[When a place is controlled by a government in which it has no
representation, it will be abused.]
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PUERTO RICO’S COLONIAL STATUS LEFT IT VULNERABLE TO HURRICANE FIONA
 
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Ryan Cooper
September 23, 2022
The American Prospect
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_ When a place is controlled by a government in which it has no
representation, it will be abused. _

View of a house that was washed away by Hurricane Fiona at Villa
Esperanza in Salinas, Puerto Rico, September 21, 2022., Alejandro
Granadillo/AP Photo

 

Puerto Rico is reeling from a devastating hurricane, again. Fiona was
far weaker than Hurricane Maria in 2017—the damage from which has
still not been fully repaired five years later—and Fiona’s core
did not directly strike the center of the island. But its slow speed
meant torrential rain that knocked out the entire power grid
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and left about a third of Puerto Ricans without drinking water. Four
days later, rescue efforts were still struggling to reach people
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stranded by washed-out roads and bridges.

There are many proximate factors behind Puerto Rico’s continued
vulnerability to hurricanes and economic dysfunction. But the root
problem is political inequality. It is an American colony: controlled
by the United States government, but without any political
representation for the people living there. Until this inequality is
rectified, it’s a safe bet that Puerto Rico will never fully
recover.

The most immediate infrastructure issue on Puerto Rico is the
electrical grid. Even before 2017, the system was aging and battered,
reliant on polluting heavy oil generators whose fuel had to be
imported at great expense. Maria virtually shredded the whole thing to
ribbons. This damage, and chronic corruption at the state-owned power
utility, prompted the island’s government and the oversight board
appointed by Congress (more on this later) to privatize the grid in
2021
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selling control to a Canadian-American consortium called LUMA Energy.

Unsurprisingly, this did not work. Not only did the grid fail
spectacularly during the recent hurricane, it suffered worsening power
failures
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immediately after privatization, including a widespread blackout
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in April this year while weather was calm. In November last year, a
judge issued an arrest warrant
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for LUMA’s CEO for failing to provide documents to local lawmakers
(though it was later rescinded).

Meanwhile, as Kate Aronoff points out
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_The New Republic_, only a tiny fraction of the $13.2 billion
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has allocated for grid repair and modernization after Maria has been
disbursed and spent. While frustrated Puerto Ricans have been setting
up rooftop solar panels by the thousands—which worked exceedingly
well
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during the recent hurricane—utility-scale renewable investment has
been sparse. As of mid-2022, the island got 95 percent
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of its electricity from fossil fuels, mainly oil and natural gas. The
capital of San Juan has come to rely on liquefied natural gas
delivered through a privately owned terminal
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Incidentally, one might think that wind turbines would be knocked down
by hurricanes, but older designs have stood up to Category 4 winds
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and new designs
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should be nearly hurricane-proof. The major vulnerability is the grid
itself, especially aboveground power lines.

The broader context here is that Puerto Rico has been in dire economic
straits
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more than a decade. In earlier decades, Congress granted it various
tax exemptions that made its debt exceptionally attractive for
investors and prompted the island government to borrow heavily, but
removed those provisions in 2006—just in time for the Great
Recession. The resulting debt crisis was “resolved” with a law
called PROMESA
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signed by President Obama in 2016, that put Puerto Rico under a de
facto dictatorship of technocrats. (That’s the board mentioned
earlier; locals call it “La Junta.”) This board set up a partial
debt restructuring plan coupled to a requirement for Greece-style
massive austerity and privatization, which only deepened the economic
crisis, and further fueled migration to the mainland.

 
Until this inequality is rectified, it’s a safe bet that Puerto Rico
will never fully recover.

This policy bungling, mostly the fault of the federal government, is
why Puerto Rico has not grown economically in more than 20 years
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The situation in Puerto Rico is crying out for a fundamental
restructuring of its relationship with the mainland. It needed a
massive debt write-off, the removal of anachronistic trade rules
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reconstruction package to move its energy sources toward renewables
and strengthen its grid against storms. (It is insane for a sunny
Caribbean island to burn so much expensive imported oil, gas, and
coal.) It would also benefit from granting full welfare rights to its
citizens—currently Puerto Ricans receive less
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in Medicaid than mainlanders and are ineligible for Supplemental
Security Income, even though they pay payroll taxes. All this could
repressurize the economy, get growth going again, and stop the loss of
population.

But so long as Puerto Rico remains a colony, that solution is nearly
impossible to imagine. If the island had senators and representatives,
they could demand action by leveraging their votes in
Congress—especially when control is so closely divided between the
parties, as it is today and is likely to remain. It’s not a
coincidence that no actual American state has ever been jerked around
by the federal government like this.

Now, statehood is controversial on the island. The most recent vote
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2020 found a clear majority in favor, though not a huge one, at 53
percent in favor to 47 percent against.

I can understand why Puerto Ricans might be suspicious about joining
up with a government that has treated them so badly over the years.
But the most realistic prospect of prying the help the island deserves
out of that government is to send its own voting members to Congress
where they can wield real power. The current commonwealth status is
plainly not working; formal independence would not solve the economic
crisis, and would still leave the island (like all small nations close
to large, rich ones) subject to American economic domination.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have every reason to create a new
state that would likely tend to favor their party—though it
wouldn’t be a liberal lock, as Puerto Ricans are more conservative
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than is commonly supposed. But partisan politics aside, the existence
of any colony is an egregious violation of basic principles of
democracy, regardless of how it might vote. There should be no
taxation without representation.

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Ryan Cooper is the Prospect’s managing editor, and author of ‘How
Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question
in Politics.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The
Week.

* Puerto Rico; Hurricane Fiona; Luma; Colonialism; Statehood;
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