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<div id="reader-header" class="header" style="display: block;"> <font
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href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/20547/Puerto-Rico-flood-climate-change-colonialism-austerity">http://inthesetimes.com/article/20547/Puerto-Rico-flood-climate-change-colonialism-austerity</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">“These Disasters Aren’t Natural Anymore”:
A Dispatch from Puerto Rico After Maria</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits"><span class="author">BY
<a href="http://inthesetimes.com/community/profile/322171">Kate
Aronoff</a> - </span> September 25, 2017</div>
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<p class="article-deck">A conversation with Xiomara Caro
Diaz of the Center for Popular Democracy about the
devastation wrought by climate change and austerity.</p>
<div class="content-body">
<p class="pullquote">This is going to be the reality under
which we fight against austerity for years.</p>
<p>Several weeks ago, Puerto Rico avoided a direct hit
from Hurricane Irma, which shifted north at the last
minute. But Hurricane Maria hit head on, and has left a
humanitarian crisis in its wake. Power on the island
could be out for as long as six months, and many parts
of the island have yet to be contacted.</p>
<p>Compounding Maria’s wreckage is the devastation brought
about by ongoing austerity and an economic crisis in
Puerto Rico. Last summer, Congress appointed a fiscal
oversight board to reign in the island’s spending—and
break union contracts and sell off public assets in the
process. Just one of the board’s seven members is
required to maintain a primary residence in Puerto Rico,
and many see the body as the most blatant expression of
the U.S. colonial presence in the commonwealth.</p>
<p>This reality complicates the question of what relief
will look like in the coming days and months: How fast
will lights get turned on? Will privatizers treat Maria
as an excuse to push through their pet projects? Will
the U.S. government release funds? What role—if any—will
Puerto Ricans play in rebuilding their lives on the
island?</p>
<p>To hear about this and more, I spoke by phone with
Xiomara Caro Diaz, a San Juan native and the director of
New Organizing Projects at the Center for Popular
Democracy (CPD). In the days before the storm, she
helped set up the <a
href="https://connect.clickandpledge.com/w/Form/cb4a3c78-5694-4324-bead-42c8ad94c1bf">Hurricane
Maria Relief and Recovery Fund</a> (“the Maria Fund”),
housed organizationally within CPD and intended to
support recovery efforts specifically in Puerto Rico’s
low-income communities and communities of color. We
talked about that effort, what she’s seen on the ground
and what a just, democratic recovery might look like.</p>
<p><strong>Kate Aronoff: </strong>Could you give me a
sense of what’s happening on the ground?</p>
<p><strong>Xiomara Caro Diaz:</strong> I don’t know if I
have the words to describe it. It’s a mix of complete
devastation and knowing that Puerto Rico is a country
that’s incredibly resilient and has survived other
hurricanes, metaphorically speaking: colonialism and
austerity. This is not even comparable, but I’m trying
to hold onto that idea.</p>
<p>More concretely, we’re 100 percent out of power. Most
people have no phones. Because cell phones are so
widespread, most people don’t have a house line anymore.
I would say the majority of the country is
incommunicado, locally. The day the hurricane passed,
there was a moment when there were no radio stations.
It’s surreal. Now there are two radio stations that are
on, so those are the main forms of communication. That’s
where the governor speaks and gives updates. That’s
where family members call to say either, “I’m okay” or
“I can’t find my family.” People have gone to the radio
station physically to give information.</p>
<p>There are towns that up to a couple hours ago hadn't
issued any updates. Updates are an hourly thing, not a
minute-by-minute thing. As of the most recent one, there
are still towns that haven’t been contacted yet. There
are still people waiting to be rescued on rooftops in
the area around Lake Guajataca. It was mentioned today
that close to 500 to 700 people were rescued Friday.</p>
<p>Guajataca, in particular, has been a topic of
conversation, because the water dam there was breached.
But the alarm that announces to the communities around
it that it will be opened up did not go off. There have
been reports that eight people have drowned so far.
There are municipalities where not even the government
of Puerto Rico knows what’s going on, and today there
are going to be several official helicopter rides to
connect with different places. The death toll officially
is 13, with estimates that power will be out for four to
six months. People are being urged not to leave their
homes unless there’s an emergency. Other people have
assumed a responsibility to help clean up trees and
debris from the streets and help open up streets and
highways.</p>
<p>I don’t think anybody alive has ever lived through
something like this. I heard a grandmother on the radio
the other day saying she lived through San Felipe II,
and she said this doesn’t even compare.</p>
<p>Today we drove to Las Piedras to see our family and see
how they are doing. The mountains looked like they were
burned; trees have no leaves on them, it’s just bare
wood. This just reveals how the people of Puerto Rico
have been forgotten and left behind, but also have an
amazing amount of resilience to live under the current
political, oppressive relationship it has with the
United States, and decades of economic exploitation by
industry, like the pharmaceutical industry. Most
recently, one big force on that front has been the
market for luxury tourism and millionaires who are
moving to Puerto Rico. But none of that money coming in
is being invested in communities here. Driving back and
looking at the mountains—where you can suddenly see
things you couldn’t see before—felt like a metaphor.</p>
<p>We’re now seeing what it means to be economically poor
and what it means to be resilient at the same time.
There are already people in the streets. Hundreds of
people are getting on calls every night to organize
relief in the diaspora. There are already lists of 2,000
people who have signed up to come to Puerto Rico to help
rebuild.</p>
<p>I’ve gotten some perspective, because I’ve had the
privilege of having internet, and I am in an area that
has signal in the capital, San Juan. There are hundreds
of people still trying to connect to family members who
haven’t heard from them in days. I don’t know if we’ll
even grasp the magnitude of this for days or even weeks.</p>
<p><strong>Kate: </strong>Have you gotten any signals
from the government or from the Financial Oversight and
Management Board about how they intend to respond?</p>
<p><strong>Xiomara:</strong> The fiscal control board has
said two things which seem pretty obvious choices:
They’re revising the austerity measures and approving us
to use $1 billion from our own budget for relief.
Understandably, the governor has been focused on the
very immediate recovery tasks at hand. There’s literally
one channel of communication for the majority of Puerto
Ricans, which is these two radio stations, so in terms
of what they’re saying, they’re talking about rescue
trips and things like that. I think it’s obvious that
there should be a moratorium on the debt. There’s going
to be a great need to look into deeper issues and
structural inequalities that led us to here. But in the
short-term, there’s a need to recognize that we need to
put a stop on debt payments at a national and individual
levels. We don’t vote. We don’t participate. We are a
colony, and we’ve been a U.S. colony for 120 years.
Puerto Rico has been used for a very long time to make
money, and create taxes that allow industries to make
money.</p>
<p>There are several conversations to be had that have to
do with policy. All of these people who live in areas
that were built up massively during the 1990s in places
have been destroyed. Who banked on building housing in
areas where they should not have been built, and which
public official signed the permit on that?</p>
<p>There are people who lost their homes because they were
wooden homes, people who stayed in their homes either
because they don’t have the resources or thought they’d
be okay there. Many people who live in houses that are
built from cement probably suffered a lot of damage
outside, but that's a steady structure that can survive
something like that. Of the at least 13 people who have
passed away, three of them were sisters, all older than
60. Their house was taken with a mudslide, and they died
inside the house. One sister survived. She left trying
to get help.</p>
<p>For the past several years, Puerto Rico has been in a
state of crisis because of its political and economic
situation. But it is also a place of possibility, of a
lot of people doing things for themselves. It just feels
like it’s been the practice field for so many neoliberal
policies for the last decade. This event magnifies that.
It forces the question: What are the implications of
austerity? This was always going to be a destructive
hurricane, but people losing their lives because their
house was built in a place where houses shouldn’t be
built are things that could have been prevented with
just policies—policies that are for people and not for
profit.</p>
<p><strong>Kate: </strong>How will money from the Maria
Fund be spent?</p>
<p><strong>Xiomara:</strong> Our affiliate in Puerto Rico
is called Taller Salud, a community organization, a
feminist organization that does work in several towns.
The main town is Loíza. The work of Taller Salud for the
last 40 years has been around reproductive rights,
sexual health and violence interruption, and they’ve
always been political. The women who created Taller
Salud were the women who created the protocol for giving
rights to women who were victims of domestic violence.
They have a successful program called Acuerdo de Paz
(“Peace Agreement”), and have done work with communities
to interrupt violence before it escalates to death.</p>
<p>When I joined CPD and started connecting them with
organizations in Puerto Rico, I saw Taller Salud as an
organization that had been doing this work for a very
long time in spite of the fact that progressive policy
work was not being supported economically. To give you
some context, some 90 to 95 percent of non-profits in
Puerto Rico are direct-service organizations. So
organizing is not something that falls within the
institutional sector, but that happens outside the
institutional sector in a more volunteer capacity.
That’s for historical reasons: It’s a colony. A lot of
foundations don’t have Puerto Rico on the map. And being
about social justice in Puerto Rico means talking about
liberation and our capacity to provide for ourselves as
a country that has all the resources necessary to create
relationships with other countries that are based in
dignity. There’s a reason why that work isn’t
necessarily funded the same way.</p>
<p>Another organization that isn’t an affiliate of CPD,
but that is included in the Maria Fund, is Caño 3.7.
That’s also an organization that has been doing work for
decades, and gotten international recognition for the
environmental justice work. It started because there
were private companies interested in gentrifying an area
very close to the business sector several decades ago.
Communities started organizing to talk about how to
guarantee their own permanence—and have a whole plan of
relocating families and rebuilding the area, because it
was an area where families had built in places that have
a high propensity to flood. They’ve even done advocacy
at the federal level. The work of Caño 3.7 has been
heavily impacted by Hurricane Maria.</p>
<p><strong>Kate: </strong>Why is it important to donate
to the kind of grassroots work that the Maria Fund is
supporting, as opposed to something like the Red Cross?</p>
<p><strong>Xiomara:</strong> When I started talking to
people about setting up the Maria Fund with Taller
Salud, we started this conversation about the need to
support grassroots organizations in Puerto Rico. Besides
the immediate rebuilding, there’s a need to have an
understanding about the impact of “natural”
disasters—these disasters aren’t natural anymore, these
disasters have been created by the politics of
capitalism. We need to understand the disproportionate
impacts these events have on populations that are
already vulnerable because they have been excluded from
policies or—really—targeted by policies.</p>
<p>Setting up the Maria Fund was a way of saying that
rebuilding Puerto Rico is not just about putting up
homes. First, it’s about guaranteeing that there will be
relief. The next stage is just as important: rebuilding.
What does it mean to rebuild with justice for people in
Puerto Rico? There are companies that are going to try
and make money off of Maria. There are industries that
are going to see this as an opportunity. A lot of people
are going to take advantage of the fact that there
aren’t a lot of watchdogs monitoring what gets rebuilt
and how. The Maria Fund is going to go to grassroots
organizations in Puerto Rico that have a presence in
those communities that have been working there already,
and who we know and trust understand the structural
inequalities those communities have faced for years.</p>
<p>It’s not enough to talk about the amount of people who
have lost their homes in Loíza. There were 80 or 90
families there who lost their homes because of Hurricane
Irma. When we talk about rebuilding Loíza, we have to
ask: What do the people of Loíza really want? What does
it mean to rebuild Loiza not just to be the way it was
before Hurricane Maria, because—before Maria—residents
were struggling with many of these issues, and were
invisible to a lot of people in Puerto Rico and to the
government. Asking that question requires us to provide
resources to organizations that have already been
listening to the people of Loíza. Taller Salud is one of
them. There are others, and similar organizations in
other communities.</p>
<p>Final decisions on how the fund is spent will be led by
those local groups: Taller Salud, Caño 3.7 and any
other groups we add as we start to assess where was
hardest hit and what organizations can manage and help
with rebuilding efforts.</p>
<p><strong>Kate: </strong>What would you say are the
biggest things to be looking out for in the coming days
and weeks in Puerto Rico?</p>
<p><strong>Xiomara:</strong> Number one, efforts to <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2017/09/12/in-wake-of-hurricane-irma-vultures-eye-puerto-ricos-electric-grid-for-privatization/">privatize
Puerto Rico’s electric utility</a>, the Puerto Rico
Electric Power Authority (PREPA). It is one of the most
indebted public agencies, and we don't have a lot of
collective clarity about how much money in loans was
taken out in the name of the utility that wasn’t
reinvested in infrastructure or working conditions. The
privatization of PREPA is a conversation that was
happening before now, and I’m sure it’s going to be at
the top of the agenda of the Fiscal Control board. I
think that people in Puerto Rico need more information
to understand the importance of maintaining capital. We
lost our hospitals to privatization throughout the 1990s
and early 2000s. People know what that means, and I
think it’ll be a top item on the agenda.</p>
<p>Before Maria hit, a lot of properties were being
repossessed, and we were having conversations about who
had an interest in homes in Puerto Rico being
repossessed. A couple years ago, banks were not crazy
about getting rid of their homes. But now it feels like
there’s someone in the market offering money to local
banks and just buying out homes in Puerto Rico. Because
of the numbers of houses being repossessed, the
legislature is considering approving a law to create a
special courtroom just to manage eviction proceedings.
Housing was already an issue in Puerto Rico—quality of
housing, accessibility of decent quality housing and a
huge interest in buying up the homes of people who have
left. I wonder how this storm is going to change that.</p>
<p>This is going to be the reality under which we fight
against austerity for years. Now it will be critical to
develop a lens of what it will it look like to still
organize people—maybe even with more urgency—to really
fight for the idea that this can be a place that we can
build, and that we have the capacity to rebuild. We must
demand the political space to be heard, to participate
in making the decisions that influence our country and
to fight for economic policies that are created and
designed by us and for us. </p>
<div class="moreby">
<a
href="http://inthesetimes.com/community/profile/322171/">
<h2 class="sechead-article-author">Kate Aronoff</h2>
</a>
<p>Kate Aronoff is a writing fellow at <em>In These
Times</em> covering the politics of climate change,
the White House transition and the resistance to
Trump’s agenda. Follow her on Twitter <a
href="https://twitter.com/katearonoff">@katearonoff</a></p>
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