On July 24 the governor of Puerto Rico Ricardo (Ricky) Rosselló resigned. He did so after ten days of massive protests and a great strike and mobilization of half a million people on Monday 22. The mobilization was sparked by the release of a series of Rosselló´s chats with strong homophobic and misogynistic content that also revealed large scale corruption, while the Puerto Rican people experience a time of great hardships.
The people will not stand for more injustice
They got tired of your lies and your manipulation of the news
Hey, hey, all the groups, all the hoods, we are our own militia
You will no longer take advantage of us
You are a corrupt man who takes corrupt advice
Get the hell out of here and don’t come back
And let´s welcome the generation of:
“I will not allow it“
(“Afilando los cuchillos”, a song by Residente and Bad Bunny, with five million views on the web)
On July 13, the Center of Investigative Journalism published 899 pages of Telegram conversations between the governor and his team. Messages with misogynist and anti-LGBT expressions, despise for the Puerto Rican people and the victims of Hurricane Maria, revealing also an important network of governmental corruption: all of this sparked a rebellion that demanded the resignation of the governor and his team.
According to the terms of his resignation, Rosselló must strp down on August 2. But he does not have a replacement yet, because it should the Secretary of State (who also quit) or the Secretary of Justice, Wanda Vazquez, who is rejected by the people that chant “do not get ready, you are not next”, because she is accused of corruption and has announced her desire to resign. As we write these lines, there is a power vacuum in Puerto Rico. As in every revolutionary crisis, power is on the streets. But the acute crisis and the vacuum usually do not last, especially when there is not a revolutionary alternative that is capable of occupying the vacant place.
The Root Causes of the Uprising
The publication of the chats was the last straw in a crisis that combined growing capitalist exploitation and decadence in the island, wrapped up in the renegotiation of an enormous public debt with corruption in the spheres of power.
Behind the deceitful name of “free associated State”, Puerto Rico is actually a US colony, with three and a half million inhabitants, while another 5 million have emigrated to US territory. Its economy is in decadence. It was the center of investments of US multinational companies in the 90s, providing a cheap workforce and tax exemptions thanks to Section 936 of the US Internal Tax Code. But the end of these exemptions in 2005 marked the beginning of a period of serious economic decadence, since many of these investors obtained similar or higher profits in Mexico after the signing of NAFTA and in other markets.
As a consequence, unemployment and poverty grew to new records. Today, unemployment is over 8,5% according to official data (for other sources, it is over 15%) and poverty is over 40%. These numbers could not be lowered because of the skant help sent by Washington to avoid a total collapse.
To cover its “insolvency”, Puerto Rican governors took on a huge public debt. According to the New York Times: “the leaders of the island, a US territory, borrowed 74 billion dollars, mainly to balance the budget and spent it all in the public pension system. The island owes retirees around 55 billion dollars“.
The loan is “a complex combination of mutual funds and hedge funds that add up to the current US$73 billion of debt (….) The bonds emitted by the island are free of taxes on benefits for the rest of the states. Therefore, those bonds were attractive for investors from different parts of the US. So the debt did not stop growing until 2015, when then governor Alejandro García Padilla declared the state´s public debt ´unpayable´.” (BBC News 4/5/17)
This originated the Ley Promesa (a compromise to pay that debt) that Obama signed in June 2016 and created the Financial Oversight Board, destined to lower “fiscal spending”, leading to cuts in pensions, the privatization of health care, cuts in the education budget and social services, and a renegotiation with creditors. For these reasons, the protests demanded the resignation of Ricky and the Board.
As Jorge Rodríguez Vélez pointed out in his article published on the ISL webpage on August 27: “it is worth pointing out that Julia Keleher, secretary of education, who was arrested on July 11, was the government´s public face and perpetrator of the closing of 442 schools, a policy of privatization of education that came on top of the labour reform by which workers suffered the lowering of their pensions and lost important benefits, in both the public and the private sectors“.
And the Hurricane Maria Disaster
On top of this economic calamity, came Hurricane Maria in 2017, which left 3000 victims in its wake according to official data, 4645 according to Harvard University, out of which the government only recognized 64 for a long period. The hurricane left a great part of the island without electricity for several months, due to the complete inefficiency and the corrupt management of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA). Out of the miserable funds voted by the US Congress to aid Puerto Ricans, less than half has entered the island.
An Ongoing Democratic Revolution
The Puerto Rican uprising has a spontaneous character. It did not have a clear leadership and was massive. As in many democratic revolutions, the amplest working masses coincided with other sectors of the political superstructure that opportunistically and in response to the disorder, joined the demand for Rosselló´s resignation. The course of the Puerto Rican process will confront these circumstantial allies, those who want to stop the process within the current regime and the mobilization that seeks to take the democratic tasks to the end.
As Jacobin magazine described the process on August 26: “all sectors of Puerto Rican society have joined in an attempt to bring down governor Ricardo Rosselló. Over 10% of the island´s people marched on the streets of San Juan on July 17 and more than 14% on July 22, with another day of massive protest programmed for July 25, a true revolution if it ever took place in any of the fifty states of the United States. This has never been seen in living history“.
“The calls for Rosselló to step down not only came from unions, women’s rights organizations, students and other groups of civil society, but also from members of all political parties, former governor, representatives of the US Congress, police associations, the Puerto Rican army stationed in foreign bases and the private sector.”
As Rodriguez Velez pointed out: “the spontaneous mobilizations demanding the resignation of Rosselló have given the people a new breath of optimism. They got rid of a governor sent by the US with the people´s most powerful weapon“.
“This victory has a lot of meaning for the Puerto Rican people and it must spread throughout the region. The people have the pride of being the protagonist of a true democratic revolution. Through mobilization they kicked out a governor while being a colony of imperialism. The confidence that has been recovered through the strike and mobilization will be recorded in the Puerto Rican people who have had a taste of their own strength. The struggle is just beginning. Workers, the LGBT community and women are aware of their own strength in the struggle for their rights.“
The Struggle is Just Beginning
The island´s structural crisis is so serious that many establishment media outlets comment with concern that whoever takes over the government does not have many alternatives to a brutal austerity plan. They express this cynically because the “mismanagement” of the Puerto Rican ruling class is totally pro-imperialist and aspires to make the archipelago become the 51st state of the Union. They have been entirely bought off by the current Democratic and Republican administrations, and they have the same logic of capitalist rapine for profit that led to the outbreak of the 2008 crisis.
Decades of “investments” by multinationals making use of the comparative advantages of tax exemptions and cheap labor did not create a productive matrix at the service of the island’s people. On the contrary, they made a more fragile and dependent economy, which collapses with the ups and downs of the imperialist business crises.
There is no solution for the Puerto Rican people except to ignore the immense “foreign debt”, allocate those funds to work, health care and education. Ignoring the debt is a democratic and anti-imperialist task. And it poses the other great anti-imperialist task: gaining independence from the United States.
Sovereignty
From its colonization in 1493 until its cession by Spain to the US in the Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-American war in 1898, Puerto Rico has had a colonial status.
Its inhabitants are second class “American citizens”. They can only vote if they reside in one of the 50 states. Its Constitution and autonomous government can be intervened by the US Congress to which they cannot elect representatives. They integrate it through a “Resident Commissioner” who has the right to speak, but not to vote. Its economy in open crisis and decline is controlled by US multinationals. Its currency, defense, foreign relations and trade regulations depend on the US government. And now, the negotiation of the debt.
Several plebiscites were held for the population to pronounce itself on the status of sovereignty of the island. It is difficult to take them as the only reference because, in the last one, held in 2017, the option of becoming a full state of the US overwhelmingly won, but only 22% of the electorate voted.
After so many years of colonial statute and taking into account the current economic and political crisis of the US, beyond this or that demagogic declaration, this option is far from the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Puerto Rico has no future as an American colony, it can only progress as an independent country. But the struggle for independence cannot be led by its corrupt and submissive bourgeoisie. Both Rosselló´s New Progressive Party (PNP) and the opposition Popular Democratic Party (PDP) want to depend on the US.
Only workers and the Puerto Rican people who now own the streets will be able to, building a revolutionary alternative, carry out this historical task that the bourgeoisie is unable to perform. And it will do so by fighting for measures like not paying the debt, stopping privatizations and labor flexibility, measures that have an objectively anti-capitalist dynamic.
That is why, while the development of popular mobilization is encouraged and all the leaders of this corrupt and subjugated regime are finished, it is more than ever necessary to fight for a sovereign constituent assembly to takes over the country´s destiny, declaring independence from the US master, bring the legitimate representatives of the popular mobilization to power and develop a program at the service of the Puerto Rican people, a socialist program.
Gustavo Gimenez