More than a week of massive protests that flooded the streets of Puerto Rico forced the island’s unpopular Gov. Ricardo Rosselló to submit his resignation effective Aug. 2. The protests were a response to the arrest of two former government officials on corruption charges and the leak of nearly 900 pages of chat messages between members of the governor’s inner circle that obscenely disparaged politicians, journalists and victims of Hurricane Maria, as well as scheming to suppress news stories about the death toll from the deadly hurricane.
But the social explosion was also fueled by years of unsustainable government debt which triggered the privatization of some government services, harsh austerity measures and deprivation, made much worse by the destruction of Hurricane Maria in September 2017. In the aftermath of Maria, mutual assistance organizers laid the groundwork for “bottom-up” resistance to the systemic causes of falling living standards and the failure of public institutions across Puerto Rico.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Fernando Tormos-Aponte, a Scholars Strategy Network postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, who talks about Puerto Rico’s emerging social movement, which is demanding fundamental systemic change beyond the resignation of Gov. Rosselló.
FERNANDO TORMOS-APONTE: There has been anger brewing for quite some time and there are social and economic bases for the kind of unrest that we witnessed over the past month. Gov. Rosselló was an easy target because of the many, many ways in which he was implicated in wrongdoing, fiscal policies and other kinds of policies that affected the Puerto Rican population. But he was by no means the only actor that was implicated in the kinds of policies that led to the precarity of a vast majority of the Puerto Rican population.
It’s important to recognize that the main opposition party, that Popular Democratic Party, does not depart itself to a great extent from the kind of policy prescriptions that the New Progressive Party has enacted. And during their mandates, which have also in the recent past only lasted four years – one electoral cycle – they have also enacted austerity measures. So, Puerto Ricans – many of them – are now calling for an end to this kind of bipartisan rule where these two main parties trade power for years and onwards.
And they’re calling for a series of reforms ranging from calling for new elections, having a second round for the election of the governor. They’re calling for the vice governor position. But more broadly, there are folks who are calling for constitutional assemblies – constitutional conventions – that would entertain reforms such as developing a mechanism for decolonizing Puerto Rico in ways that would allow Puerto Ricans to have power over the ways in which they are governed, because of course, Puerto Ricans do not have members of Congress who have a vote and they do not have a presidential vote outside of the presidential primaries. So, Puerto Ricans are entertaining things like independence or statehood, and they’re also calling for an end to financial ways of colonization, including eliminating the Fiscal Control Board which currently has vast powers to enact whatever budget they believe is necessary to pay back Puerto Rico’s onerous debt.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Fernando, in your recent article, “Puerto Rico Rises,” you write that Puerto Rico is now at a crossroads, but you’re talking about how now in Puerto Rico, the left and nonpartisan citizens have been united in the view that fundamental change has to take place. I wondered if you’d talk about the connection of that sentiment across the island of Puerto Rico with some of the mutual assistance organizing of political networks across the island in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
FERNANDO TORMOS-APONTE: There were some folks who took it upon themselves, organizers, veterans from the left, as well as just community folks who had never been associated with the left, who took it upon themselves to go to areas in the island where they suspected that government had not reached. And this is the case of the mutual assistance group in the barrio of Bucarabones in Las Marias, a Central West mountainous region municipality where these folks reached two weeks after the hurricane and they realized that government had not reached that community for two weeks after this hurricane and they began to work with the community and of course letting the community lead, but at the same time bringing resources from other areas.
And there was already this sort of organizational infrastructure in place. Now in 2019, about a few months ago, less than a year ago, they had held meetings and they announced that they were a network now and there were other folks in the diaspora who had set these networks, who were folks who had gathered resources in the United States and other countries and they shipped them in the aftermath of Maria. So there were these connections, community connections, people who knew each other now who had their phone numbers, who had Facebook groups, who had other forms of communicating and had these kinds of ties. When these corruption scandals emerged, when the chat is leaked, all of a sudden these networks that had not been highly politicized were now outraged because, of course, many of them had realized firsthand what government neglect looked like.
Read articles by Fernando Tormos-Aponte in Jacobin.
