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THE PUERTO RICAN RIGHT IS RALLYING AGAINST A RISING LEFT  
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Ian J. Seda-Irizarry
November 2, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]


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_ For years, Puerto Rico’s right-wing establishment has branded the
Left as “communists” seeking to impoverish the island by isolating
it from the US. Yet decades of economic mismanagement have discredited
the Right and strengthened the Alliance _

Demonstrators protest power rate increases in San Juan, Puerto Rico,
on June 28, 2023, Gabriella N. Baez / Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

November 5 will see elections not just in the United States but in
Puerto Rico, the island that has been a colony of the United States
for 126 years. Throughout much of the twentieth century, opposition to
the deeply unequal economic system that has predominated within Puerto
Rico has been easily dismissed as anti-Americanism by critics who seek
to provoke islanders with threats of economic isolation. However, in
the last year, Puerto Rico’s left-wing parties, some of which are
pro-independence, have cobbled together a loose bloc. This alliance
now threatens to win at the upcoming election, a possibility that
Puerto Rico’s ruling elite are terrified of.

On September 24, hundreds of billboards
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flooded Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, bearing messages critical
of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP) and its candidate for
governor, Jenniffer González. Later in the day a tweet
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the billboards appeared, declaring that they were “paid for by
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio,” better known by nom de plume Bad
Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper, singer, and producer. A couple of days
later, another well-known artist, René Pérez, aka Residente,
appeared in a video
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endorsing González’s main rival in the November election, Juan
Dalmau. Dalmau is the candidate for governor for the Alliance
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a progressive electoral coalition comprising the Puerto Rican
Independence Party (PIP), to which Dalmau belongs
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Movemen
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and several other organized
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political
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religious
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organizations.

The Alliance, which was recently endorsed
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by Democratic congressmembers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia
Velázquez, seeks to oust the PNP and the Popular Democratic Party
(PPD) from their decades-long stronghold in electoral politics,
political discourse, and the management of the finances of the colony.
Status-wise, the coalition is interested in developing bilateral and
binding mechanisms for solving Puerto Rico’s colonial status, as an
alternative to the millions of dollars continuously wasted on sterile
referenda
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on status formulas (i.e., independence, statehood, or commonwealth)
that the traditional two-party system has provided so far.

The Alliance owes its growing strength to its focus on the local
protagonists that facilitate and benefit from the institutional decay
of the colony. This is a reflection of a growing wave of discontent
with how the different government administrations of the PNP and PPD
have dealt with the social crisis effecting most Puerto Ricans. The
island, which was once celebrated as an example of rapid capitalist
development
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is suffering from the effects of a dangerous cocktail of austerity,
debt peonage, and extreme corruption
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According to a recent study, 47 percent of households would be unable
to pay
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a debt of $2,000, a not unlikely threat given the costly impact that
near-continuous power outages have had on the island’s residents.
These failures have been the order of the day since September of 2017,
when ﷟Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, and have been more
pronounced since 2021, when the production and distribution of
electricity on the island began to be privatized.

Some of the Bad Bunny billboards sought to draw a connection between
the energy crisis and the PNP. One of them reads, “Voting for the
PNP is voting for LUMA,” LUMA Energy
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being the current private monopoly that was awarded the distribution
and transmission contract by the PNP under the then governor and
former secretary of justice Wanda Vázquez. Vázquez, and the whole
process that led up to LUMA being awarded this contract, is currently
being investigated in an ongoing process plagued by irregularities.

The imposition in 2017 of a Fiscal Control Board
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to manage the finances of the island and pay off the debt acquired by
various governmental administrations of the PNP and PPD has only
worsened the situation. These are the same administrations that for
decades have made Puerto Rico a tax haven for corporations and wealthy
individuals in an economic system that has developed into a mechanism
for wealth transfer and extraction
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This model benefits both local and international capital while
creating substantial income inequality. Puerto Rico is among the
top-ten most unequal places in the world, and its poverty rate is
significantly higher than that of the United States, with a population
increasingly dependent on federal transfers in the form of Social
Security, Medicare, reconstruction funds
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and nutritional assistance funds.

These flows of income and resources coming from the US federal
government, which have been increasing for almost a decade because of
hurricanes, earthquakes, and COVID-19, are continuously mismanaged and
swallowed up
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even though they are supposed to provide a lifeline to many families
on an island in which 43 percent of people sit below the poverty line.
For comparison, the figure for the United States is 12 percent.

This is the reality confronting the Alliance, which faces a historic
situation in which both main parties have been losing support while
their once-fragmented electoral opposition has been slowly gaining
ground. When the Alliance ran in the 2020 election as separate
parties, the PIP and MVC, the main members of the Alliance, obtained a
combined 28 percent of the vote, while the current PNP government got
33 percent, the lowest percentage in its history. The PPD, its
historical rival, meanwhile won 32 percent of the vote. All these
results followed on the heels of popular protests that ousted the PNP
governor in 2019.

In that same 2020 election, a current member of the Alliance, Manuel
Natal, who had been supported for a long time by important workers’
organizations
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almost won the mayorship of the capital city of San Juan in a process
also marred by irregularities
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Natal is running again against the incumbent, Miguel Romero, who was
secretary of the department of labor under then governor — and now
Donald Trump advocate for Latinos
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— Luis Fortuño.

Fortuño’s tenure saw the firing of thousands of public employees
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in 2009 and the passing of more tax exemption laws that cost millions
to the public coffers in the midst of a fiscal crisis; some of these
laws, critics noticed, personally benefited Romero
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Finally, Romero was a senator who endorsed the privatization of the
power utility’s functions and the awarding of the contract to LUMA
Energy, a private firm with no experience in the provision of
electricity for such a large-scale operation.

Threat Response

It is not surprising that the weakening popularity of the PNP and PPD
among voters has been accompanied by a concerted response to try and
stop the growing momentum of discontented opposition. A whole
generation of Puerto Ricans have now grown up in a post–Cold War
era, and this has weakened the appeal of the two main parties. The
backdrop to the lives of this generation has instead been the
two-decade socioeconomic crisis devouring the island.

Some have been able to emigrate to the United States, a process
contributing to the island’s depopulation and aging
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but for many of those that stay, the prospects are bleak. A power
outage
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on September 3, which interrupted the registration process of hundreds
of students at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus,
became emblematic of this sorry state of affairs.

There was also the case of thousands of citizens encountering problems
with the digital platform that the State Election Commission had
purchased for $3.7 million. At some point, around 60,000 electoral
transactions, many of which were requests by citizens to register to
vote, were reported to not have been processed through what was
advertised as an “efficient” digital platform. Worryingly,
thousands of dead people appeared in the official registry lists for
voting in the upcoming election.

This last irregularity was a result of a fraud scheme recently
uncovered by the Center for Investigative Journalism
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and published on September 24, the same day that the Bad Bunny
billboards appeared across Puerto Rico. According to this report, this
scam, which allowed the dead to cast ballots, could be traced to at
least the 2016 election, when the now exiled Ricky Rosselló
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the PNP was elected governor of Puerto Rico in administration
shortened after a wave historic popular protests ousted him during the
summer of 2019
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Rossello’s running mate in the 2016 election as resident
commissioner, a nonvoting position in the US Congress, had been
Jenniffer González, who still holds that seat and, after defeating
Pedro Pierluisi
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the current governor, will be the PNP’s candidate for governor in a
primary for the upcoming November election. González, a
self-identified Republican and fan﷟ of Benjamin Netanyahu, endorsed
Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Like her current running mate for
the capital’s mayoralty, Miguel Romero, she was a leader in the
Legislative Assembly when it fired thousands of public employees and
was implicated in a scandal involving the illegal raising of debts.

Following in the footsteps of her Republican leaders in the United
States, the González campaign has decided to use Cold War and
anti-communist propaganda against the Alliance. “The communists here
are threatening to take power
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speech. She has, for example, sought to highlight how the Alliance’s
candidate for governor, Juan Dalmau, believes in independence for
Puerto Rico, independence being for them a codeword
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“communism” and complete isolation from the United States.

Still, the war of words is just a complement to attacks on other
fronts. The problems with the State Electoral Commission, which
exposed the number of dead people potentially voting in Puerto
Rico’s election, were handled by the same commission that generated
them. Rather than look into these concerns, the State Electoral
Commission threatened to file a lawsuit
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against the Center for Investigative Journalism for not making their
sources public.

The Enemy Behind the Enemy

The economic crisis that started in 2006 and the debt default that
came in 2017 directly affected those that earned property income
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on the island. They would continue to profit, but their accumulation
of rents, interest, and profits would slow down
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the arrival of the Fiscal Control Board and its purported focus on
balanced budgets and happy creditors
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In this new scenario, many representatives of Puerto Rico’s
capitalist class decided to organize themselves as “Bonistas del
Patio,” a group of local bondholders appealing to both the fiscal
junta and the island’s citizens for priority in the payment of the
public debt, because they were the fellow Puerto Ricans “most
negatively affected
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in what effectively was their collaboration in the dismantlement of
the public welfare
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These creole capitalist groups, which thrive on politics being defined
solely in terms of the relationship between the United States and
Puerto Rico, and which have for decades benefitted from preferential
tax treatment and regulatory laxity and pushed for labor market
precarity while the country’s debt increased, have now organized
themselves as a super PAC [[link removed]]
that has actively ﷟ endorsed members of the PNP and PPD that have
undermined the Alliance. They have done this by preventing PIP and MVC
from formally running together
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and disqualifying currently elected members in the legislature
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from running under an official party banner.

By joining the “anti-communist” chorus of the two main parties and
other ultraconversative groups
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the private sector has revealed the real motivations behind its
ideology: a need to sustain the colonial status quo that allows them
to continuously enrich themselves while costs are socialized.

Looking to the Future

It’s undeniable that the Alliance has made important strides in
capturing much of the generalized discontent with how previous
administrations have managed the socioeconomic crisis in Puerto Rico.
This anger, which previously erupted in 2019 and led to the ousting of
the then governor, has contributed to expanding the coordinates of
political understanding in an increasingly polarized society beyond
the usual status discussions. Against this, the PNP, the PPD, the
creole capitalist class, and ultraconservative sectors have all fallen
back on old tactics to try to keep a hold on their decaying hegemony.
Their battle cry that this is an “election between the Left and
those that believe in a relationship with the United States
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still resonates with many.

It seems that whatever the election outcome, the results are likely to
be contested given the substantial loss of credibility of the State
Electoral Commission in running the process. This “credibility
flaw,” which was created and developed by the status quo, is already
being used by both sides in a struggle that will intensify after the
elections, and where the street will be center stage, in a context
where the status quo is being pulled by the extreme right wing and the
Alliance keeps gaining more supporters.

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Ian J. Seda-Irizarry is an associate professor of economics and
graduate program director at John Jay College, City University of New
York. His research focuses on the political economy of Puerto Rico and
Marxist economic theory.

* Puerto Rico; Austerity; Colonialism; Anti-Communism;
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