Over
the weekend, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz made a spontaneous
statement expressing her frustration with insufficient relief efforts in
a video that went viral.
As
the people of Puerto Rico suffer, President Trump lashed out at San
Juan's mayor this morning. In this interview, I talk with social
anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla about the history of the US in Puerto
Rico and the challenges Puerto Ricans face in the wake of the storm.
Puerto Rico is devastated. Two hurricanes plunged the island into darkness and despair. Crops perish in the fields. The landscape of ruined buildings and towns resemble Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped on it. Over 3 million people are desperate for food, water, electricity and shelter.
After a slow start, the Trump administration is now speeding up the flow of supplies to the island. A top US general has been given command of the relief efforts. And, like so many others, Yarimar Bonilla watches with a broken heart as her native Puerto Rico struggles. This noted social anthropologist — a scholar on Caribbean societies — says the hurricanes have made an already bad fiscal and economic crisis worse, and she sees darker times ahead unless major changes are made in the structure of power and in Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States.
Last night on NBC, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz made a spontaneous statement expressing her frustration with insufficient relief efforts that went viral. Before you read my interview with Yarimar Bonilla please take two minutes to watch this video. You will understand even more clearly Ms. Bonilla’s explainer of what is happening in Puerto Rico.
— Bill Moyers
San
Juan mayor pleads for federal help after hurricane:
"We
are dying here"
Bill Moyers: What’s the first
thing you would want us to know about Puerto Rico?
Yarimar Bonilla: That
it is a US territory — as are the Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam. That
it has a greater population than 21 other states — more residents than Utah,
Iowa or Nevada — and is geographically larger than Delaware or Rhode Island.
However, rather than wanting folks to know
something in particular, I would want them to ask why is Puerto Rico part of
the United States, to investigate the question and come up with their own
answers. I think it would be more interesting for people to start out wherever
they are — be it with no knowledge at all — or people who grew up in Puerto
Rico and have long lived this political relationship without fully
understanding it, to ask themselves why the island is part of the United States
and what explains the particular ambiguity of its situation today.
Moyers: What’s
your personal connection to Puerto Rico, and how did you come to devote so much
of your life to studying Caribbean societies?
Bonilla: I
was born in Puerto Rico, although my mom says that I can choose if I want to be
an Island Puerto Rican or a Diasporican because now I’ve spent pretty much
equal time in the United States and in Puerto Rico proper.
Moyers: I dare
say that until the hurricanes the popular image of Puerto Rico in this country
was the epitome of prosperity. You know, all the ads on television and in
magazines touting pleasure and escape — the resorts, the bright sun, the white
beaches, the blue water, the rum and tonic, the sexy bikinis, the
smiling locals.
Bonilla: Well,
it’s funny, I had a colleague, a fellow anthropologist, with whom I joked about
wanting one day for us to write an ethnography of the Puerto Rico that exists
in tourist ads. Because it’s a place that we’ve never really visited or known.
Moyers: But
doesn’t this distorted view make it more difficult for regular Americans
to connect to the devastation today?
Bonilla: Perhaps.
But I think even more than the tourist ads, what makes it difficult for Americans
to connect is the deep ignorance that exists about the political relationship
between Puerto Rico and the United States. Most folks in the US don’t even know
how to orient themselves towards Puerto Rico. How should they feel about it?
Should they support statehood, should they support independence? They’re unable
to reconcile the political history of Puerto Rico with the history that they
are taught in schools about the United States.
Moyers: You’ve said that
Puerto Rico was in trouble long before the hurricane.
Bonilla: Puerto
Rico’s been in an economic recession for over a decade. The great American
recession that was so debated in the United States during the early Obama
administration after the collapse of the banks in the US — all of that started
in Puerto Rico much earlier, and whereas the US is said to have recovered to
some extent for certain populations, Puerto Rico’s recession has only deepened.
That is in part due to the lack of a strong economic base and to tax incentives
that were put in place to bring foreign — “foreign” meaning US companies — to
Puerto Rico. After the crash a lot of companies left and a base of employment
in Puerto Rico was gone.
So even before this last hurricane, already
Puerto Rico had huge unemployment, huge poverty rates — poverty rates that
double any poverty rate in the US, even that of the poorest states of the US —
and a very neglected infrastructure that was not ready for the storms.
Moyers: Donald Trump
tweeted, “Texas and Florida are doing great after their hurricanes, but Puerto
Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure and massive debt,
is in deep trouble.” And that seems to echo what you’ve just said and what you
wrote in The Washington Post — that a state of emergency
existed well before the hurricane hit.
Bonilla: I’m
curious about that statement from Donald Trump. I wonder who in Florida and
Texas is doing great and who is not. So that would be my first question. But
you know, that’s for other folks to answer.
Moyers: Why was the inequality
in Puerto Rico so great?
Bonilla: Because
there’s been an erosion of the middle class. And so you have a lot of people at
the bottom who can’t find work, who can’t start their own businesses. Many of
them depend on government assistance, but there’s also a huge number who are
working poor, who live paycheck to paycheck, who are supplementing their
incomes with the gig economy. Retailers like Walmart offer no job security.
Most of the people working for them can’t predict their shifts — their shifts
change from week to week. They have to keep their schedules completely open.
They are paid for part-time labor, but have to be available full-time.
And so all of this means that leading up to the
storm, people already did not have enough money to prepare, to buy the supplies
that they needed. Ideally, you would prepare for a storm of this nature by
having a well-stocked pantry, plenty of water, lots of batteries, and if you
can afford it, a generator. Also, your car would be full of gas and you would have
a good amount of cash, because as can be expected and as we’re seeing now, ATMs
are down. People who are just making ends meet, they don’t have the kind of
money that is necessary to prepare for these storms.
There’s a lot of talk about the island’s
environmental precarity and vulnerability. It’s true that the Caribbean is on
the front lines of
effects from climate change. But there are other forms of
vulnerability, like socioeconomic vulnerability. And also a political
vulnerability because Puerto Ricans don’t really have anyone in Congress
advocating for them. They’re nobody’s constituents. They have no representation
and no one who can leverage votes and trade deals with other states in order to
get things expedited on the ground there.
Moyers: You’ve described
these Caribbean societies, including Puerto Rico, as protected markets for
national corporations.
Bonilla: Yes. If
you look at the Jones Act, the only goods that can arrive in Puerto Rico have
to be on US-made ships, and owned by US citizens, with a US crew flying a US
flag. So this means that if the Dominican Republic wants to sell food to Puerto
Rico, which it does, it has to send that food first to Jacksonville, Florida,
unload it, put it on another ship that is allowed to bring it to Puerto Rico.
So this makes it very difficult for Puerto Rico to engage in trade with other
countries. We’re not an independent nation, so we can’t make our own trade
arrangements. And that means that we have to buy mostly from the US.
Please continue this interview here: http://billmoyers.com/story/vulture-capitalists-circle-puerto-rico-prey/
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