Puerto Rico’s failures in recovery contributed to human suffering
Puerto Rico’s nonvoting congresswoman is a Republican and its current governor is a Democrat. Both were elected at-large to serve a larger population of U.S. citizens than each of 20 states.
The congresswoman and governor lead a bipartisan, pro-statehood coalition in Puerto Rico. That bipartisanship was illserved by a far-left local Democratic mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, in the island’s sprawling capital of San Juan. Her antics following Hurricane Maria provoked President Donald Trump to remark pointedly in an interview with Geraldo Rivera on Fox News: “With the mayor of San Juan as bad as she is…Puerto Rico shouldn’t be talking about statehood until they get some people that really know what they’re doing.”
With those remarks, Trump was not changing his announced policy supporting a vote in Puerto Rico on terms for statehood defined by Congress. He knows the current territory status is historically and constitutionally temporary, and that equal rights for U.S. citizens can come only through eligibility to vote in a state. But he called out Cruz in a way that let statehood supporters know she was not helping their cause.
A May 2018 Harvard study sponsored by the local government redefined criteria for hurricane-related death and raised the mortality count from less than 100 to 3,000. Yet reliable data and reporting confirmed that FEMA coordinated airlifts and sealifts bringing food, water, equipment, supplies, medicine and civilian boots on the ground to the island, with better than expected results given the worst of conditions. Trump rejected allegations of inhumanity and unapologetically declared the disaster effort in Puerto Rico a “success” for America.
Following the storm, Cruz endorsed a socialist post-hurricane “disaster recovery” plan proposed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but it was too much like a local government bailout and wealthredistribution scheme.
Cruz is an anti-statehood, pro-independence “nationalist” despite 94 percent of voters rejecting independence. The mayor’s socialist roots go back to the New Deal era, when then-President Franklin Roosevelt exiled his openly socialist secretary of agriculture to be governor of Puerto Rico. That legacy manifested itself in the bankrupt commonwealth regime of territorial government, which owned power, water, sewer, communications and transportation resources, in addition to hotels and restaurants. This bloated and inefficient public sector stumbled into fiscal collapse in 2015.
Socialist experimentation morphed into crony capitalism in the Great Society era, including offshore territorial tax shelters for U.S. corporations. These tax shelters were not constitutional in U.S. states, so for three decades corporations benefiting from billions annually in territorial tax credits financed lobbying targeting Democrats in Congress to preserve the territorial status quo and oppose statehood.
In 1996, House Speaker Newt Gingrich shamed the Clinton administration into phased repeal of the Puerto Rico corporate welfare tax shelters. But the three-decade delay in hardening public-sector infrastructure and improving public-sector human services to statelike standards had lethal consequences when Maria hit.
Trump knows failure to meet statelike standards of readiness in San Juan and the rest of the territory forced FEMA to operate in Puerto Rico without the local government partnership found in places like Florida and Texas after hurricanes Earl and Maria. He also knows Cruz engaged in media grandstanding and did not mobilize effectively to support early recovery efforts.
We believe Cruz and all of those who opposed and impeded statehood created conditions that contributed to suffering after the hurricane. Every loss of life due to Maria is tragic. We are sure Trump will honor self-determination on status by our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico. But he won’t soon forget how ungrateful some in Congress and on the island were after federal officials and contractors succeeded in overcoming the pronounced lack of statelike readiness by local officials in Puerto Rico.
Some of Latin America’s most important geo-strategic linchpin countries are embracing free-market capitalism. Last summer Colombia elected Iván Duque, last week Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro — both by landslides. The Puerto Rican territory and our American Puerto Rican brothers and sisters on the mainland should embrace self-reliance and reject leaders who promote victimization politics and socialist (and crony capitalist) policies that lead to unfocused anger and misery.
A capitalist wave is gaining momentum in our hemisphere. Our family in Puerto Rico needs to be part of it.