy is among the worst examples of the island’s debt crisis, of purposely not performing proper maintenance of electrical lines, as a result of workforce cutbacks. On the union’s website, UTIER president Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo said the lack of maintenance was intentionally designed to create a climate of public acceptance for the failing agency’s ultimate privatization. Small things, like trimming the overgrowth of tropical forestation that is quite noticeable on winding mountain roads, cause power lines to fall. On August 21, the Puerto Rico Senate announced an investigation into the increasing incidence of blackouts on the island.

“The problem is that workers can’t focus enough on maintenance. If a tree falls, the system goes down,” said attorney Rolando Emmanuelli Jiménez, who filed two concurrent lawsuits for UTIER on August 7, one of which claims La Junta is unconstitutional, while the other asserts that the Puerto Rican government violated the Contracts Clause of both the US and Puerto Rican Constitutions by passing laws that impaired the collective-bargaining agreement. The latter suit argues that when a previously existing agreement—which had been in dispute because vacation-accrual rights and sick-leave days had been taken away—came under the supervision of La Junta, that violated the contract clause of both Constitutions. The other suit claims that La Junta violates the appointment clause of the US Constitution, because members of the board were named despite conflicts of interests.

While there are no clear precedents to these claims, Emmanuelli argues that “there is no legal precedent to the imposition of this board.” On the same day, Aurelius Capital, a significant holder of Puerto Rico General Obligations bonds, sued to invalidate the island’s Title III bankruptcy provision, using a similar argument about the appointments clause.

Meanwhile, in early August in the southwestern town of Peñuelas, there was an uptick in violence by police against a stubborn group of 100 or so protesters fighting the deposit of toxic coal ash in local landfills. A report by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism revealed that the ash was transported by the energy company AES, which operates a Guayama, Puerto Rico–based electric-power plant, to the Dominican Republic last year, severely contaminating a small town, and was subsequently rerouted to a landfill in Peñuelas, a community that had in past years faced contamination from the island’s failed attempt to develop a petrochemical industry in the 1970s. The government says that coal produces about 15 percent of the total amount of electrical energy generated by PREPA, which warned in mid-July that if its use were disrupted, the cost of electricity would rise by 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, or 15 percent, and that this would also increase the number of blackouts.

This past July 4, the Puerto Rico government passed a law that said that a toxic element of coal ash, called fly ash, could not be deposited anywhere on the island. This prompted AES to turn to the use of a new product called Agremax, which mixed fly ash with other forms of ash and water. On August 6, a court in nearby Ponce dismissed a suit that claimed the dumping would cause health and environmental damage, saying that, according to Puerto Rico’s Environmental Quality Board, the dumping was in compliance with law and did not pose an environmental threat.

Gerardo Medina Rivera, an adjunct professor and activist at the University of Puerto Rico–Ponce and a Peñuelas resident, has been part of the protest encampment for its two-year existence and feels that, despite the court ruling, Agremax contains highly toxic elements and that the government should explore safer ways of producing energy. The encampment is similar to the one that protested the imposition of La Junta last year, and, like the university-based resistance, combines youth with labor and environmental activists and is organized in a horizontal rather than hierarchical structure.

“As time passes, the violence from the police and riot squad is increasing,” said Medina about the incident in August. “They used tear gas, were very physical. Puerto Rico is facing multiple shocks: economic, psychological, environmental. The state uses the power of the police and the trucks keep coming in.”

Accusations of Fraud

Manuel Natal Albelo, a member of the Puerto Rican House of Representatives, was one of the first elected officials to call for an independent audit of Puerto Rico’s debt, and he’s one of the island’s most outspoken critics of La Junta and the pro-statehood New Progressive Party. He’s been all over the local media accusing the Rosselló administration of orchestrating a cover-up of what he calls a “multimillion-dollar theft,” which he attributes to a revolving door between Banco Santander—which underwrote much of the explosion of debt during the 2008–12 Fortuño administration—and the Government Development Bank, which was recently dissolved and replaced by the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AFAAF in Spanish), designed to be a “fiscal agent” between the government and La Junta.

Using a trail of evidence previously reported by Hedge Clippers, Natal Albelo reveals that, before he became a Junta member, Carlos García moved back and forth between leadership roles at both Banco Santander and the Government Development Bank, where he approved an allegedly questionable emission of $18.3 billion of bonds, which resulted in $236 million in underwriting fees for Santander. Natal Albelo also points out that Gerardo Portela, the head of the AFAAF, was previously vice president of Santander Securities. Adding fuel to this fire are three other apparently incestuous connections: The vice-president under García during his time at GDB, Fernando Batlle, moved on to Santander after García’s departure, and his brother, Juan Carlos Batlle, replaced García as the head of the GDB. Finally, Jorge Irizarry, the leader of a group called Bonistas del Patio, a group of bondholders from Puerto Rico (local citizens not part of hedge- or vulture-fund groups), was GDB president preceding García’s tenure.

Natal Albelo’s suspicions were further stoked by an announcement on August 4—overshadowed that day by the drama over government-worker furloughs—that La Junta would create a committee to “investigate” the debt. This action, he says, was motivated by a recent petition in Title III bankruptcy court for a forensic debt investigation. That petition, which comes from a group of creditors holding unsecured debt, has unnerved both the government and La Junta, according to Natal Albelo.

“Back in January, when Rosselló eliminated the debt commission, he said the reason was that it was not needed, that it was a left issue, and in the end, it would all come out in court,” said Natal Albelo. “Now that the creditors in the bankruptcy court solicited a forensic investigation, the Rosselló administration presented a motion opposing the forensic investigation. The same day creditors raised the motion for discovery, AFAAF filed a motion against it, and the PNP-controlled Senate proposed a law…that has a provision that says that if there are loans, that were emitted in an illegal form, that were emitted by persons that did not have authorization to emit those loans, it doesn’t matter because this provision justifies or remedies them.”

At the Title III hearing, held on August 9 in San Juan, Judge Laura Taylor Swain redirected the request for a forensic audit to District Court Judge Judith Dein, who on August 22 ordered that the FOMB and the Committee of Uninsured Creditors find ways to coordinate a debt investigation involving Santander, Banco Popular, and the GDB, setting September 12 as a deadline. If La Junta were to conduct the investigation alone, both Emmanuelli and Natal Albelo said it would be tantamount to having the “goats in charge of watching the lettuce.”

Amid all this, the war of words between the governor and La Junta continues, with La Junta reserving the right to hold the governor in contempt in a court proceeding, and the governor, after some prodding by talk-radio star Rubén Sánchez, saying he was willing to go to jail for refusing to cooperate with the furlough plan.

“This is where the real political strategy of civil disobedience is finally available to the governor, the same thing that got the Navy out of Vieques,” said Emmanuelli sarcastically, referring to the thousands arrested protesting the military’s use of the island as a bombing range before it finally pulled out in 2003. “If Rosselló says he’ll go to jail, I’ll be out there in the streets supporting him!”

This unlikely scenario came closer to reality when, on Monday, La Junta filed suit against Roselló, claiming that neither he nor his then–FOMB representative, Elías Sánchez, raised an objection to the furloughs in March, when the fiscal plan was approved, nor in June, when the budget was approved. The suit claims that “Congress provided it sole and complete discretion regarding the fiscal plan certification decisions” and “Congress also provided that such certifications are beyond challenge.”

La Junta has made clear, as eloquently argued in an editorial on the San Juan–based news site Noticel, that it is a “control” board, hiding behind the euphemism “oversight and management.” While some may have characterized the absurd dance between the governor and La Junta as a charade, the decision made on this case will have the effect of law, guaranteeing the board’s irrevocable control.

Last week, events in Puerto Rico continued to reach new levels of tension and emotion as the island’s bankruptcy proceedings began, the university’s month-long strike was threatened by court maneuverings, and the long-held political prisoner Oscar López Rivera emerged from house arrest to assertively spread an anti-colonial message to a people long denied sovereignty.1

López Rivera, whose sentence was commuted in January by Barack Obama, had been in prison since 1981, convicted of seditious conspiracy and other offenses as a member of the FALN, a radical Puerto Rican independence group that carried out bombings in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, in the 1970s and early ’80s. Because of Puerto Ricans’ universal yearning for national pride, the still-defiant 74-year-old appeals to a broad swath of islanders regardless of political affiliation.2

Even though López Rivera was not convicted of any of the FALN’s bombings, he has been branded by some as a terrorist, and several corporate sponsors of this year’s Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York—including AT&T, the New York Yankees, and JetBlue—have withdrawn their sponsorship to protest the parade organizers’ decision to honor López Rivera.3

 Yet even as López Rivera denied he was a terrorist, pacifically aligning himself with Puerto Rico’s resistance movements as well as Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ solidarity, his return home was almost overshadowed by the dizzying pace of events. Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood government, in conjunction with the US-imposed Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB, or La Junta, as it is commonly known on the island), invoked Title III of the PROMESA act to launch bankruptcy-like proceedings and moved to stifle dissent as the looming reality of austerity cuts hung over the island’s 3.4 million residents.4

The tension-filled month began with protest on May Day in San Juan, when several streams of demonstrators—worker and student groups, faculty members, a feminist contingent, street artists, and an increasingly politicized middle class—coming from different points around the city converged at the Milla de Oro (Golden Mile) in the Hato Rey business district. The crowd, numbering tens of thousands, came to hear a mix of speeches and musical acts on a stage set up in front of the World Plaza building, which once housed the failed Westernbank and which in April had acquired a new tenant: the FOMB, which had been put into place by Congress’s PROMESA act last year.5

The protest was massive and peaceful; there was an almost festive atmosphere. Street-theater actor Israel Lugo, a University of Puerto Rico alumnus whose group The Tactical Operations Unit of Police Clowns participated in the hope of cooling tensions and underlining the sadness of repression, felt that “despite the indignation we shared, we were having a day where there was some hope.”6

Yet just as the event was coming to an end, a sudden surge of unsanctioned vandalism and police violence left clouds of tear gas choking protesters, media members, and march observers and mediators alike. By week’s end, the governor and the FOMB invoked Title III of PROMESA, beginning a legal process leading to a form of bankruptcy—and intensifying the air of uncertainty over the island’s future.7

The Milla de Oro represents the triumph of modernity that US colonialism intended to bring to Puerto Rico in the 1950s and ’60s. A palm-tree-lined boulevard called Luis Muñoz Rivera Avenue, festooned with glass-box buildings housing banks and corporate offices, signaled a level of prosperity that didn’t exist in the rest of the Caribbean. Fifty years later, the island territory is deep in the throes of a fiscal crisis driven by a $70-plus billion bond debt, as well as an additional $49 billion pension obligation to government employees.8

The PROMESA board’s original model was the one created in the wake of New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis, whose financier-driven management solutions greatly aided the rise of Donald Trump as a major real estate player. The one that intervened in the recent Detroit bankruptcy produced debt-cutting settlements, but that debt was only $18-20 billion, and, like the one in New York, it was imposed by elected officials who were elected by local residents. In Puerto Rico, PROMESA, imposed to tame an exponentially larger debt, is viewed as an external force that is symptomatic of the lack of democracy on the island and emblematic of Puerto Rico’s second-class status.9

The crowd gathered around the stage on Muñoz Rivera Avenue was unaware that just around the corner on Bolivar Street, masked rogue demonstrators were throwing stones at the main headquarters of Banco Popular, the island’s largest bank, shattering some of its largest windows. Police—including regular forces and the riot squad—reacted slowly, moving into the area and marching en masse toward the main stage down the block. They launched tear-gas canisters and pushed into the crowd as stage announcer Millie Gil, a local media personality, was desperately calling for calm. “Don’t be provoked.… We don’t want the headlines of tomorrow’s newspapers to say that we lost control of a peaceful demonstration!” she pleaded.10

But the police, after a negotiated standoff, engaged in continual confrontations with protesters, pushing, striking, and gassing peaceful demonstrators and masked provocateurs alike. Images of vandals, tear gas, and students running under late-day thunderstorms dominated the evening news. It was a tailor-made media op for the rightist statehood party (PNP) government. Governor Ricardo Rosselló held a press conference denouncing the vandalism, but he recklessly lumped the vandals together with the marchers. His tone of moral opprobrium was underscored the next morning in another staged media tableau that showed him helping workers sweep up shattered glass in front of the Banco Popular tower.11

The mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, as well as Representative Manuel Natal Albelo, who was one of the first elected officials to champion the idea of an independent debt audit, quickly denounced the governor’s equation of peaceful protesters with vandals. The ACLU, led by William Ramírez, held a lengthy press conference in which Ramírez, who was still recovering from the effects of tear gas he was exposed to while acting as a negotiator and observer, displayed tear-gas canisters and even rubber bullets that had been used by the police. His statement directly contradicted one made earlier by police Superintendent Michelle Hernández, who denied their use. Ramírez also criticized violations of protocol (including no warnings, and plainclothes officers not wearing badges) and excessive use of force.12

In addition, eyebrows were raised when a lawsuit was filed by Banco Popular on the afternoon of the protests and disturbances, naming 42 plaintiffs, including community organizations, labor unions, and “unknown demonstrators.” Ariadna Godreau-Aubert, a human-rights lawyer who is part of a Legal Action Committee that is trying to draw attention to SLAPP lawsuits, or frivolous suits brought to intimidate people who take part in demonstrations, found the suit to be highly irregular and part of a disturbing pattern.13

“This suit came out just an hour after the events, and even the president of the Banco Popular said that the lawsuit was made in a preventive way, that they had it ready in case something happened. You can’t have a demand ready in case something happens—lawsuits exist to remedy real damages and include people that caused real damages, not something prepared or speculative,” said Godreau-Aubert. She pointed out that a previous suit against demonstrators engaging in another protest in late April was dismissed because of lack of evidence.14

This past Friday, Governor Rosselló signed into law revisions in the penal code that will increase criminal penalties against demonstrators who wear masks, seemingly aimed against students and young protesters; will make it a crime to obstruct construction sites (up to three years in prison), aimed at union protests; will impose a fine of up to $30,000 for interfering with tourist activities, spurred perhaps by the closure of an access road to the airport on May Day, and for obstructing access to or functions in health or government offices or learning institutions.15

This last element was particularly relevant because, just days after the governor and the PROMESA board invoked the Title III clause and its modified bankruptcy provision, the education secretary announced that 179 public schools around the island would be closed. While the continued population exodus from the island has pushed down the number of enrolled students, the closures will still heavily affect poor and working-class areas and place on many families an increased burden of extra commuting time to more distant schools. Some schools and parents are already announcing plans to protest.16

Title III and Its Discontents

 Governor Rosselló’s decision to request the invocation of Title III was met by derision from many political observers, who noted his previous insistence that the island could pay its debt in a restructuring process that would not require bankruptcy proceedings. He has also been harassed by the centrist Commonwealth Party Senator Eduardo Bhatia, who filed an injunction to force the release of a copy of the proposed budget the governor sent to José Carrión, the head of the FOMB, arguing that the island’s citizens are entitled to full transparency. Yet most observers seemed unsure of what to expect—for the moment, the 22 known litigation proceedings against the government to collect debt, which had been frozen, will be absorbed into the framework of Title III. The Puerto Rican government and several financial-sector observers have given reassurances that Puerto Rico will now engage in an “orderly” process of resolving its debts, but no one is quite sure what that will mean.17

The pseudo-bankruptcy proceedings, which could take from six months to several years, began on May 17 and are presided over by New York District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain, an African American appointed by Bill Clinton in 1996. Swain, who spent most of the session establishing rules for arguments—and quirkily banning the use of all colognes and fragrances among those in the courtroom because of her allergies—is faced with a process that has no legal precedent.18

The primary order of business for her will be to focus on the fate of the general obligation bonds ($12.7 billion), which are backed by a constitutional provision, and the COFINA bonds ($17.3 billion), which are tied to an 11.5 percent sales tax imposed several years ago. While the matters will be considered “jointly,” creditors from the two sides are warring against each other, each claiming priority.19

For Rolando Emmanuelli Jiménez, a bankruptcy lawyer who has become well-known on the island for his explainer lectures and book about PROMESA, the move to Title III was “badly needed, but you don’t celebrate what is badly needed.”20

There are many troublesome aspects about the debt-restructuring negotiations: Pensioners remain a potent force and are attempting to claim a higher priority on a debt that adds $49 billion to the already contested $70-plus billion bond debt; the government may be forced to sell off a substantial amount of its properties to lessen the blow of the apparent “haircuts,” or downward negotiation of payouts to creditors; collective-bargaining agreements with unions representing government workers may be suspended to renegotiate contracts; and the “absolute priority” rule in PROMESA for the general-obligation debt may mean it must be paid in full.21

Emmanuelli Jiménez sees some silver linings in the process. He thinks the audit report that will be done under PROMESA—even though it will not be anywhere near as thorough as an independent audit—may find that billions of dollars of COFINA debt could be declared “non-priority debt,” which could further postpone payment of it or even result in some of its being eliminated. He also thinks that Swain may be sympathetic to ordinary Puerto Ricans in some of her rulings, since, “as an African American, she knows about marginalization and discrimination.”22

“But let’s face it, she’s an imperial judge,” continued Emmanuelli Jiménez, albeit one, “like the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández says, with garras suaves [soft claws].” The problem remains a political one, in which Governor Rosselló, he says, will be limited to “carrying water for the Junta and the judge. The governor has practically ceded control of the immense majority of the issues that have to do with the development of public policy. When the Junta approves the budget the legislature can’t do much because it’s already been certified. The whole democratic process breaks down.”23

Another political problem emerged for the Junta last week with the release of a new report, “The Looting of Puerto Rico’s Infrastructure Fund,” by the Hedge Clippers, a watchdog group that, according to its website, is “working to expose the mechanisms hedge funds and billionaires use to influence government and politics.” The report systematically details how FOMB member Carlos García, in his previous roles as a Banco Santander executive and later president of Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank, diverted $1 billion intended for infrastructure improvement and maintenance to “a series of financial transactions that were intended to bolster the island’s credit rating, but which became tied up in the issuance of billions in new debt.” The same day, Puerto Rico AFL-CIO president José Rodríguez Báez called for García’s resignation.24

The Road Ahead: More Austerity Cuts, More Protests

 Despite the appearance of an orderly debt-restructuring process, the situation in Puerto Rico remains dire. The problem is that making sustainable payments on the debt requires austerity measures that will undercut any stability that the Title III process promises. The balanced-budget requirement for the next four years, for example, is likely to provoke severe crises, with looming battles over which services—the university, the police, health care—will be deemed “essential.”25

“The requirement of a balanced budget could be achieved hypothetically, but only under conditions that will have catastrophic effects,” said Ian Seda-Irizarry, an economist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, especially given “the explicit vision of the FOMB regarding the need to cut government spending in an economy that is in free-fall and in areas that will not affect everybody equally, with the working class and small businesses bearing the brunt of the adjustment.”26

“The new budget goes into effect on July 1,” said Emmanuelli Jiménez. “Most municipalities will be affected, budgets will be slashed, [including] the [proposed $450 million] cuts to the university; the new series of taxes and fines; health care. It’s going to be very difficult for the middle class. Who’s going to be able to pay both the car and the mortgage?”27

This past weekend student assemblies in seven out of the 11 campuses, including the main branch in Rio Piedras, rejected a preliminary agreement with government officials to reopen the university gates, prolonging the strike. The proposed university budget cuts still loom—Junta president José Carrión announced on May 12 that the cuts, estimated at $450-512 million over the next eight years, were “non-negotiable”—but the FOMB board has since agreed to meet with students on May 24. Meanwhile, on May 22, Judge Lauracelis Roques Arroyo—who had earlier ruled that the university must reopen to comply with a suit brought by some students who argued that their right to go to classes has been impeded by the strike—threatened interim university president Nivia Fernández with arrest if she didn’t come up with a concrete plan for reopening. The next day, Fernández resigned, along with three members of the university’s governing board.28

Another general strike is rumored for June 11, the day a plebiscite to vote on the island’s status is to be held. The plebiscite remains mired in controversy, with commonwealth and independence parties urging a boycott, and zero buzz coming from Washington, where Congress would consider the results.29

“The general feeling is always going to be uncertainty, fear,” says first-year law student Carlos Sosa. “We are facing something that could affect all the sectors of the population, not just the students. And that same uncertainty about how it will happen, how fast it will happen, the fear that can be reflected, is a little overwhelming, oppressive. But you can see that there’s a multi-sectoral population united to confront this.”30

Aurora Muriente Pastrana, who is both a law-school student and adjunct professor in the humanities department at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), had come to the steps of Puerto Rico’s capitol building on April 18 with a group of university students, professors, workers, and activists to raise their voices against the passage of a bill that would eliminate the government-funded Debt Audit Commission, which was created in 2015 to audit the island territory’s $70-plus billion in debt. In solidarity with a group called the Citizen Front for Auditing the Debt, the growing crowd began to stir when representatives of the Citizen Front were not allowed access to the building to observe the bill’s hearings, as is their constitutional right.1

Muriente, who is part of a movement that has shut down university operations since March, said the crowd was chanting “We’re Citizens, Not Criminals!” with some urging the police to join them, since their pensions were also threatened by austerity measures. But then, in a poignant echo of the violence that occurred on these same steps in 2010, the demonstrators were, without warning, beset by nightstick-wielding riot police, who fired a barrage of pepper spray at them.2

“I was recording what was happening, and the spray reached my hands and arms and I breathed in a lot of it. I had to receive medical assistance,” Muriente said. “Other students and professors were sprayed in the face and hit with billy clubs indiscriminately.”3

The return of violence to the capitol steps was a reminder that the US Department of Justice had investigated the Puerto Rico Police Department in 2011 for use of excessive force, which led to a consent decree that placed the department under DOJ supervision. According to Puerto Rico ACLU president William Ramírez, the use of the spray was in violation of the DOJ-enforced agreement with the PRPD. It’s not clear whether the police were emboldened by the recent statement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that such federal investigations of police abuses would be re-evaluated. At any rate, tensions are rising again in Puerto Rico, now that the Fiscal Control Board—which was created by the US Congress’s PROMESA bill to supervise all government expenditures, and which took power in January—has begun to push for austerity measures, such as a $512 million cut in university funding by the year 2025.4

Bernat Tort, who teaches in the philosophy and women’s and gender studies departments at UPR, was hit in the face with pepper spray when he resisted the riot squad’s attempts to push demonstrators away from the building. “We were prepared for the possibility that they might use [pepper spray], but no one was prepared for the stinging pain, all over the body,” said Tort. “I lost my sight for 40 minutes.” Tort, who belongs to a group called Self-Convened Professors in Resistance and Solidarity, feels strongly about supporting an audit of the debt. “The audit would reveal 1) how much of the debt is illegal, 2) who is responsible for putting together the illegal bonds that were sold, and 3) who was involved in the underwriting,” he said.5

Both a preliminary report issued last summer by the Debt Audit Commission and a report issued by Saqib Bhatti and Carrie Sloan of the ReFund America Project found that some $36.9 billion of Puerto Rico’s debt was illegal because it either involved “extra-constitutional” debt saddled with predatory interest rates or “toxic” interest-rate swaps. Such findings are most likely behind the rushed bill just passed and signed into law by the current governor, Ricardo Rosselló, to repeal the legislation creating the Debt Audit Commission, as well as passage of a new resolution by Rosselló’s party ally, Senator Larry Seilhamer, requesting that the comptroller general of the United States audit the debt to comply with PROMESA.6

While this year’s student movement shares some similarities with the one that took place in 2010, there are important differences, largely having to do with the increased urgency of the island’s fiscal crisis. “Back in 2010, students were fighting against a raise in tuition and an additional charge of $800 annually,” said María de Lourdes Vaello, a first-year law student who was also at the capitol on Tuesday. “The purpose of the university is to provide a high-quality education to the middle and lower classes, but now we’re facing cuts that threaten the very existence of the institution. It’s a much bigger moment.”7

Tort feels that the 2010 movement was important because it abandoned the hierarchical structure of the old left in favor of horizontalism, creating a new organizational base. “The difference is, despite the fact that the mobilization is happening over the cuts to the UPR budget, they’re now linking to the general issue of the austerity measures imposed by the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board,” or FOMB, he said. “It’s the base for what we hope to be a national movement against austerity measures in favor of the debt audit, in favor of a moratorium on payment on those portions of the debt that are illegal or illegitimate, and in favor of restructuring the debt so that the payments are linked to investments in economic development and the common good of the country.”8

The FOMB’s Spanish sobriquet, “La Junta,” implies dictatorial control, helping to make it an easy target for disenchantment among most Puerto Ricans, who see the board members as outsiders despite the presence of some Puerto Ricans on it. There is popular awareness that board member Carlos García was a past head of Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank and an executive of Banco Santander, which underwrote deals worth up to $61.2 billion of the island’s debt. There is also widespread skepticism about the board’s newly appointed executive director, Ukrainian-American Natalie Jaresko, who will be paid $625,000 a year. She has no experience in the Caribbean, and ethical questions have been raised about her management of a $150 million US-taxpayer-financed investment fund that she ran before becoming Ukraine’s finance minister in 2014.9

“Frankly, my opinion is that Puerto Rico right now is not a democracy,” said Vaello. “This is the closest to a dictatorship that we’ve had on this island, and I think it’s being administered behind closed doors, with a lack of transparency. We have to start a series of political discussions and reevaluate what kind of country we want and how we are going to construct it.”10

While many progressives in Puerto Rico feel the economic crisis and growing inequality are more pressing than the status issue, the latter is still central to the mainstream political debate. A referendum scheduled for June 11 on the island’s status remains shrouded in controversy. On April 13, the US Justice Department rejected a plebiscite proposal because of unclear wording and omission of the current commonwealth status as an option. So this Tuesday, Governor Rosselló of the statehood party (PNP) delivered an amended version that included the current commonwealth/unincorporated territory option, along with statehood and independence (or “free association”). Neither the commonwealth (PPD) nor independence (PIP) parties support the plebiscite process, and the date has not yet been finalized.

Given the economic and political crises that face Puerto Rico, it’s logical and perhaps inevitable that a movement arising from its 11-campus university system would transcend immediate issues and become the vanguard for a national mobilization. The university—particularly its main campus, in Rio Piedras—is legendary because it was the scene of protests in the 1940s for social and economic justice, in the 1960s and ’70s over the Vietnam War and the Independence movement, and in the 1990s over the US Navy occupation of the offshore island of Vieques. But the university is also a national symbol of culture, tradition, and pride.11

“In a colony where the manipulation of information has been the order of the day for 115 years, to have access to a university education has been the most powerful tool of the less-favored sectors,” said Muriente. “It’s been the home of intellectuals, artists, ballet dancers, architects, journalists, anthropologists, and poets. In a country where we don’t have international representation, or even an embassy, it’s a bridge to the rest of the world.”12

A new deadline for the fiscal crisis is approaching: On May 1, the freeze extended by the PROMESA board on lawsuits over portions of outstanding debt will expire. Of the two debt-settlement mechanisms that PROMESA provides for, the Title III option, which invokes a modified bankruptcy procedure, seems most likely because it provides for an automatic stay on any legal action by creditors. But it also requires the formulation of a debt-restructuring plan. And any such plan would be much more advantageous to the Puerto Rican people if potential illegalities were revealed—as they were in the case of Detroit, which saved millions of dollars.13

A report in Reuters last Friday said that lawyers for the Puerto Rico government were drafting an agreement “to avoid invoking bankruptcy protections in the short term.” Yet last week, Puerto Rico’s government dissolved its own debt commission, which had found promising evidence of illegality. In its place, the Senate, claiming the $2 million expense for the debt commission was too costly, passed a resolution requiring the US comptroller general to audit the debt, which the Senate claims is provided for by PROMESA. Opposition party (PDP) Senator Eduardo Bhatia countered by telling El Nuevo Día, “Section 411 of PROMESA does not say that, it does not say that an audit will be done; it says that a report will be made on how the debt is increasing and decreasing, and that it will have some elements. That’s not a debt audit; it’s a debt report.”14

 On Friday, the Citizen Front called for exploring the possibility of initiating a “citizen’s participatory audit,” a strategy that has been used successfully in Chile, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Romania.15

While one deadline looms for the technocrats, politicians, and revolving-door finance executives—who will crunch numbers that could mean life or death for 3.4 million US citizens in Puerto Rico—a movement led, but not limited to, university students will be calling for a different set of priorities, ones that put people first. Because on May 1, students, professors, university workers, labor unions, public-school teachers, religious groups, and those who hold out hope for democracy on the island will be calling for a general strike.16

“The UPR strike has managed to create a public conversation, a debate that is obliging everyone to take a side,” said Tort.17

Hillary Clinton’s decisive victory over Bernie Sanders in the Puerto Rico Democratic primary on Sunday was not surprising. She won for the same reason she enjoys strong support from blacks and Latinos in the States: Previously established political networks that get out the vote, and the loyalty to local leaders and elected officials, translate into her margin of victory. Despite his more progressive policies, Sanders is not strongly enough embedded in this ground-level political discourse.

Yet the positions they take on Puerto Rico represent two competing strands in the fight to save the island from Republicans in Congress, who want to impose conservative, pro-business economic growth models, and hedge- and vulture-fund owners, who want to have their way with Puerto Rico’s wealth and people. Clinton reluctantly endorses a debt-restructuring bill that would impose a fiscal-oversight board with colonial powers; Sanders favors emergency action from the Treasury Department in the form of loans and access to Chapter 9 bankruptcy.

 There is a general consensus for many of the parties involved in the rapidly unfolding drama known as the Puerto Rican debt crisis that July 1 represents the clock striking midnight, the point at which we enter the potential chaos of unbridled bondholder lawsuits and even more draconian government cuts in services to the unincorporated territory inhabited by 3.5 million US citizens. At that point, Puerto Rico is expected to default on an $800 million debt payment of general-obligation bonds, which will spur the owners of that debt—whose payment is given priority over other governmental expenditures by the island’s Constitution—into legal action. This was ostensibly the impetus for the House Committee on Natural Resources to release the final version of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, a k a PROMESA, on May 18, a bipartisan effort that drew sharp responses from various interest groups on the right and left.

The debt-crisis battle features a dizzying array of combatants: First are the bondholders, who are roughly divided into hedge- and vulture-fund owners mainly invested in what is called COFINA debt, which is secured by a share of the island’s 11.5 percent sales tax; and other hedge fund and mutual-fund owners, who own general obligation (GO) bonds.

The latter group, represented by the lobbying efforts of the Koch-brothers-backed America Future Fund, Main Street Bondholders and 60 Plus organizations, supposedly consists of “average” Puerto Rican and US senior-citizen bondholders. But as The New York Times wrote last December, “Puerto Ricans own less than one-fifth of the island’s debt,” and “most of the group’s revenue comes from a few large, anonymous contributors.” Koch-affiliated groups are not happy with the PROMESA bill because it requires restructuring of the GO debt, even though it is backed by Puerto Rican constitutional guarantees, and they have voiced loud displeasure.

Vulture-fund groups, many of whom bought bonds as cheaply as 30 cents on the dollar and which have more to gain by the potential of acquiring government-owned assets as part of a settlement, seem to be happy with the bill. Democrats like Nancy Pelosi strongly backed PROMESA because the bill “achieved a restructuring process that can work,” even with its poison pill of austerity measures that include lowering the minimum wage to $4.25 for workers under 25 (if the governor chooses to enact this provision). Republicans like the sharply conservative Puerto Rico–born Raúl Labrador and Rob Bishop, who shepherded the bill through the House as committee chair, are satisfied, since the bill left out any provision for healthcare parity and satisfied the Republican mantra of shrinking government spending and mandating a business-friendly economic growth plan.

But Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro García Padilla, who in April signed on to an emergency moratorium law justifying the island’s default on a $422 million payment due on May 1—along with many mainstream island politicians, activists, labor unions, and community groups—is deeply unhappy about PROMESA’s fiscal-oversight board. The board became a fait accompli in Congress after the failure of repeated attempts by Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in the House, Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi, to gain support for his debt-restructuring bill after it was attacked as a “bailout” by bondholder lobbyists.

The seven-member oversight board—four of whom would be appointed by Republicans, two by Democrats, and one by the president, with only one required to maintain a residence in Puerto Rico—would have so much authority over the island’s fiscal and governmental affairs that it is seen as a throwback to the early days of US colonial rule, when the governor was a US military officer appointed by the president and the legislature was divided into an upper and lower house, with the upper house completely controlled by Washington.

Despite some pushback from Representative Luis Gutiérrez and Senator Bob Menéndez, who called the PROMESA bill “neocolonial,” several members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have endorsed it. “When measured against the worsening crisis in Puerto Rico, this legislation is necessary,” said Representative Raúl Grijalva, an outspoken immigration-reform activist, like Gutiérrez. So there is a growing sense in the Beltway media echo-chamber that Washington has spoken on the issue, and all Puerto Rico has left is to hope the bill passes to begin an orderly process of debt restructuring, with at least a temporary stay in legal action by bondholders. But all this posturing reflects little or no sense of what Puerto Ricans think or how they may react if the bill is signed into law. The rhetorical flourish on PROMESA is that it will “save” Puerto Rico, but a growing chorus is not convinced, and is challenging the colonial dynamic, as well as the legality of the debt itself.

The Diaspora Strikes Back

Despite the bleak prospects, Puerto Ricans on the island and on the mainland are beginning to promote solutions that are not dependent on Congressional legislation. At a May event called “Pueblo for Puerto Rico: A Teach-in on Puerto Rico’s Economic and Political Present and Future,” Héctor Figueroa, president of the 32BJ SEIU union, which sponsored the teach-in, made it clear that a just resolution of the debt crisis required a broad-based movement that embraced issues affecting working families and people of color in the United States. Announcing Vamos4PR, a coalition including labor unions, community organizations, and activist groups like the Hedge Clippers, Figueroa said, “Today, as we build a movement that is fighting for a minimum wage of $15 an hour, that is demanding climate justice, that wants to make sure that black lives matter, we too want to have a movement that fights for PR, that makes sure that Puerto Rican lives—whether they are here as migrants, here for many generations, or on the island—also matter to the progressive movement in the US.”

The gathering at 32BJ was a response to the over-emphasis on Congress and to previous attempts to organize the diaspora, including one held in New York just a few weeks before at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies. The Hunter event featured a panel with Antonio Weiss—Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s point person on the debt crisis—that heavily centered on Diaspo-Rican elected officials like US Representatives Luis Gutiérrez, Nydia Velásquez, and José Serrano, as well as emerging leaders like New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

The Vamos4PR teach-in was in part a reaction to the perception that previous gatherings in Orlando and New York organized by Democratic elected officials—who have all endorsed Hillary Clinton—were too in line with the party’s agenda and did not include broad-enough sectors of the diaspora. “The labor movement is more independent and can put pressure on elected officials to get them to be more militant on this issue and raise the stakes,” said Angelo Falcón, president of the National Institute of Latino Policy. “Melissa Mark-Viverito keeps calling for civil disobedience—I’m waiting for her to disrupt something on this issue.”

Julio López Varona, a Make the Road and Hedge Clippers–associated activist who hosted much of the Vamos4PR event, was caustic about the gathering at Hunter. “That meeting boggled my mind for many reasons. They didn’t invite us, and they didn’t invite unions or the most active groups when it comes to Puerto Rico, like A Call to Action [a consortium of grassroots and pro-independence activists based in New York] and Hedge Clippers. That’s a problem. And then you’re putting at the forefront of the meeting Antonio Weiss as one of your presenters. That also raises concerns, and we feel that has more to do with Nydia [Velásquez] and Luis Gutiérrez trying to push for some sort of Congressional action so they look good, than about the Puerto Rican people.”

Weiss, although perceived by some Democrats as representing Puerto Rico’s interests in fighting for pensioners’ priorities and advocating for Democratic proposals like an earned-income tax credit, was the subject of a Hedge Clippers report last September. That report questioned his impartiality, in view of the fact that Weiss went from a position at Lazard Frères, a firm that had been active in buying Puerto Rican debt, to his job at Treasury—for which he was opposed by Elizabeth Warren in 2014, who was very uncomfortable with Weiss’s mergers and acquisitions background. Weiss, who received a $21.2 million golden parachute from Lazard upon leaving, has an eclectic history as both an investment banker and former publisher of The Paris Review, which suggests that he might be a more liberal thinker. But as Warren argued, the overrepresentation of the Wall Street view is not desirable in domestic economic policymaking.

The Debt: Odious… and Illegal?

 One of the great ironies of the debt crisis is that following its victory over Spain in 1898, the United States successfully argued against responsibility for debts incurred by Spain when Washington was granted possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. This was so-called “odious debt,” because it had not been incurred in the interests of the people in those colonies. While in some senses one could argue that the debt taken on by the Puerto Rican government over the past few decades was in the interest of the people, since it kept government operating and provided services, some argue that aspects of it are illegal, and could thus be annulled in court.

At the Hunter College conference, journalist Juan González, taking advantage of an opportunity to question Weiss while on the same panel, asked the Treasury official about attempts to uncover illegality in the debt. “There are legal theories about the legality of the debt, and the legal theories can play out in a court of law, and it is possible that one could pursue legal cases that would not provide any protection for essential services,” said Weiss, who warned, “There is no time left. If Congress is prepared to enact legislation which allows the debt to be reduced to an amount that the economy can sustain, we need to pursue that, because anything that plays out in a court of law will take, in our judgment, a decade.”

 Figueroa felt that auditing the debt was key in Vamos4PR’s fight to prevent Washington—heavily lobbied by bondholders—from determining the island’s fate. “We need to have a forensic investigation independently of those who issued the debt, of those who own the debt, of those who are speculating with the debt, to understand the extent to which this debt is chaining the people of Puerto Rico to a future of misery and poverty,” he insisted in his speech at the 32BJ teach-in.

Puerto Rico labor leader Roberto Pagán, who participated in the teach-in, agreed. “I haven’t met with treasury or Antonio Weiss. I think that he is wrong, and we are looking for the opportunity to sit down and present our vision, including audit of the debt,” he said in a phone interview with The Nation. Pagán is also the president of a government commission established last July that authorized an audit of the last 45 years of government bond transactions. But the commission has suffered from underfunding, and only began operating in January of this year.

On June 1 the commission released what it called a “Pre-audit Survey” of the two most recent debt issues, the spectacular $3.5 billion general-obligation bond sale of 2014, which took place after the bonds were graded as junk by major ratings agencies, and one issued in 2015. The report contained several findings that suggest possible illegalities: Throughout the crisis it has been casually stated that the Puerto Rican government ran into trouble because it borrowed to cover deficits; indeed, has borrowed over $30 billion to do so, and may have been doing it since 1979. But the report points out that the island’s Constitution “explicitly prohibits” budget deficits.

 There’s more: The audit commission found that Puerto Rico is spending somewhere between 14 and 25 percent of government revenues on debt repayment—this is significant, because the Constitution prohibits spending more than 15 percent. It also prohibits most bond sales that would mature more than 30 years after their issue, yet the commission found that, because of the terms of the 2014 sale, debt issued in 1987 will not be paid off until 2035, 48 years later. This practice of refinancing mature debt with new debt, called “scoop and toss,” seems to be systematic.

The debt-audit strategy—taken up by Argentina and Greece during their debt crises—gained strength last October when Hostos Community College professor and lawyer Nelson Torres-Ríos brought up the 1885 Litchfield v. Ballou case, which held that bonds created in violation of a municipal debt limit do not have to be repaid. In the Detroit bankruptcy proceedings, according to the pre-audit survey, Litchfield, among other cases, was used to show how evasion of the debt limit could invalidate some debt.

The Puerto Rican government’s failure to issue financial statements and provide information about the most recent bond sales has led to public pressure for information, as symbolized by the suit by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism demanding details of the $3.5 billion issue in 2014. Despite a ruling in the center’s favor almost a year ago, the Puerto Rico Government Development Bank has not released the information. By June 2, the center, with support from various civil society groups, had helped arrange three public hearings supporting the creation of a transparency law.

It was congressional calls for transparency and detailed information—led most memorably by Senator Orrin Hatch in hearings this year—that led to PROMESA’s fiscal-oversight board. Representative Bishop has been clear that part of the board’s function will be to audit the debt, but with a crucial difference: “The fiscal oversight board audit isn’t coming from a perspective of protecting the interests of PR,” said Carlos Ramos Gonzalez, law professor at the Inter-American School of Law in San Juan and author of a report on the constitutionality of the fiscal-oversight board. “It’s a perspective of protecting the interests of the creditors. For me, that’s very clear.”

It is apparent that the authors of PROMESA are well aware that an audit might find parts of the debt illegal, even though that’s not exactly headline news in the US media. Pagán mentioned that his collaborators have noticed a specific clause in the House bill that would seem to override any findings made by his audit commission. It appears under the “Liability Claim” section: “The term ‘Liability Claim’ means, as it relates to a Liability—(A) right to payment, whether or not such right is reduced to judgment, liquidated, unliquidated, fixed, contingent, matured, unmatured, disputed, undisputed, legal, equitable, secured, or unsecured.” [Emphasis added.]

The Supremes, the Fed, and Colonial Responsibility

There are two Supreme Court cases, to be ruled on soon, that may affect the debate. One of them is the appeal to last year’s court ruling that struck down Governor García Padilla’s 2014 Puerto Rico Public Corporations Debt Enforcement and Recovery Act. That bill attempted to set the terms of debt restructuring in the absence of bankruptcy protection for Puerto Rico, which was mysteriously taken away by Congress in 1984. The other is Puerto Rico v. Sánchez Valle. A favorable ruling in Sánchez would acknowledge that Puerto Rico does indeed have the limited autonomy supposedly granted in its 1952 Constitution, which would give the island the right to restructure its own debt.

Yet even if the Court finds in favor of García Padilla’s law and says that Puerto Rico should be able to restructure its own debt, most legal observers I talked to said it would be irrelevant. “Let’s say the Supreme Court says, ‘Puerto Rico, you have the authority to do this,’ ” said SEIU attorney Alvin Velásquez at the Vamos4PR event. “Congress can easily come in and say, ‘That’s nice, Puerto Rico. We’re going to impose PROMESA anyway.’ The supremacy clause says Congress has complete authority over the territories—it is completely plenary, and it can do whatever it wants.”

Another possibility available for Puerto Rico is pushing the executive branch to act. This has been done by Representatives Nydia Velázquez and Luis Gutiérrez and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders; all have brought up the fact that the Federal Reserve can be “creative” by lending money to Puerto Rico to buy back some of its debt and force creditors to sell at a discount. But that would, of course, be perceived as a “bailout,” which is one word that Democrats seem desperate to avoid during an election year, not to mention that it is one of the GOP’s unflagging talking points about “wasteful government spending.” This would also seem to explain the lack of “political will” President Obama seems to have in taking executive action.

One very sensitive issue is how resolution of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis will affect the stability of the troubled municipal-bond market; there could be a ripple effect on other distressed municipalities in the United States (New Jersey Governor and Trump booster Chris Christie had been pushing for a fiscal-control board for Atlantic City, but a recent compromise granted the state “broad authority” in monitoring its finances). In remarks to a C-SPAN panel of reporters last month, Rob Bishop made it very clear that PROMESA was designed so as not to set a precedent for any debt problems in the states.

Some might hope that this drawn-out drama has been part of a strategy: that Obama has been biding his time this election year. But, as Antonio Weiss says, we’re running out of time. The July 1 default could trigger a cycle of hospital closures, electric-grid instability, infrastructural collapse, and emergency-service breakdowns. In addition, the government pension fund is $43.2 billion in debt. Even under PROMESA, public-sector pensions won’t be protected, which means they could be severely cut. This would trigger a crisis among the island’s increasingly elderly population, much of which was employed by the government.

The debt crisis has certainly allowed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to further distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton. In a statement issued last month, the Vermont senator denounced PROMESA’s proposed control board as an ugly manifestation of Puerto Rico’s colonial reality. He has since proposed legislation that would allow the Federal Reserve to grant Puerto Rico loans and bankruptcy protection. Hillary Clinton has merely expressed concern about the powers of the fiscal-oversight board and the threat to the island’s minimum wage; she says “we must move forward on the legislation,” because there is seemingly no other option than the House bill to alleviate Puerto Rican suffering.

 It’s unclear whether Clinton’s position is related to the fact that some vulture- and hedge-fund operators have been major contributors to her campaign. They include Marc Lasry, who as late as last November was continuing to buy up Puerto Rico bonds. Two weeks ago, she lost the support of the progressive Mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, and LGBT activist Pedro Julio Serrano. In withdrawing their endorsement, both cited Clinton’s lack of opposition to the oversight board. She did, however just win the endorsement of Governor García Padilla.

Who Is Responsible?

 What progressives in the United States and Puerto Rico agree on is that pressure must be put on Washington to own up to its responsibility in the debt crisis. Washington’s colonial control over the country’s economy helped create this situation; UCLA professor César Ayala says that Puerto Rico would rank next to last on a list of world countries in GNP-to-GDP ratio. Only $67 billion out of the island’s $100 billion in earnings stays in Puerto Rico. Ayala estimates that between 2004 and 2013, US multinationals repatriated $313 billion from Puerto Rico, which is enough to repay the debt fourfold.

This loss of generated wealth, in which Puerto Ricans are a captive market for consumer goods sold by Walmart, fast-food chains, and the like, has translated into the need for government borrowing, which was sold to US pension holders without any understanding of the artificial and insolvent nature of Puerto Rico’s economy. Even as the debt piled up, corporate profits for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, which has major operations in Puerto Rico, continued unabated. In late May, another Big Pharma brand, Roche, announced it was investing $60 million to increase production on the island, creating a whopping 40 jobs in the process. “While Puerto Rico was going into debt, and its creditors could receive payments, Congress did not worry,” said law professor Ramos. “When the moment came when this could no longer be done, then PR is irresponsible.”

While everyone agrees there is a shared responsibility for the crisis, and that a series of elected Puerto Rican governments played a role in continuing to amass debt, it can also be argued that they had no choice and were acting much like many US state governments and municipalities in recent years. Such an obvious failure should not be a reason for Puerto Ricans on the island or on the mainland to accept the odious imposition of PROMESA’s fiscal-oversight board. Of course, even if the bill passes the House, it could be softened in the Senate. But for now, there is a growing consensus, among mainstream politicians and grassroots activists here and on the island, that it must be rejected, and that Congress is gravely mistaken if it thinks this will save Puerto Rico.

One thing that caught my attention while reading this wistful, insidery feature in The New York Times about President Obama’s future (apparently a “post-presidential infrastructure” is involved) was a certain someone who attended a swanky dinner party at the White House recently. Sure, Toni Morrison was there, as well as Malcolm Gladwell and Eva Longoria, perhaps joining the prez in a taste of his fave, the extra-dry Grey Goose martini. But it wasn’t a glamorous showbiz/intelligentsia name that attracted my notice; it was Marc Lasry, co-founder and CEO of the hedge/vulture fund Avenue Capital Group.

Lasry is perhaps more famous at the moment as the new-ish co-owner of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, a development that was so energizing for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker that he signed a bill last week subsidizing a new arena for the team that, according to the Times, would “cost the public twice as much as originally projected.” But it turns out that Avenue Capital is one of the vulture funds that owns some Puerto Rico debt, and is currently aligned with Candlewood Investment Group, Fir Tree Partners, and Perry Corp, which have formed what is known as the GDB Ad Hoc Group (BGF is the acronym in Spanish), a coalition of vulture funds that hold bonds issued by Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank.

Recently the GDB Ad Hoc Group has hired the law firm Davis, Polk & Wardwell to represent it in the upcoming battle with the Puerto Rico government, hoping to recoup its investment and avoid either the government’s debt-restructuring proposals or a move by Congress to change federal law to allow the commonwealth/unincorporated territory/colony to declare bankruptcy. The irony here is that this is the same law firm that helped orchestrate the US government’s bailout of AIG, the bad-mortgage debt-swapping machine at the center of the 2008 recession. So the same law firm that pushed for the AIG bailout is gearing up to force Puerto Rico to pay up, while Obama, who also favored the AIG bailout, has not even hinted that he would offer one to the troubled island.

“I haven’t seen the kind of focus that is necessary from this administration to respond to the crisis,” Representative Luis Gutiérrez told me in a phone interview earlier this month. While President Obama has yet to address the issue himself, he has directed White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew to suggest that although there will be no bailout, the bankruptcy laws should probably be changed to allow Puerto Rico to use them. These half-hearted Executive Branch pronouncements have done nothing to change the fact that the Republican-dominated Congress has no interest in either the House bill proposed by Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi, or Senate legislation by Senators Charles Schumer and Richard Blumenthal to change the bankruptcy laws.

On the surface, it seems like a political move for the administration to play this situation with a barely there indifference—sound familiar, immigration-reform activists? As the 2016 election looms, even though Obama is leaving office, he might want to leave the Democratic Party’s record as deficit hawks intact for whomever is nominated, and a Puerto Rico bailout would threaten that. But given the fact that Obama is having swanky dinner parties that continue his relationship with Wall Street types that have a) been bundlers of campaign contributions in the past and b) are now coming around to contribute major cash to a “postpresidential infrastructure and endowment,” including a library and foundation, that “could cost as much as $1 billion,” there might just be an ulterior motive.

Marc Lasry is perhaps the kind of benefactor—someone who raised $500,000 for Obama’s last campaign—the president and the Democrats think they should keep happy. After all, Lasry was Obama’s choice for ambassador to France in 2013, but unfortunately “had to remove his name from consideration after a close friend was named in a federal indictment for playing in a poker ring with alleged ties to the Russian mafia.” Just last May, Lasry threw a $2,700-a-head fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, while assuring MSN viewers that she is “moving a little bit to the left.”

Lasry’s ties to big Democratic politics go back many years. A March 2010 feature in The Wall Street Journal (titled “Avenue Capital’s Investor in Chief—He’s Prescient. He’s Well-Connected. Just Don’t Call Marc Lasry a ‘Vulture.’”) describes him lunching with then–White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, in part to advise Emanuel on whether banks would resume lending again in the wake of the 2008 crisis. A 2012 New York Times article said “About 50 people paid $40,000 each to crowd into an art-filled room” in Lasry’s apartment to hear Obama and Bill Clinton speak. Last decade, Lasry’s Avenue Capital even famously employed Chelsea Clinton, whose husband has more recently flopped in making bad investments in Greece while heading his own hedge fund.

Lasry, who was once a humble UPS driver whose parents convinced him to go to law school, seems to be at heart a gambler capable of rolling the dice with anyone in the global Wall Street hedge-fund casino dice game—as well as actual casino owners, like Republican candidate and anti-Mexican bigot/misogynist Donald Trump. This partnership, which stretches back to Trump’s Atlantic City casino bankruptcy in 2009, eventually resulted in Lasry buying him out and becoming the chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2011, a post Lasry eventually resigned.

The stories about Lasry in the business press describe him as the “don’t call him that” vulture-fund investor; the optimistic gambler who “bets” on economies like those of Spain or Greece to “recover,” and then profits from that. This 2012 Bloomberg story describes a regular poker game he has with other hedge-fund managers; one colleague assesses him as “good at figuring out what the odds are. He’s willing to take moderate risk.”

Yet it’s pretty hard to believe that someone who is worth $1.87 billion, according to Forbes—presumably an indication of good business sense—would believe that economies that are in a “death spiral” would miraculously recover. It’s more likely that rather than believing in a Puerto Rican economy that had shown no signs of growth for so long, and whose economy was largely driven by government employment, Lasry bet that its inability to declare bankruptcy would yield a higher return once it defaulted. Avenue Capital was one of many vultures that began hovering over Puerto Rico in late 2013, when its junk-leaning bonds caused credit analyst Richard Larkin to say of the vultures, “They can smell the blood and the fear.”

So, since things haven’t quite turned out as planned, and Puerto Rico—which, unlike almost any other economy in the world, has had negative growth for eight years—what’s in all this mess for Lasry? A July 19 Wall Street Journal article on the Puerto Rico crisis provides a possible explanation for his interest in pushing back against bankruptcy or a debt restructuring that would give relief to Puerto Rico and its people: 

Low default rates in corporate debt have led such distressed-debt specialists to instead focus on cash-strapped governments like Greece, Argentina and Puerto Rico. But while prices of Greek and Argentine bonds bottomed out at less than 20 cents on the dollar at the height of their debt crises, much of Puerto Rico’s debt still trades between 50 and 70 cents, according to MSRB data. That means the hedge funds will need to recover more in a Puerto Rico restructuring than speculators in the Greek and Argentine defaults did to turn a profit.

If turning that profit entails austerity measures like lowering wages and cutting pensions and laying people off, thus pushing toward a human rights catastrophe—well, a smart investor has to get those 50 to 70 cents on the dollar somehow. It remains to be seen if Obama really has Lasry’s back here, and if that’s the main reason for continued silence from the president on this issue. But one thing is clear: If investors have their way, a chunk of the money the Puerto Rican people will be paying back is owed to an unrepentant gambler who has a privileged, back-door channel to the White House.

New York–born Puerto Rican activist David Galarza spent a recent sultry summer Monday picketing a meeting of bondholders by day and meeting with professionals, students, and working people in the evening concerned about the increasingly scary crisis over the island’s $72 billion debt. “I picked up a Freddy Krueger mask on the way down there—a little bit of theater, you know?” Galarza told me. He had come to get a look at Anne Krueger, the former IMF official behind a recent report suggesting solutions to the crisis—solutions that imposed draconian neoliberal “adjustment” burdens on the island’s distressed population—and didn’t hesitate to read her body language as she entered the building. “She looked a little mystified, like she was bewildered that we were even there. She seemed to have an ‘I’m trying to help you people’ attitude.”

Krueger, a former IMF economist, could be said to lack the one-dimensionality of the horror movie icon at least in her IMF role in Argentina, where she apparently was first given that nickname in 2001, only to testify in a New York federal court last year in favor of Argentina against the country’s holdout bondholders, decrying the “negative consequences” of their attempt to collect debts in full. In the case of Puerto Rico, where she was hired by the commonwealth’s government to produce her report with two other IMF functionaries, she once again sent mixed messages. Her ambivalence most likely results from her role, which is to be “fair” while “balancing” the concerns of wealthy investors with everyday citizens who are stuck on the wrong side of the balance sheet, doomed to an ongoing global project of exclusion and increasing inequality.

Investors in Puerto Rican government debt are a mixed bag, including some mom-and-pop mutual funds like OppenheimerFunds and Franklin Advisers, which have been prioritized in the restructuring costs because of the length of their investments and the fact that they paid more for them. But over the past few years there’s been a growing presence of hedge funds, which avoid regulatory oversight and are solely interested in profit, regardless of how a national—or, in the case of Puerto Rico, territorial—economy performs. Vulture funds, their more extreme counterparts, specifically target debt that is distressed or in danger of default in troubled economies, hoping to cash in on settlements after buying the debt for pennies on the dollar. They can paralyze attempts at debt restructuring by insisting on repayment at full face value. Given Puerto Rico’s recent history of privatizing its airport and highway toll collection system, it is vulnerable to further selloffs—even its prized university system—as concessions to the vultures.

Because of all the press rumblings about an upcoming showdown between the high-rolling owners of the island’s municipal bonds and a government that continues to scramble to be allowed Chapter 9 privileges, the gathering at the Citigroup headquarters in Midtown had an air of tension surrounding it, but it turned out to be a rather pedestrian reset of what we already know. Melba Acosta Febo, president of Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank, restated Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro García Padilla’s themes of shared sacrifice between bondholders, government, and ordinary citizens alike, and then Krueger launched into a frenetic PowerPoint presentation highlighting her supply-side suggestions for economic restructuring.

“Puerto Rico’s minimum wage, at $7.25 an hour, is 88 percent of its median wage,” she said clinically (in fact, her own report as well as the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the figure at 77 percent). “Most economists conclude that half that amount would be beneficial.” One major problem for the island, according to Krueger, is that it is competing with neighboring Caribbean islands, whose wage scales are lower than Puerto Rico’s, which is set by US minimum-wage law. She also suggested that welfare payments are “very generous relative to per capita income,” causing a disincentive to work for minimum wage. This ignores the fact that, as the pro-statehood party correctly argues, such payments are capped at levels significantly lower than what residents would receive if Puerto Rico were a state; the island’s lack of full entitlement is one of the reasons Puerto Ricans are second-class citizens.

These assessments lay bare the fading promise that lies within Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated star in the US safety-net orbit. In a way, the federal entitlements provided to Puerto Ricans were part of the bargain to offset their watered-down citizenship, at least during the postwar boom years. But now that neoliberal free-trade models reign amid a Great Recession still weighing significantly on the mainland, the United States can no longer afford to prop up the island’s living standards and must defer to its deregulated banking system’s needs, which are to place the island in its “proper” Caribbean context.

In the end, Krueger ever so slightly walked back the harshness of her remedies by saying that rather than slashing the minimum wage, a provision could be made that it should not be allowed to rise as it might on the mainland, until it “has reached the per capita income” of the poorest state in the Union.

This is where Krueger comes off much less as an economist than a politician, or a family therapist who is leading an intervention on a problem child. There was an absence of fireworks in the question-and-answer period, which featured Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management’s softball inquiry about what impact a lengthy litigation process between the island and its bondholders would have on the economy. Where were the vultures of Wall Street who so stridently demanded a pound of Argentina’s flesh just last year in a courtroom a couple of miles downtown?

Most of the original Puerto Rico bond-buyers were traditional municipal fund houses like OppenheimerFunds, a party in a successful challenge to García Padilla’s attempt to legislate Puerto Rico’s right to a debt restructuring that resembles bankruptcy. But the landscape has shifted in the past five years, when hedge funds and their more speculative cousins, vulture funds, came to hold increasing amounts of the island’s debt. Some sources say that hedge and vulture funds combined own close to 50 percent of the island’s debt. This tendency took off big time in March 2014 with a municipal bond issue of an unprecedented $3.5 billion by the island’s Government Development Bank, with the deal brokered by Barclays.

Last week two investigative efforts, one by an activist group called the Hedge Clippers and another by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, tried to methodically identify the hedge- and vulture-fund owners of the debt. Among them are BlueMountain Capital (which according to Hedge Clippers has hired an army of Washington lobbyists to oppose the Chapter 9 efforts in Congress) and Stone Lion Capital, which includes Paul Tudor Jones, who founded the Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Wall Street high-rollers that claims to apply “evidence-based” solutions to fight poverty.

Many of these hedge-fund operators have also been targeted by activists because of their ties to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and their influence on pro-landlord and charter-school legislation. A July protest at a swanky Hamptons fundraiser that was originally called under those themes was re-envisioned to include the Puerto Rico issue. Another salient figure is John Paulson, who has not only bought $120 million in bonds but also invested in the island’s largest bank and several major hotel properties. Along with Alberto Bacó Bagué, García Padilla’s Secretary of Economic Development and Commerce, Paulson has pitched Puerto Rico as a tax shelter for renegade billionaires, saying it can become the “Singapore of the Caribbean.” Paulson also helped host former New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani as keynote speaker this past February at the Puerto Rico Investment Summit at the San Juan Convention Center.

* * *

Under the previous administration of Governor Luis Fortuño—a fiscal conservative who cut government jobs and attacked unions—the Puerto Rico legislature passed two laws, the Export Services Act and the Individual Investors Act. The first law gave hedge-fund managers a flat 4 percent tax rate as an incentive to move operations to Puerto Rico, while the second offered investors complete tax exemptions on dividends, interest, and capital gains, provided the investor lived on the island for half the year. García Padilla’s more moderate administration has embraced this policy in a desperate attempt to maintain outside investor interest.

The Puerto Rico Center for Investigative Journalism’s list features a handy chart that illustrates how many of these hedge- and vulture-funds have also had a hunger for investments in troubled places like Greece, Argentina, and Detroit, which famously declared bankruptcy last year. Three funds, Aurelius Capital, Monarch Alternative Capital, and Canyon Capital, have been involved in all four, while Fir Tree Partners and Marathon Asset Management, among others, hold a trifecta of Puerto Rico, Greece, and Argentina. Paulson has also invested heavily in Greek banks.

The disingenuous smoke-and-mirrors tactics of many of these hedge and vulture funds should make their legal claims ethically and morally dubious, but such considerations count for little in this high-stakes face-off. For instance, Double Line Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach more than doubled his holdings of junk-rated bonds as recently as last May. In an interview with Bloomberg News, he said he compared the investment potential in Puerto Rico’s debt to US mortgage markets in 2008, evoking the perfect-storm conditions that helped set off the Great Recession.

Many of these funds are now organized into the Ad Hoc Group, which represents 35 investors and $4.5 billion in bonds, and the PREPA Group, which is currently negotiating with PREPA, the government electrical utility company, which narrowly avoided default on July 1. One reason the vultures and hedges may not have begun their attack in earnest yet is that they are awaiting completion of the PREPA negotiations. The Puerto Rican government itself is likely to use some of the same bond-swap or maturation-delaying proposals in those negotiations as the ones in the restructuring proposal currently being prepared by García Padilla’s economic recovery working group.

The lists compiled by Hedge Clippers and the Center for Investigative Journalism are based on reports in the business press and were confirmed by accessing public records and in some cases verifying with the hedge funds themselves, but they are not definitive. So on Monday, the Center filed a lawsuit in a San Juan court against Governor García Padilla and Melba Acosta to force them to disclose the list of hedge funds that hold the bonds, the members of the ad hoc group that has been meeting with her and other public officials, and the written conditions for renegotiating payment terms as well as future bond sales. (They also asked for the complete Krueger Report; the document released in June and presumably distributed at the Citigroup bondholder meeting on Monday has the look, according to the Center, of an executive summary, but on Friday, the GDB officially certified that the version released in June was the complete report.) “If they certify they’re saying they paid $400,000 for this 26-page document, that doesn’t explain how they got to their conclusions or recommendations or what the net effect on public finances they would have,” said Carla Minet, director of the Center.

Tuesday the Center published a bombshell article that disclosed that hedge- and vulture-fund representatives “visit the offices of legislators at the Capitol constantly.” According to the report, they are sometimes accompanied by lobbyists like pro-statehood party members Kenneth McClintock and Roberto Prats, who also happens to be a major Democratic fundraising bundler and chair of the Democratic Party in Puerto Rico. Yet the article’s sources for these revelations, commonwealth party Senator Ramón Luis Nieves and Melba Acosta, for the most part claim to not remember or know the names of the hedge funds or their representatives. “[Acosta] was not even concerned about vulture funds and hedge funds,” said Minet, one of the co-authors of the article. “She was more worried about Oppenheimer and the mutual funds.” The judge hearing the lawsuit found that some of the Center’s requests for information were valid and instructed them to re-petition the GDB with a specific request for a list of bondholders and the amounts owed.

Meanwhile, last Wednesday three members of the Government Development Bank, all from the private sector, announced their resignation. This followed the resignation of GDB chairman David Chafey. Earlier in the day, Puerto Rico’s Office of Management and Budget introduced a legislative proposal that would allow government and municipal workers to voluntarily cut hours in their work day, a measure that could save up to $133 million. Eerily symbolic was the Agriculture Department’s announcement the same day declaring fourteen municipalities disaster zones because of the island’s months-long drought.

In Washington, after months of inaction on a proposed House bill to allow Puerto Rico Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, Senator Charles Schumer introduced a similar Senate bill with Democrats like Richard Blumenthal, Harry Reid, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand, along with Independent Bernie Sanders, and said he would engage Republicans like Marco Rubio and John Cornyn. While the nation’s political focus was on things like the Iran nuclear accord, Schumer insisted that failure to resolve the Puerto Rican debt issue could result in a “humanitarian crisis.”

Seizing on this specter of potential human tragedy, Galarza and the new core of US-based Puerto Rican activists hope to make alliances with alternative movements on the island, proposing a possible march on Constitution Day, July 25, which marks both the creation of the Commonwealth status in 1952 and the US landing during the Spanish American War in the southern port of Guánica in 1898. “The people in Puerto Rico shouldn’t be made to pay for the sins of these hedge-fund vultures,” he said. “This is not unlike when the community came together around the Navy’s bombing in Vieques. We wanted to show that we were indignant as well.”

Riding through the hills of Canóvanas last weekend with Prima, a vacationing 65-year-old Brooklynite who was born and raised in the Puerto Rican countryside, I got a brief lesson on the island’s history and political economy. “This land was all cañaverales,” she said, meaning rough acres of sugarcane, which has now been replaced by mile after mile of suburban tract housing. “When that ended, some people worked in factories and construction. Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I think the empire is collapsing.”

Today that history has caught up with the island. Puerto Rico—an unincorporated territory of the United States with 3.5 million US citizen residents who do not have the right to vote for president or representation in Congress—is making headlines these days because of its inability to pay a $72 billion debt owed to holders of its devalued bonds, often issued through such entities as the infamous PREPA, the electrical power authority. The threat of default was signaled by Governor Alejandro García Padilla’s admission last week to The New York Times that the debt was “not payable.”

The debt crisis, which has spurred comparisons to Argentina, Detroit, and, of course, the recent tumultuous events in Greece, occurs at the climax of a local recession that began in 2006, two years before the Great Recession, and is accompanied by other bad news. Because of the government’s shrinking tax base and huge debt-service expense, a sales tax of 11.5 percent—higher than in any state in the Union—has been imposed. Hundreds of schools are closing, and more than 31,000 jobs have been lost since García Padilla took office two and a half years ago. A healthcare crisis is looming because of a proposed cut of $150 million in Medicare Advantage reimbursements. The unemployment rate, now more than 13 percent, is bad, but it pales in comparison to a dismal workforce participation rate of around 40 percent—far worse than the US rate, which is itself at a 38-year low of 62.6 percent. As a result, the island is in the throes of a persistent depopulation, with about 200,000 migrating to the mainland over the past decade.

What Puerto Rico has in common with Greece is that it is a peripheral economy that has been invaded by hedge funds and pushed, by speculation and ballooning debt-service payments, to its limits. But since Puerto Rico’s banks are tied to the US Federal Reserve and not its own government, there is no bank panic. What it has in common with Detroit is a history of inefficient administrations that borrowed to pay for pension payments and services, but, unlike municipalities in the 50 states, Puerto Rico cannot declare bankruptcy. Its territorial status also made its bonds triple-tax-exempt for any buyer, adding to the lure of their high yield and fueling the desires of an erratic muni bond market for paper that would quickly become junk.

García Padilla’s announcement came about a year after he passed a law to restructure the debt, which was struck down in court in February (on Tuesday the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston upheld the decision on appeal, citing a 1984 decision by Congress that excludes US territories from Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection). He simply came to the conclusion that with zero economic growth and a debt-to-GNP ratio of about 100 percent, the situation was untenable. “This is not politics, this is math,” he said. The moderate mainstream holds that the island’s only recourse—a path that is supported by presidential candidates like Democrats Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley, independent Bernie Sanders, and Republican Jeb Bush—is to petition Congress to change the bankruptcy laws so that Puerto Rico would be allowed to file.

But even if bankruptcy protection were granted, it would most likely entail painful austerity measures. The recommendations of last week’s Krueger Report, “Puerto Rico: A Way Forward,” commissioned by Puerto Rico’s government and put together by several current and former IMF employees, are clearly along those lines. Among other things, the report recommended shrinking the size of the government, lowering the minimum wage, and trimming federal entitlements—including Medicaid and Medicare, which would be a particularly dire step, since 2 million people, or roughly 60 percent of Puerto Rico’s residents, depend on those programs. The report also recommended making it more difficult to get overtime pay—on the same week that President Obama expanded it for US mainland workers. For its part, the Obama administration is saying that no bailout is being contemplated, although it is urging Congress to consider changing the law to allow Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy. Last February, Pedro Pierluisi, the resident commissioner of Puerto Rico, who is the island’s non-voting representative in Congress and a member of both the pro-statehood party and the US Democratic Party, introduced HR 870, which would accomplish that. The bill has not made much progress, however; the latest action was in March, when it was referred to the Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law. Most House Republicans are against the measure, considering it a bailout, despite the fact that most of Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood party is affiliated with the GOP, most notably Alaska’s Don Young.

In his telecast speech on June 30, García Padilla said he was not in favor of lowering wages, but he also said he would push for “legislation to make our laws more competitive” to promote job creation, which is code for doing just that. What many left-leaning Puerto Rican economists and political theorists are saying is that they agree, as the Krueger Report says, that the island’s economy has deep structural problems. It’s the report’s remedy that they disagree with, especially when it’s been shown that austerity in times of recession tends to depress economies further.

Working People’s Party spokesperson and University of Puerto Rico professor Rafael Bernabe supports a recent legislative proposal to audit the debt, as was done in Greece, where that process called the imposition of the debt “premeditated” and “immoral.” In fact, Puerto Rico has become the victim of a high-stakes game of hedge-fund casino gambling, with about 43 percent of the debt held by so-called vulture funds and Wall Street banks and lawyers charging over $1.4 billion in a seven-year period between 2006 and 2013 for charges like swap termination fees. “We want to study the general conditions that led to the creation of the debt, the terms of the contracts, the role of intermediaries,” said Bernabe in an interview with The Nation.

For the most part, the debt crisis has been portrayed as something that arose after the advent of the current ten-year recession. But in fact, Puerto Rico’s government has been borrowing to finance its expenses since the 1970s, when the limited success of the post–World War II Operation Bootstrap, which transformed its economy from an agricultural one to a light manufacturing one, lost its luster. The resulting cure, Section 936 of the IRS code, exempted US and multinational corporations from paying taxes on profits, but that spur to investment was phased out between 1996 and 2006. Meanwhile, NAFTA had already depressed wages in nearby Mexico, making Puerto Rican workers too high-priced, and a construction and infrastructure building boom that was partly financed by bond-selling had burst, driving the island’s economy into its current death spiral.

Herein lies the Puerto Rican economy’s “structural problem”: It’s not about workers having salaries and benefits that are too high; it’s about the fact that the island’s territorial status means that since the days of the 19th-century sugar growers, whose drive to avoid tariffs were an early manifestation of hemispheric free trade, capital has fled the island at a steady rate, without interruption. “The economy of Puerto Rico is mainly controlled by US corporations, which generate a tremendous amount of profit that is not reinvested and does not create economic growth,” said Bernabe. “It’s a cycle of dependency that reproduces itself.”

It’s reasonable to ask whether the US government is at least partially responsible for the crisis—both through creation of the nebulous commonwealth status and the actions of its financial institutions—and whether it has a moral obligation to help resolve it through financial support. In 2004, legal scholar Pedro Malavet suggested that it was the social construction of Puerto Ricans as a non-white race that made them “unassimilable as Americans,” cementing their colonized status, and that they were therefore owed reparations.

While the idea of asking for reparations may have lost its feasibility after the Great Recession, both the United States and the ruling party of Puerto Rico should begin to view the debt crisis as a human problem affecting millions of what are effectively second-class US citizens, and not a matter of business mathematics. If mainstream politics on the mainland refuses to consider a restructuring of the US economy away from a blind profit motive, it should at least have the intelligence and decency to help Puerto Rico restructure its own economy to create new modes of capital reinvestment on the island, just as it would anywhere on the mainland.

Some argue that a change in political status is necessary to effect real change in the economy. Statehooders push for entrance to the union—highly unlikely, given the Republican-controlled Congress bent on reducing spending, which statehood would sharply increase, not to mention the probability that Puerto Rican voters would send Democratic representatives and senators to Congress. On June 22, the UN Special Committee on Decolonization called once again for the United States to “expedite a process that would allow Puerto Ricans to fully exercise their inalienable right to self-determination and independence.”

Any movement for independence, which might choose to lobby for reparations, needs to highlight class, race, and gender marginalization, as well as environmental reform, as part of its agenda. New parties that do not prioritize status change, such as All Puerto Ricans for Puerto Rico, the Sovereign Unity Movement, and the Working People’s Party have tried to enter the arena, but according to political scientist Manuel Almeida, “the rules of the game” in the island’s political structure have hindered their emergence. Puerto Rico’s ruling party has used technical challenges to delay the Working People’s Party’s re-certification for elections, despite electoral reform that had allowed the new parties to field candidates for the 2012 elections.

With an overly moralistic tone directed at the island’s mostly Catholic residents, Governor García Padilla spoke of “shared sacrifices,” in which the community, supposedly complicit in the actions of an irresponsible government, would share the pain with the bondholders. But many Puerto Ricans I’ve spoken with, from academia to the working class, agree that they’ve sacrificed enough, and that it’s time for those most responsible for creating this mess to own up to their transgressions.

On June 30, 2010, as part of a lesson in democracy, Betty Peña Peña drove with her daughter, Eliza, from the town of Caguas to the Capitolio building in Old San Juan, which houses the island territory’s legislature. They had been to several demonstrations before, particularly those organized by Puerto Rico’s teachers union, of which Betty is a member. This time they intended to join a coalition of university students, community organizations and labor unions at the Neoclassical Revival structure overlooking the Caribbean.

It was the last day of the session, and on the agenda were final arguments on legislation to carry out budget cuts designed to address what right-wing Governor Luis Fortuño had proclaimed a fiscal crisis. The session had been plagued by controversy surrounding the decision by Senate president Thomas Rivera Schatz, who belongs to Fortuño’s pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP), to prevent the general public and independent media from entering the viewing galleries. The imposition of this unconstitutional restriction, coming after months of protest against the government’s harsh austerity policies, brought political tensions in Puerto Rico to a boil.

When Peña arrived with her daughter, the crowd, as many as a thousand or more, was singing and chanting slogans. As if sensing the wet gust of a wind that signals an impending tropical thunderstorm, Peña felt the atmosphere deteriorate quickly. “Suddenly a helicopter came over the ocean, really close to us, and we moved toward the students, who were by a row of parked cars, surrounded by a wall of police, the riot squad and mounted police,” she recalls.

Then a police officer, using a megaphone, ordered the crowd to disperse. In seconds the tactical operations unit—in actions that prefigured many of this fall’s evictions of Occupy Wall Street—began to viciously attack the demonstrators with batons and pepper spray. “They were just hitting people, and then my daughter, Eliza, was on the floor, and they hit me,” she says, beginning to sob. “But the blow didn’t hurt as much as when I saw her on the floor and I saw the police were on top of her.”

“The party in power wants Puerto Rico to be a state, but they don’t know the first thing about American democracy,” says William Ramirez, executive director of the Puerto Rico branch of the ACLU, which is suing the Puerto Rican police on behalf of the Peñas.

The brutality of police conduct that day was the culmination of a wave of violence that, while a problem for many years, has accelerated under the Fortuño administration. It drove Illinois Representative Luis Gutierrez, a Puerto Rican who attended the University of Puerto Rico, to rail against Fortuño on the floor of the House last February. “This year the people of Wisconsin took over the Capitol in Madison; they had 100,000 people there,” Gutierrez told me later. “But they didn’t send in the riot squad! They didn’t close down the Senate. Here, people march to the Senate and what did they do? They called the riot police and they pepper-sprayed, and I’m wondering, why isn’t anybody saying anything?”

In Washington the president and Congress remained silent, but in Puerto Rico people had been speaking up for quite a while. The efforts of Ramirez, along with those of another lawyer named Judith Berkan, helped to spur a three-year investigation of the Puerto Rican police by the Justice Department, the results of which were released this past September 8. Announced at a San Juan press conference hosted by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Pérez and Fortuño, the report found that the Puerto Rico Police Department—the second largest in the United States, with 17,000 officers—had engaged in a “pattern and practice of: excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment; unreasonable force…designed to suppress the exercise of protected First Amendment rights; and unlawful searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

The report details how these violations were systemic, “pervasive and plague all levels of PRPD”; and that there is a “staggering level of crime and corruption” among police officers. It also documented abuses of Dominicans, who tend to live in segregated neighborhoods, as well as a failure to investigate domestic crimes against women and violence against the LGBT community. And the ACLU has documented a decades-long history of abuses of poor Afro–Puerto Ricans. “The Puerto Rico police department is broken,” said Pérez, who promised to transform this report into “a comprehensive blueprint for sustainable reform” by continuing to work with and engage “stakeholders” like the Fortuño government, the police department and the larger community.

But the next step for the Puerto Rican people, its government and the police department is unclear. The DOJ has two choices: initiate a lawsuit and force the PRPD into a consent decree, which is a court-ordered settlement, or settle out of court and enter into a memorandum of agreement. How much cooperation the DOJ receives from the department—and the rest of Fortuño’s administration—in these early stages will determine which of these solutions will be implemented.

“This is the first time ever in our history that an investigatory body has said, ‘Not only do you have a corrupt police department but they engaged in criminal behavior, they violated human rights.’ If nothing else comes out of this report, just getting that is historic,” says Ramirez, a Bronx native who taught at the University of Puerto Rico and is now a permanent part of the island’s political fabric.

Like Ramirez and Luis Gutierrez, Judith Berkan has an intimate bond with the university, where she once taught in the law school. “The police department in Puerto Rico has had plenty of issues, which is at least partly due to their being a quasi-military unit to support US interests in Puerto Rico,” says Berkan, a Brooklyn native who has been litigating cases of police misconduct for thirty-five years. “If you look at the last eighteen years, in fourteen of those the police department has been run by someone from the FBI.”

In the mid-1980s Ramirez began working with residents of the poor San Juan neighborhood of La Perla, where everyone understands the pattern of police impunity. “If they go into my neighborhood to look for a drug dealer, they don’t knock my door down; they just go to the suspect’s house,” Ramirez says. “When they go to La Perla, they break down every door and wreck your house, and possibly beat you up.”

It was a barrage of lawsuits from Berkan’s office—most notably regarding the case of Miguel Cáceres, a father of three who was shot to death by an enraged officer and left to die on a street in a small town—that helped spur the four-year DOJ investigation in 2007. The killing of this unarmed man was a Rodney King moment for Puerto Rico; someone videotaped the shooting, showing it to be a clear case of police abuse.

The Cáceres killing was a textbook case of the systematic problems in the police department, as Berkan laid out in her lawsuit against PRPD officials. The lawsuit revealed that repeated violations of conduct are ignored, that protocols are ignored, that there is no systematic record-keeping or analysis of police shootings and that there are excessive delays in the disciplinary system and no redress for civilians who are victimized.

Enter Fortuño and the State of Emergency

Long before Fortuño’s rise to power, electoral politics in Puerto Rico had become a game of musical chairs, with ineffectual governance and corruption scandals. But when Fortuño took office in 2008, his PNP party took control of the legislative and judicial branches as well as the executive. And Fortuño used the recession—which had begun in 2006 on the island, at least a year before it hit the mainland—as an excuse to implement what he argued was a mandate for extreme change.

Previously the island’s resident commissioner, or nonvoting representative in Congress, Fortuño is a prominent member of the Republican National Committee and has extensive GOP connections. His former campaign consultant, Annie Mayol, currently his government affairs adviser, worked for Karl Rove during the early years of the George W. Bush presidency in the controversial Office of Political Affairs. Fortuño has been praised by Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich, who featured him on his website the Americano, and has been the subject of a glowing profile in the right-wing webzine Newsmax. While the PNP has usually been conservative, few Puerto Rican politicians have so stridently connected with the far right on the mainland as Fortuño. “Republicans are pointing to his extreme government-budget-slashing priorities as an example of what they’d like to do when and if they regain control in Washington,” says Puerto Rico Senator Eduardo Bhatia, a member of the rival Popular Democratic Party (PDP), which supports commonwealth status.

As soon as he entered office, Fortuño pushed through the infamous Law 7, whose full title is Special Law Declaring a Fiscal State of Emergency and Establishing an Integrated Plan of Fiscal Stabilization to Save Puerto Rico’s Credit Rating. The declaration of a state of emergency allowed the government to implement austerity measures, including the layoff of some 20,000 government employees. Less noticed was that because of the “emergency,” the government could take extraordinary measures to “protect the life, health and well-being of the people.”

“The layoffs start, so what begins to happen is that people begin to protest, and on May Day in 2009 we had 30,000 people marching,” says Ramirez. The first demos were peaceful, but Ramirez and others were concerned, because Fortuño had named José Figueroa Sancha as police chief. As deputy FBI chief in Puerto Rico, Figueroa Sancha had been involved in the 2005 extrajudicial killing of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, leader of the militant pro-independence group Los Macheteros. Ojeda Ríos’s killing was widely perceived by Puerto Ricans, regardless of their views on the Macheteros, as an improper FBI incursion into local governance. Months later, during a series of FBI raids designed to gather information about Machetero sympathizers, agents stormed a San Juan building. When a crowd of journalists showed up, the FBI pepper-sprayed them, and then hit them with batons while they were on the ground writhing from the effects of the spray. Figueroa Sancha was at the scene as deputy FBI special agent in charge.

Three months after the massive 2009 May Day strike, the police used batons to strike bystanders in the off-campus tavern area of the University of Puerto Rico, and one officer shot a female student with a tear-gas canister, causing a gaping wound. In 2010 a coalition of UPR students—alarmed by the intention of the board of trustees, which is packed with Fortuño acolytes, to increase tuition fees—decided to strike. On May 20 the police attacked a group of about 200 students, union leaders and public employees who were protesting Fortuño’s appearance at a fundraising event in a San Juan hotel. Videocameras caught the images of officers pepper-spraying directly into the faces of protesters, some of them middle-aged women. “The tear gas that they were using was a highly toxic form of CN gas,” says Ramirez. The gas is prohibited by many mainland police departments.

* * *

By the time of the Capitolio incident, there was mounting discontent over these incidents as well as the banning of the public from the legislature’s observer galleries. “You have to understand,” says journalist and lawyer Oscar Serrano, who is former president of the Puerto Rico Journalists’ Association, “the Puerto Rico Constitution was written after the International Human Rights Declaration of 1948, and it explicitly states that all legislative activities must be open to the public. And the people know this.”

The violence started inside the vestibule, where independent journalists were sitting in to demand access to the galleries. Connecticut native Rachel Hiskes, a UPR graduate student, was sprayed, violently pushed out the door and sent flying down the Capitolio steps after officers kicked an Amnesty International observer who was taking part in the sit-in.

Carmen Yulín, a PDP representative in the House, was also attacked. “I took my badge out, announcing that I was a legislator, and I was pepper-sprayed all over,” said Yulín. “I was thrown across a folding table and had ligaments torn in my rib cage. I was in a half-cast for six weeks.” What most frightened Yulín was that the attack was apparently not accidental. “When I was in the lobby, one of the security guys said, ‘This is for you, Carmen Yulín,’ and they started to hit me. Later I was told by a member of the administration that they weren’t going to rest until they cracked my head at the rally.”

The day after the rally, police superintendent Figueroa Sancha showed no remorse, insisting that he would do the same “today, tomorrow…and next month.” Fortuño accused students of bringing pepper spray and rocks to the demonstration and of not respecting the views of others. He also accused a group of “socialists” of planning to take the Capitolio by force. PNP leaders like Senator Roberto Arango and Fortuño’s chief of staff, Marcos Rodríguez Ema, strongly supported the riot squad’s actions at the Capitolio.

“The government clearly decided that they were going to make it very uncomfortable for you if you demonstrate against their policies,” says Ramirez. “If you show up at a march, you’re going to get beat up and pepper-sprayed. In constitutional law, we call that a chilling effect.”

Immediately after the Capitolio incident, Fortuño announced there would be an investigation, but the results were never made public. Two weeks after the incident the Puerto Rican Bar Association issued a 133-page document detailing police violations, testimonies of victims and its recommendations. This report predictably fell on deaf ears—a year earlier, when the bar association had accused the police of abusing their powers during the 2009 incident in the university off-campus bar area, it was met with open hostility by PNP officials and PNP law firms, which filed a flurry of suits designed to weaken the association.

Ever since membership became compulsory in 1932, the bar association has inspired frequent attacks because of its function as a forum for civic debate. But the attacks from right-wing Fortuño supporters intensified after he took office, even though its membership contains partisans from all three of Puerto Rico’s major parties. “In 2009, now that the PNP had taken control of both houses of Congress, along with the executive branch, the legislature passed two laws seeking to destroy the bar association,” says lawyer Berkan.

The association was accused by one dissident member of “violat[ing] the law and promot[ing] disobedience,” and the legislation eliminated compulsory membership and cut crucial government funding. “They also imposed a series of draconian restrictions on the Bar Association and prohibited it from engaging in expressive activity related to any political or religious ideas,” says Berkan. This legislation culminated many years of litigation initiated by rightist statehooders, who as “dissidents” within a compulsory bar had argued that they should not be compelled to buy its $80 annual life insurance. In 2006 the firm Indiano & Williams filed a class-action suit arguing that the mandatory insurance program was unconstitutional. Even though the association ended the program two months after the suit was filed, the court found in favor of the plaintiffs in 2008 and assessed more than $4 million in damages. Since the bar association has historically been a forum for political and legal debates in Puerto Rico and is perceived as a cultural institution, many considered this an attack on the cultural heritage of the island territory.

While the attack on the association has been orchestrated primarily by the rightist leadership of the PNP, it shows the unorthodox ties the party has occasionally had with US Democrats. Andrés López, a major fundraiser for the Obama campaign in Puerto Rico and among US Latinos, was a key participant in the class-action suit, and registered Democrat Pedro Pierluisi, the current resident commissioner, led a campaign to discredit Luis Gutierrez’s remarks in Congress.

The Future of Police Reform

In the aftermath of the DOJ report’s release, it’s clear that Puerto Rico faces a long, difficult road to achieve real reform, and that the efforts of the government appear inefficient, if not downright duplicitous. At the press conference announcing the report, Fortuño insisted that his government had begun taking steps toward reform soon after the 2010 Capitolio incident. While the ruling party produced no report on a par with the one produced by the bar association, in October 2010, after a new scandal involving the arrests of more than seventy officers on drug charges, the governor issued an executive order creating a monitor to oversee the police department and issue a report. Fortuño contracted a former PNP judge, Efraín Rivera Pérez, to compile the report, at a cost of $300,000. The result: a skeletal twenty-one-page missive with no statistics or historical data.

After filing it this past June 30, on the anniversary of Capitolio, Rivera Pérez left to become president of the Puerto Rico Lawyers Association, a new rival to the bar association. No new monitor has been named. “The police monitor’s office in Puerto Rico doesn’t exist right now,” says Ramirez.

On July 2 police chief Figueroa Sancha resigned, citing pressure arising from the island’s crime rate, which has skyrocketed over the past two years. In his place Fortuño named retired National Guard Maj. Gen. Emilio Díaz Colón. In August Díaz Colón made headlines when he denied at a press conference that there was a federal investigation. The next month, days after the DOJ report was issued, Díaz Colón said the PRPD was so fiscally strapped it would be hard to implement change. While this could be taken as an excuse to do nothing, New York–based ACLU researcher Jennifer Turner agrees. “They have very little money allocated outside of payroll, and it’s going to be difficult, for example, to create a computer system to track repetitive conduct by abusive officers.”

Ever since the DOJ report’s release, Fortuño has been on the defensive over the disclosure that his government spent $1.7 mil-
lion to hire former White House deputy drug czar Robert Warshaw, whose firm consults with and helps rehabilitate police departments in trouble.

Another disturbing development has been the police violence during a second strike carried out by University of Puerto Rico students, from December 2010 to March 2011—just after Fortuño said he was committed to reform. The government ordered the police and riot squad to occupy the campus, and “violence became like a daily event,” says student leader René Reyes Medina. When students engaged in civil disobedience, police, including high-ranking officers, dislodged them using pressure-point control tactics on the neck and eyeballs that in at least one case caused a student to pass out.

Adriana Mulero, another student leader, was sitting in on campus when the police used these techniques on her. “The policeman who tried to move me applied pressure on my neck, and I felt an intense pain I didn’t expect, and I began to have difficulty breathing,” she says. “Afterwards I was handed off between officers, and they grabbed me by my breasts and thighs. I made a public statement denouncing that as an attack on women. During my second arrest, several of them attacked me by squeezing my neck, saying, ‘This is the one who complained about grabbing her breast!’ and they called me a whore. That hurt even more than when they hit me.”

While the release of the DOJ report would seem to put the police under a microscope for the foreseeable future, the ACLU’s Ramirez is still concerned about violence. “I have no doubt it’s going to happen again,” he says. “The governor uses code words to justify violence against certain groups.”

“In the spring we had a meeting with government officials there,” says ACLU researcher Turner. “And [Fortuño’s chief of staff] Marcos Rodríguez Ema kept stressing that we needed to include the violation of the right of students to study by other students. The attorney general, Roberto Sánchez Ramos, actually said they were allowed to arrest someone who cursed at one of the officers. He said it was a felony! That’s constitutionally protected speech. You can imagine what the police officers think.”

Rodríguez Ema is widely recognized as the member of the administration most prone to violent and provocative statements. Five months after the governor claimed he’d begun the process of change, Rodríguez Ema was quoted in the press as saying the police should remove student protesters from university grounds by force—a patadas—“and those bandit professors who are inciting them, too!” The day after the DOJ report was released, Governor Fortuño offered this assurance to Puerto Ricans that he was working on reforming his broken policing system: he named Rodríguez Ema as the point man to monitor the overhaul of the police department.

“It’s not my role to tell the governor who is on his team,” said Assistant Attorney General Pérez. “Our role is going to be to attempt to translate our findings into an accountability document. I hope we’ll be successful, and I’d rather fix the problem than fix the blame. If you can’t fix the problem in a sustainable way, we will not hesitate to take appropriate legal action in court.” Those sound like comforting words, but the ACLU’s Turner is concerned. “Because police abuses are continuing in PR, we feel it is important for DOJ to take action as quickly as possible,” she says. “We feel that any agreement between the DOJ and the PRPD needs to be court-monitored…. If it is not subject to court enforcement, the PRPD would fail to deliver on promised reforms.”

On October 23 a hideous plume of black smoke filled the sky in San Juan, Puerto Rico, emanating from a gas tank explosion at a storage facility of the Caribbean Petroleum Corporation (CAPECO) in the nearby municipality of Bayamón. The explosion and ensuing fire, which forced the evacuation of more than 1,000 people and caused President Obama to declare a federal disaster, is an ominous metaphor for Puerto Rico’s current state. The combination of a four-year recession, a $3.2 billion deficit and a toxic Republican-style governor, Luis Fortuño, has turned the island into a political powder keg.

After the explosion, the head of the FBI’s office in Puerto Rico announced a federal investigation into whether the explosion was the result of sabotage or terrorism (the investigation has ruled this out). This dovetailed neatly with the strategy employed by the island’s ruling New Progressive Party (PNP) of denouncing as terrorists labor leaders who had organized a general strike the previous week. Using Plaza Las Américas–the Caribbean’s largest shopping mall and the most glaring symbol of US consumerism on the island–as a staging ground, the unions had amassed tens of thousands of protesters to denounce Governor Fortuño’s recent announcement of layoffs of government workers, which would bring the year’s total to about 17,000. In an economy where government workers make up 21 percent of the total workforce, these measures–employed ostensibly to protect Puerto Rico’s credit rating, which is threatened with junk status–struck a deep chord of resentment among Puerto Ricans. And no wonder, since the official unemployment rate is 16.2 percent–closer to 25 percent if the underemployed are included.

The week after Fortuño’s announcement, during a press conference about the development of an eastern port near a recently closed military base, the governor had to dodge an egg hurled at him by Roberto García Díaz, a 44-year-old former employee of the base. The huevazo, or “egg-throw,” became a major news story, echoing the famed shoe-throwing at George W. Bush in Iraq and indicating that the island’s usually raucous political environment had been kicked up a notch. While PNP functionaries fearmongered about an element that wanted to sow chaos in Puerto Rico, García Díaz became something of a folk hero.

Puerto Rico has been an unincorporated territory of the United States since 1898, and although its residents were granted citizenship in 1917, the UN and much of the world still recognize it as a colony (in June the UN Special Committee on Decolonization called on Washington to expedite a self-determination process). Since 1952, when its euphemistic status as a commonwealth or “free associated state” was coined, the island’s leadership has oscillated between the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), which favors the status quo, and the PNP, which favors statehood. The Independence Party, which consistently garners between 2 and 5 percent of the vote, represents a constituency that has been repressed by the US federal government since a series of nationalist uprisings that began in 1937.

Although the PNP’s leaders have historically oscillated between the mainland Democrats and Republicans, the new regime seems to be living out a GOP fantasy of regaining power lost in last year’s presidential election. In addition to his government-downsizing measures, Fortuño–a board member of the Republican National Hispanic Association, which includes party loyalists such as Senators Orrin Hatch and John Ensign, RNC chair Michael Steele and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform–has emboldened a social conservatism that is suddenly ascendant on this largely Catholic-yet-carnivalesque island. A few weeks ago it was announced that several far from obscene books, such as Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s El Entierro de Cortijo and Carlos Fuentes’s Aura, would be banned from public school libraries because they contain “coarse language.” Austere legislative measures, including closing bars much earlier and lowering the blood alcohol limit for drivers to .02 percent from the standard .08 percent, are close to being enacted.

Fortuño’s policies even earned him a tongue-lashing on MTV Latin America’s awards show, which was held on the day of the general strike. After sporting a T-shirt that read, Fortuño–Dodge This! alternative rapper René Pérez Joglar, a k a Residente of the group Calle 13, denounced the governor as a “son of a whore” because of the layoff announcement. The PNP tried to spin the insult as an attack on Puerto Rican women, and San Juan Mayor Jorge Santini promptly canceled Residente’s much-anticipated show at the island’s largest arena. But on November 2 a group of female activists held a semi-nude protest against Fortuño’s policies, saying his cutbacks to agencies advocating for women deprived them of human rights.

Denouncing Residente’s edgy, Rabelaisian rants as trafficking in obscenity masks the obscenity of an economic policy that compounds the worst effects of this deep recession. Edwin Meléndez, an economist who directs Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies, suggested the Fortuño government needs to look more closely at other options, such as offering early retirement with full pension guarantees and renegotiation of debts incurred by government programs with attached revenue streams.

Despite the massive public protest against his policies, Fortuño is sticking to his guns. He announced in early November that 7,000 of the layoffs would be delayed until January because of faulty paperwork by a private consulting firm. The move seemed like an attempt to lessen the immediate impact of the layoffs while refusing to reconsider them.

For many Puerto Ricans, the current problems stem from a deeper, much more long-term malaise: the island’s unsettled political status. Yet another plebiscite proposal, which critics say is stacked toward getting Puerto Ricans to vote for statehood, is creeping through the House in Washington. Now more than ever, it’s time for a strong coalition of Puerto Ricans on the island and the US mainland to come up with an alternative–a people’s movement, perhaps seeking stronger economic ties to the Caribbean and Latin America, to demand social justice for 4 million effectively second-class US citizens.

As Residente said on MTV, “Latin America is not complete without Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico is not free.”

At first, after the March 25 protests, it may have seemed that 1960s Chicano activist Moctesuma Esparza’s HBO docudrama Walkout had inspired all Los Angeles to run into the streets and demand justice. Or that life was imitating the 2004 black comedy A Day Without a Mexican, in which every Latino disappeared from California. The sudden emergence of the immigrants’ rights issue has surprised many Anglophones, but for consumers of Spanish-language radio, TV and newspapers, it was the crescendo of a media message that was a long time evolving.

It is widely acknowledged that an unlikely band of ribald, prankster disc jockeys in LA played a crucial role in generating the massive turnout. In what may go down as a historic meeting of the mouths, four rival morning DJs–KSCA’s El Piolín (Eduardo Sotelo), KLAX’s El Cucuy (Renán Almendárez Coello), KBUE’s El Mandril (Ricardo Sánchez) and KHJ’s Humberto Luna–held a joint news conference announcing their support for the March 25 rally. Sotelo, whose show on Univision-owned KSCA is the highest-rated radio program in LA, called the meeting and became the most recognized for his passionate support of the rally. “It was fascinating, to say the least,” said LA march organizer Javier Rodríguez. “Here were [El Piolín and El Cucuy] the two top [morning show] DJs, competitors, coming forth and saying, We’re going to march with you, we’re going to get everybody together.” Rodríguez laid much of the groundwork for the DJ détente by organizing a breakfast March 14 that not only resulted in massive local news coverage but also prompted an invitation from El Mandril to appear on his show. Two days later, El Mandril called his rival El Piolín on the air, and the DJ movement was on.

“Radio, unlike TV, focuses on how to effectively speak to the common man and woman and thus has been able to generate a great deal of enthusiasm,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, one of the march organizers. “Many of the disc jockeys are themselves immigrants and can relate to the struggle that their listeners face and motivate them to be active.”

The role of the radio personality as advocate for immigrants is nothing new. According to USC journalism professor Felix Gutiérrez, in the 1920s and ’30s Pedro González, once Pancho Villa’s telegraph operator, pioneered Spanish-language radio in LA, protesting the deportation of half a million Mexicans, many of them US citizens mistaken for illegals. But by the 1960s and ’70s, music formats dominated Spanish-language radio. Ever since Humberto Luna brought back personality-driven radio in the late ’80s, DJs have increasingly assumed an advocacy role. Javier Rodríguez notes that they took part in the resistance to Proposition 187 in 1994, as well as the protests against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2003 effort to repeal the law that allowed undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Radio talk shows have also allowed the voiceless to express their personal anxieties about their tenuous existence in El Norte. “People call in to talk about ‘My mother’s dying in Mexico but I can’t go be with her because I don’t know if I can get back across the border’; ‘My kids are born here but I’m facing deportation,'” Gutiérrez says. “Or someone is retiring and realizing she had no Social Security even though it had been taken out of her paycheck for years.”

The LA DJs have gotten most of the credit for the massive turnouts, but other sectors of the Spanish-language media, and other cities, also played significant roles. Print media, which act as a basic survival guide for immigrants in a hostile world, create the background noise that radio and TV pick up on. By devoting pages to legal issues, fraud scams, tax-filing information and healthcare issues, newspapers give the undocumented an understanding of the rights that this year’s Congressional action threatened to strip away. In Chicago, next door to anti-immigrant-bill sponsor James Sensenbrenner’s home state of Wisconsin, the weekly La Raza has been central to a well-organized, vibrant immigrants’ rights movement in a state that pioneered the use of Mexico’s matricula consular as valid identification for the undocumented. A former La Raza reporter, Jorge Mújica, left the paper to become one of the main organizers of the movement there. The current editor in chief, Jorge Mederos, says the paper’s front page has been devoted to the issue for several weeks. Last July a rally was held in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood to protest the breaking up of families by deportation of undocumented immigrants. Another central figure in that march was Chicago DJ El Pistolero (Rafael Pulido). According to PR people at the Univision station, back then El Pistolero was already encouraging marchers to wear white and be peaceful, messages echoed in LA.

That two Univision DJs are at the heart of this feel-good story about a movement coming of age is somewhat ironic. Univision, after all, is owned by Republican backer Jerrold Perenchio, who once donated $400,000 to anti-immigrant California Governor Pete Wilson. In a merger approved almost three years ago, Univision acquired all of its sixty-three radio stations from HBC, which was 26 percent owned by Clear Channel, home to Rush Limbaugh. In 2005-06 Univision donated 72 percent of its total $88,450 campaign contributions to the GOP. But given George W. Bush’s relatively moderate stance on immigration reform (the Lou Dobbs hard right equates Bush’s guest-worker program with “amnesty”) as well as big business’s need for immigrants both as low-wage employees and consumers, maybe it’s not so odd.

The corporate Latino media have been as uncritical of the Iraq War as their mainstream counterparts. And Univision promoted the candidacy of Latino conservative judge Miguel Estrada, a Bush fave. But unassimilated immigrants are Perenchio’s and big Spanish-language media’s bread and butter. This is a case of marketing imperatives trumping conservative values. And although Perenchio and most of Univision’s head honchos are not Latinos, his staff–and the staff of the Spanish-language media in general–is. “Almost everyone in our newsroom are either immigrants, children or grandchildren of immigrants or are somehow related to immigrants,” said Alberto Vourvoulias, executive editor of New York’s El Diario-La Prensa, which belongs to the same conglomerate as La Raza. “It’s part of the fabric of our lives.” El Diario, like La Raza, accentuates its outreach to non-Latino immigrant groups as well.

As we approach May 1, a day of protest designated A Day Without an Immigrant, the Spanish-language media continue to push the idea that although the Sensenbrenner bill has stalled, the fight is far from over. Like some moderate politicians and labor groups, radio DJs have been discouraging children and workers from walking out of school or their jobs and stop short of endorsing a boycott. Piolín says, “I invite all sides to come on the show, so that people can decide what they can do without negatively affecting their family.” Still, Chicago activist Mújica says outrage is palpable in the press and on the airwaves over the recent raids of IFCO plants around the country. Undocumented immigrants and their growing coalition-building and activism are no longer invisible, and they’re speaking in a loud, clear voice.

The Iowa Brown and Black Forum. There it was, superimposed on the bottom corner of the screen going to commercial break just after Al Sharpton tore into Howard Dean’s affirmative-action hiring record. Hosted by MSNBC’s Lester Holt, an African-American, and Maria Celeste Arrarás, a Puerto Rican-born anchor for Telemundo, this last debate before the Iowa caucuses helped introduce a new phrase into the American political lexicon. Black and brown. “Do you have a senior member of your cabinet that was black or brown?” Sharpton prodded, and Dean turned red (again).

Although Sharpton and the Iowa group use this phrase to promote black-Latino unity, the first time I remember hearing it was when, on the occasion of the quincentennial of Columbus’s journey to the Americas (and the aftermath of the Rodney King riots), The Atlantic Monthly published “Blacks vs. Browns,” by LA Times reporter Jack Miles. In a significant challenge to the binary view of American racial politics, Miles uncovered the hidden truth about the riots, that there was substantial Latino involvement in what was widely portrayed as a black-and-white confrontation. Yet he did not regard this as evidence of an alignment of black and Latino interests. On the contrary, he predicted that “America’s older black poor and newer brown poor are on a collision course.”

According to Miles, the civil rights era coalition between blacks and Latinos was threatened by an emerging class conflict. Fearful of the “nihilistic” tendencies in black urban culture, he claimed, white and Asian employers were increasingly passing over poor blacks in favor of Latino immigrants, who were willing to work for lower wages. “Blacks are the most oppressed minority, but it matters enormously that whites are no longer a majority,” wrote Miles. “And within the urban geography of Los Angeles, African-Americans seem to me to be competing more directly with Latin Americans than with any other group.”

A year earlier, Charles Kamasaki and Raul Yzaguirre of the National Council of La Raza had published a groundbreaking paper that corroborated Miles’s argument. Yzaguirre and Kamasaki recounted several instances when African-American leaders had failed to support Latino causes. The NAACP opposed an extension of the Voting Rights Act that benefited Latinos in 1975, while the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights opposed a similar extension of the act in 1982. The NAACP declined to oppose employer sanctions under the Immigration Reform and Control Act; throughout the 1980s the LCCR was indifferent to increasing protection for Latinos against employment discrimination, while only nominally opposing the English-only movement. The paper concluded that “growing tension between the two communities…threatens the ability of blacks and Hispanics to develop strong, sustainable coalitions.”

These ominous predictions are echoed in Nicolás C. Vaca’s new book, The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means for America. But unlike Miles and Kamasaki and Yzaguirre, whose arguments he cites, Vaca, a lawyer and scholar based in the Bay Area, wants to posit the adversarial aspects of the relationship between blacks and Latinos as a fact of life. In making this argument, Vaca, who fancies himself a maverick, claims he is simply facing up to realities that Latino intellectuals and activists have sidestepped because of “knee-jerk,” “politically correct” assumptions about black-Latino solidarity. He is so convinced of this that he lost an old Latino friend in a public argument over whether to write this book.”Why dig up dirt,” writes Vaca, “ruffle feathers, destroy the illusion of unbroken unity between Blacks and Latinos, bleeding the colors of the Rainbow Coalition by giving the dreaded gringo the ammunition my former friend told me I was providing? The simple answer is that the ethnic landscape has changed.”

Vaca’s argument hinges on demographics, laid out in the opening chapter, “The Latino Tsunami: The Browning of America.” He cites statistics that forecast exponential population growth, which will cast California and the Southwest in an increasingly “brown” hue by mid-century, and the related “hypergrowth” of Latino communities in areas like Atlanta and Raleigh, Greensboro and Charlotte, North Carolina, with the influx of new, mostly Mexican, immigrants. This demographic transformation will inexorably generate increasing conflict as Latinos–who have long been underrepresented in political office, in part because immigrants can’t vote, and who have long felt their concerns are not taken seriously–seek representation equal to their numbers. In cities like Los Angeles, where African-Americans wield a measure of political power, blacks are increasingly digging in to resist a numerically superior brown rival.

In Chapter 3, “Who’s the Leader of the Civil Rights Band?” Vaca analyzes the landmark case Mendez v. Westminster, which challenged the existence of separate schools for Mexican-Americans and “helped lay the groundwork for the ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education eight years later.” By establishing a Latino claim to a history of oppression by white America, Vaca is also trying to establish that African-Americans were not the only pioneers of civil rights struggle, and that Latinos deserve a share of the movement’s benefits. Unfortunately, he uses these arguments to blame another victim: The villains invariably turn out to be African-Americans, who are threatened by demographic changes and shut Latinos out of political office, while refusing to acknowledge that anyone’s suffering could ever be as great as theirs. In the chapter “Somewhere Over the Rainbow Coalition,” Vaca curiously draws from the Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton classic Black Power to argue that “feel-good statements” and an idealistic “squinty-eyed view” held by out-of-touch activists “does not square with what has happened in the real world.” By invoking Carmichael and Hamilton’s observation that different groups in a coalition will tend to act in their own interest, he is merely invoking a tautology that could be made about almost any political coalition. Vaca goes on to cite several studies showing that in Los Angeles, blacks often block Latinos from obtaining municipal employment. This competition is “one of many examples of how zero-sum conflict trumps any idealized notion of Latino-Black cooperation.” But there is no discussion in this chapter of the private sector, either with respect to the hiring practices of small businesses or with respect to falling wages, which Latino immigrants are more likely to accept than African-Americans.

All of which is not to say that Vaca is entirely wrong. Although he doesn’t take into account that Mexican-American citizens are also displaced in the job market by immigrants (including fellow Latinos), and that some established Mexican-Americans do not favor pro-immigration legislation, this conflict scenario accurately represents the Latino experience in the South and Southwest. Los Angeles has seen black-Latino political conflict (and cooperation) since the early days of the civil rights movement. Although the city’s eighteenth-century founders were multiracial Mexicans of indigenous, African, Chinese and Spanish blood, LA has not elected a Latino mayor in more than a century, and blacks and Latinos have often voted for different candidates. The 1965 Watts riots, a predominantly African-American uprising, focused attention on the plight of black Angelenos but not on the barrios, while the black-Jewish liberal coalition that swept Tom Bradley into power further isolated Mexican-Americans from political power. An even greater rift developed when janitorial jobs, once the preserve of African-American union members, were turned over to nonunionized Mexican immigrants by unionbusting janitorial firms. Despite Antonio Villaraigosa’s strong candidacy in the 2001 mayoral race, he was not able to draw enough black votes from James Hahn, a white liberal whose father was a favorite of African-Americans.

Vaca shows that the conflict between blacks and Latinos in California is historically rooted in a dynamic that is particular to that part of the country. After it was absorbed by the United States following the Mexican-American War, the Southwest’s primary racial divide was between Anglos and Latinos (and to a lesser extent East Asians), with African-Americans coming into the mix later on, beginning in the 1930s. In Vaca’s account of phenomena like segregated Mexican-American-only schools and the lynching of Mexican-Americans, African-Americans are portrayed as latecomers to the West’s zero-sum battle for resources. That is to say, despite African-Americans’ claim to primary “minority” status, “black suffering does not necessarily trump Latino suffering.”

Vaca’s argument is true as far as it goes–which isn’t far at all. As he points out, Mexican-Americans make up about 60 percent of the total Latino population in the United States, and their experience in Los Angeles (particularly in the neighborhood of Compton) has been marked, at times, by tensions with African-Americans. But the question of black-brown relations is national in scope, and Vaca’s analysis reflects a distinctly West Coast and ultimately parochial perspective. Chapters on black-Latino political strife in Los Angeles and Houston focus almost entirely on the Mexican-American version of Latino interests. In an attempt to counterbalance this, Vaca offers an analysis of black-Latino relations in Miami (a reverse-case scenario, where the white Cuban-American elite has historically refused to share public-sector power with African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans) and, in the book’s least coherent chapter, of the 2001 mayoral race in Puerto Rican-dominated New York. Miami is clearly an aberrant case, because that city’s Latino immigration was dominated by lighter-skinned members of Cuba’s upper and middle classes fleeing Castro’s revolution, and New York’s complex ethnic politics, in which Latinos and blacks have entered into various coalitions with each other and with whites, is apparently beyond Vaca’s expertise.

Although he rarely uses the word “brown” to describe Latinos, Vaca’s assertion of a sharp separation between black and Latino is consistent with the “brown perspective” associated with a group of influential West Coast Latino writers. While it can serve as a useful color-coded signifier for being Latino, “brown” obscures the fact that Latinos come in the full spectrum of racial hues, very much including black. West Coast Brownologists like the essayist Richard Rodriguez and the LA Times commentator and New America Foundation fellow Gregory Rodriguez consistently categorize Latinos as distinctly separate from African-Americans, a third, mestizo, wheel in the American race dialogue. Although the Rodriguezes (no relation) are more diplomatic than Vaca in declaring that historic Latino suffering could never approach black suffering, the most important subtext in both writers’ output is their effort to erect explicit barriers between blacks and Latinos.

Richard Rodriguez’s concept of brown is, to be sure, semantically playful, invoking UPS’s current ad campaign and sodomy in describing this “undermining brown motif, this erotic tunnel.” Brown can be read here as the messy multiethnic muddle America is seemingly becoming through rising rates of Latino intermarriage, a utopian space from which, as the Mexican writer José Vasconcelos once suggested in his work La Raza Cósmica, humanity could launch its next great leap. In his recent book of essays, Brown, Rodriguez describes how growing up as an “honorary white” allowed him to escape linkages with the black culture of suffering. When a black professor at a public forum uses the phrase “blacks-and-Latinos” as a “synonym for the disadvantaged in America,” Rodriguez recoils in discomfort. His most fervent desire for the African-Americans he has so much compassion for is “white freedom. The same as I wanted for myself.” By this he means freedom from “culture” or “race,” a desire expressed in various ways by ideologues like Ward Connerly and writers like Shelby Steele.

In his June 22, 2003, editorial in the LA Times Gregory Rodriguez went to great lengths to give African-Americans their due as the undisputed kings of suffering. “Even as Latinos exert growing influence on American politics and culture, blacks will continue to have a more powerful claim on America’s moral imagination,” he wrote. “Their history of slavery and segregation ensures that African-Americans will not be displaced in their role as the preeminent ‘other’ in U.S. society.” But apparently this moral authority is directly proportional to the ability to inspire the kind of fear Jack Miles’s Atlantic Monthly article evoked. “Latino immigrants generally do not instill the same fear among whites that blacks can. The social distance between brown and white has never been as great as that between black and white.”

Well, that may be true, but what if you were one of the millions of Latinos who are not brown but actually black (a genetic condition given only passing reference by Brownologists), or even stranger, strongly identify with African culture regardless of skin tone? One doesn’t have to look too far in US Latino letters to find representatives of this point of view. Witness Lisa Sánchez-González’s fascinating meditation, in Boricua Literature, in which she contrasts William Carlos Williams and Arturo Schomburg (both of Puerto Rican heritage) and the roles they played defining how Latinos have manifested themselves not just as brown but as “white” and “black” in America. Hip-hop, the most dynamic and commercially successful musical form in the world today, emerged as a joint creative effort between blacks and Latinos, as both Juan Flores’s From Bomba to Hip-hop and Raquel Rivera’s New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone have recently demonstrated. These texts are not merely evidence of “identification” with African-Americans but a reflection of a shared, lived experience engendered by the proximity of black and Latino neighborhoods in Northeastern cities and the Caribbean islands, as well as an acknowledgment of shared African genetic heritage. Pace Vaca, this shared history, though no guarantee of black-Latino solidarity, can translate into a set of overlapping political interests.

Call these writers the leading edge of the East Coast-based Caribbean alternative to the brown perspective on black-Latino relations, if you are daring enough or have the energy to accept even more categories in the increasingly complicated debate over race in America. One might argue that these works are merely part of a “Puerto Rican exception,” to borrow a phrase from the neoconservative Linda Chavez, who used it to describe intractable Puerto Rican poverty in her notorious 1992 treatise Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation. But although Puerto Ricans make up less than 10 percent of US Latinos (roughly 17 percent if you count island Puerto Ricans, all US citizens), and other Latin American countries with Afro-Caribbean affinities (including the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba) only add another 5-7 percent, this perspective has always been crucial when examining the relations between blacks and Latinos in the United States. And the Puerto Rican experience formed a pattern that Dominicans are following, despite the fact that they entered this country as immigrants. One of the major projects recently proposed by the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone is the creation of an Afro-Dominican cultural center in Washington Heights.

Vaca’s take on New York’s sometimes troubled black-Latino political coalitions in the chapter “The Big Manzana” starkly reveals the limitations of West Coast Brownology. Vaca concludes that mayoral candidate Freddy Ferrer foolishly believed in the potential of a black-Latino coalition (which had elected David Dinkins in 1989), only to be betrayed by Al Sharpton, who withheld his support until the last minute, denying Ferrer his best chance. What Vaca fails to understand is that Ferrer had a history of shying away from African-American issues, and in part for this reason was never wholeheartedly embraced by the Puerto Rican community, a significant portion of which is black. Vaca recounts that Ferrer was strongly in the running until (a) the 9/11 terror attacks, which occurred the day of the scheduled Democratic primary, drove the city into the arms of minority-unfriendly Rudolph Giuliani; and (b) stepped-up mailings of a New York Post cartoon depicting Ferrer as a Sharpton puppet ruined him with white voters. While Vaca wrongly argues that Sharpton’s refusal to help out a Latino is evidence that Ferrer was sabotaged by black self-interest (Sharpton initially demanded Ferrer’s support for a slate of black candidates in exchange for his endorsement), the implication is that Ferrer’s mistake was his attempt to appeal to black voters. Freddy violated the Brownologists’ rule of keeping your distance.

Vaca’s underlying project, it seems, is to free Latinos from any guilt they might feel about pursuing their own interests. Latinos, he argues in his conclusion, are not responsible for the plight of African-Americans. And, he adds, because Latinos are not responsible, they come to the table with a clear conscience. Latinos come from “another land, living a life apart from the black-and-white vision of the world described by Black literature.” As Vaca points out, the Latin American idea of race was always more supple and nuanced than that of the United States. In Latin America, large communities of escaped and freed slaves were able to flourish, and with the abolition of slavery, Jim Crow laws were never adopted. While there is a grain of truth to the idea that Latin America’s openness to racial mixing contrasts with the notorious “one-drop” rule in the United States, that doesn’t mean its conscience is clear. Latin America was a major player in the slave trade, has a long legacy of antiblack attitudes, and Latinos often bring those attitudes with them when they come north. Slur words like mayate that refer to people of African descent and qualifiers like pelo malo (bad hair) did not originate in the United States. In fact, Afro-Latinos are beginning to organize in countries like Brazil, Colombia and Honduras to address government policies of benign neglect. Representatives Charles Rangel and John Conyers, with the support of both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, are pushing for an “Afro-Latino Resolution” asserting that US funding to Latin American countries should come with a provision recognizing the difficult economic and social conditions of the approximately 80-100 million Afro-Latinos.

In truth, the relations between blacks and Latinos have never been as plain as black and white, as Tatcho Mindiola, Yolanda Flores Niemann and Nestor Rodriguez show in their valuable work of analytic sociology, Black-Brown Relations and Stereotypes. The book’s measured discussion of black-Latino relations in Houston, in which attitudes are revealed through extensive questionnaires, contrasts markedly with Vaca’s inflammatory selection of anecdotes from a single article published in March 2001 in the Charlotte Post, in which blacks were quoted as saying things about Mexican immigrants like “they’re taking all of our jobs…they could be plotting to kill you and you would never know.” But the two groups have at times successfully worked together on the West Coast, and black-Latino relations in New York are never completely smooth. While researching a piece about Spanish Harlem last year, I encountered strains between African-American and Latino politicians fighting over whether to call the region East Harlem or Spanish Harlem. The Harlem political machine that propped up Dinkins has often outmaneuvered and sometimes sabotaged Latino pols. But whether or not you think Sharpton was posturing for influence, he did spend three months in jail over Vieques. And how do Vaca’s theories hold up in Freehold, New Jersey, where a black Baptist church is providing sanctuary for Mexican immigrant day laborers whose case is being represented by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund? In the end, Brownologists like Vaca question the value of a brown-black alliance in the same way many mestizos in Latin America distinguish themselves from blacks.

The Brownologists’ excitement is fueled by an explosion of immigrants who are willing to work long, hard hours and who, unlike US citizen Puerto Ricans, are not eligible for welfare. But as anyone who has studied inner-city youth or picked up a copy of Urban Latino magazine knows, after a few generations many Latinos start to look more and more like African-Americans. It’s in places like Chicago, with its mix of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and blacks, and Spanish Harlem, whose demographics are beginning to resemble Chicago’s, that much of the work of black-Latino relations will be done. As NYU professor Arlene Dávila says in her forthcoming book, Barrio Dreams, “the relationship between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans…echoes that of Blacks and Puerto Ricans, at least in regards to a history of cooperation and competition.” Aren’t we always cooperating and competing with everyone we love?

Migration to the United States has allowed many darker-skinned or Afro-Latinos (primarily from the Caribbean, but increasingly from South America) to embrace an African identity that was suppressed in their native countries. The fiction of Dominican-Americans like Nelly Rosario and Junot Diaz, and of Puerto Ricans like Edgardo Vega Yunqué and Piri Thomas, is part of a new understanding of Latino identity that could not have formed in the postcolonial culture of Latin America. When Richard Rodriguez, referring to the probability that most African-Americans have white blood in their genetic history, declares that “the last white freedom in America will be the freedom of the African American to admit brown,” I can only wonder, when will the Brownologists be free to admit black?

Of course, racial cross-identification is only a preliminary step in the difficult process of creating and maintaining political alliances between oppressed groups. Vaca’s book might be helpful in clearing the ground for future cooperation between blacks and Latinos by acknowledging points of contention. But the book is more likely to have the effect of reinforcing what generations of immigrants have been taught: that estrangement from blackness is the key to success in America.

Forty-six years after Lolita Lebrón and fellow Puerto Rican nationalists shot up the House of Representatives, wounding five members in a desperate act of defiance, Lebrón, along with Puerto Rican members of Congress Luis Gutiérrez and Nydia Velázquez, were arrested for an act of nonviolent resistance against the federal government. On May 4, 300 US Marshals and FBI agents cleared about 200 demonstrators from a Navy bombing range on the embattled island of Vieques. “Puerto Rico has been invaded again,” said New York City Councilman José Rivera as he was led away. For Puerto Ricans on the island and the mainland, this was just another display of nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy.

President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno were pleased that the removal played out nothing like the Elián-retrieval horror show, but the Vieques issue will not die out like a trash-can fire on a Little Havana boulevard. Puerto Ricans’ opposition to the Navy’s ecologically harmful, suffocating presence had been brewing long before the yearlong sit-in on Vieques, triggered by last April’s bombing run that killed private security guard David Sanes. In 1989 I observed it firsthand during a reporting trip when I heard and felt the Navy’s thundering assault on the beaches of Vieques.

The President’s Vieques strategy appears to be dictated by a need to placate the military lobby. His plan, negotiated in conjunction with Puerto Rican Governor Pedro Rosselló, provides for an immediate $40 million boost to the Vieques economy and the resumption of limited Navy training using “dummy bombs”–which occurred a few days after the FBI action. A referendum, to be scheduled at the whim of the Navy, would allow the residents of Vieques to vote on whether the Navy should pull out entirely after three years; a vote to retain the Navy would garner the island another $50 million in aid. This combined stalling tactic and overt bribe might pave the way for the Navy to resume its flouting of agreements, as it did when it ignored a 1983 accord to improve the local economy.

Rosselló’s complicity with this agreement has turned Puerto Ricans solidly against the pro-statehood politics of his New Progressive Party. The day after the removal of the protesters, Rosselló activated units of the National Guard, and an angry crowd of more than 1,000 demonstrators forced the cancellation of a ceremony at a renovated federal building in Old San Juan. The demonstrators smashed the windshield of pro-statehood former Governor Luis Ferré’s car as he tried to drive through them. Rosselló’s party is absorbing a blow it will probably not recover from in this year’s gubernatorial elections, and the Independence Party, whose leader, Rubén Berríos, was virtually canonized as the patron saint of the Vieques squatters, will score some gains. But the big winner will probably be the status quo Commonwealth Party, which has always absorbed voters with nationalistic sentiments who are not ready for the left-leaning independentistas.

But while the Vieques fallout will likely only signal another change in power on the island in what is essentially a two-party system, its effect on mainland Puerto Ricans could be significant. When she was arrested, Representative Velázquez predicted that New York’s Puerto Rican Day Parade on June 11 would become a massive rally supporting the Navy’s removal from Vieques. The outrage demonstrated by Velázquez, Gutiérrez and Representative José Serrano, who was arrested at a Washington protest on May 4, may inspire a community of voters to become energized as never before. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton has called for an immediate and permanent end to the bombing. Presidential candidate Al Gore has issued only nebulous statements against the bombing while expressing support for the Clinton-Rosselló agreement, which is tied to the dubious referendum proposal.

Far from being resolved, the Vieques problem is just beginning to get serious. With the possibility of protesters still hidden deep inside the tangled brush of the Navy range and the vow of a coalition of clerical, union and Vieques activists to return to the protest site, Washington’s only choice is increasing militarization of the island, which will bring more resentment. Vieques fishermen, the bulwark of the island’s economy, have been denied access to lobster traps set offshore of Navy firing ranges.

President Clinton and Governor Rosselló, who claimed to support the people of Vieques, have betrayed Puerto Ricans by allowing bombing to resume. It is increasingly clear to Puerto Ricans on the island and on the mainland that the yearlong sit-in on Vieques was the referendum, and it is time for the United States to cease its duplicitous attempts at “fairness” and remove the Navy from Vieques once and for all.