Paradise Lost
Puerto Rico’s Political Model Has Run Out of Steam. But the Old Guard Isn’t Going Quietly.
When one stands on the walls of the old city in Viejo San Juan, watching the sun make its fiery descent to the west as it throws its last fading rays over the cobblestone streets behind you and the twisting lanes of the colourful working-class neighborhood of La Perla before you, a more beautiful patch of the world is hard to imagine. Hemmed in by the Atlantic Ocean bleeding into the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Bahía de San Juan on the other, with an army of street cats drowsing in the shade of its grand buildings, Viejo San Juan has, in many senses, for years been the beating heart of Puerto Rico, where the island’s hopes and terrors were most vividly lived.
It was from here that the Spanish ruled the island for much of their nearly 400-year occupation of it, building the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture that continues to captivate visitors today. It was also from here where, after the U.S. invaded Puerto Rico in 1898 and captured it from Madrid during the Spanish-American War, the island would be ruled by unelected and often racist functionaries for five long decades, as U.S.-backed security forces violently suppressed moves towards independence, culminating in a 1937 massacre in the southern town of Ponce on Palm Sunday 1937, during which 19 people died and some 200 were injured.
It was here in 1950 that independence-supporters inspired by their complex, mercurial leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, in coordination with attacks elsewhere in the island, launched a suicidal assault on the island’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, at the governor’s mansion, known as La Fortaleza, and elsewhere on the island before being crushed and effectively vanquished as a political movement for decades. And it was here in 1952, under the aegis of Muñoz Marín’s Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), a new constitution came into effect, setting up the strange, hybrid relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, which still exists today. Encompassing what is called the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (Free Associated State of Puerto Rico), Puerto Rico elects its own governor and bicameral legislature and sends a single, nonvoting member - known as the Resident Commissioner - to the U.S. Congress, while ultimate power over its fate remains in the hands of a U.S. president and a U.S. Congress the island’s citizens have no say in electing.
And it was here, nearly 70 years later, that tens of thousands of ordinary Puerto Ricans filled the streets during the summer of 2019 during what became known as the verano boricua, successfully demanding the resignation of then-governor Ricardo Rosselló - a member of the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), which favours Puerto Rico becoming a U.S. state - after the leak of hundreds of pages of misogynistic, homophobic chats between Rosselló and his confidantes on the messaging service Telegram which saw the governor and advisors mocking the island’s citizens and their suffering after 2017’s devastating Hurricane Maria and fantasizing about the assassination of political opponents.
At the time, the fall of Rosselló seemed a potentially transformative moment for Puerto Rico where, after years of apathy and reflexive support for the PPD-PNP duopoly that had long governed the island (often referred to as bipartidismo), Puerto Rico’s citizens had at long last found their voice and demanded real, structural change in their political and economic system. During the 2020 elections that followed, two members of the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (MVC), a newly-formed centre-left political party, won election to the island’s senate, as did two of its members to the island’s Cámara de Representantes. A new right-wing party, Proyecto Dignidad, won one seat in each of the bodies. The PNP’s gubernatorial candidate, Pedro Pierluisi, won the governorship with a paltry 33.16% of the vote (Puerto Rican elections do not go to a second round if the leading candidate fails to secure more than 50%), while the MVC’s candidate for governor, attorney and businesswoman Alexandra Lúgaro, won 13.92% and, most startlingly, Juan Dalmau, the candidate for the pro-independence Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP), a political entity which had previously performed in the very low single digits, won 13.54%, a six-fold increase from the party’s performance only four years earlier.
But the four years since then have not been easy ones for Puerto Rico and, as the island’s voters prepare to go to the polls again this November, the verdict remains open on exactly what path towards the future the island will take.
The Shovel
In rapid succession over the last 7 years, Puerto Rico has endured the destruction of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which claimed over 3,000 lives and knocked out power to the island for months, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in January 2020 which also briefly knocked out power and devastated some communities in its southern reaches, the coronavirus pandemic and a grinding economic crisis. But many of the structural and systemic issues currently facing the island stem from man-made, rather than natural, disasters.
Despite the surprisingly strong showing of the new parties in the 2020 election, governance and policy on the island has largely remained in the hands of the PNP and PPD. The PNP controls the island’s governorship under the rule of Pierluisi, a Democrat, and the position of Resident Commissioner in the person of Jenniffer González-Colón, a Trump-supporting politico who is challenging Pierluisi during the PNP primary elections in June. [The PNP remains a strange, stitched-together Frankenstein’s monster of a party encompassing both relatively liberal Democrats and right-wing Republicans united only by their ostensible desire to see Puerto Rico granted full statehood. González-Colón has said her support for Trump ended after the 6 January assault on the U.S. Capitol.] In Puerto Rico’s Senate, the PNP and PPD control a combined 22 seats out of 27, while in the island’s lower house, the Cámara de Representantes, they control 46 out of 51. The PPD hold a slim advantage in both houses.
Regardless of how viciously the two parties may fight with one another, they often seem united in their apparent indifference to the suffering of their fellow citizens. Years ago, Puerto Ricans coined a mordant term - la pala (the shovel) - to describe the overlapping sprawl of bureaucracies, connections and corruption that seem to have attached themselves, vampire-like, to the island’s politics.
“The situation is urgent,” Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, a senator who serves under the MVC’s banner and an attorney had previously served as the president of the Bar Association of Puerto Rico told me. “The country can no longer tolerate misgovernment, corruption and economic crisis.”
The corruption scandals that have swirled around the upper echelons of the PNP in recent years have been so dizzying in their frequency that one almost needs a score card to keep track of them.
In August 2022, the PNP's Wanda Vázquez Garced, who had served as the island's governor from August 2019 until Pierluisi's inauguration in January 2021, was arrested and charged with participating in a bribery scheme to finance her 2020 gubernatorial election campaign, charges she denies. Last year, the PNP’s Ángel Pérez Otero, who served in the House of Representatives before becoming mayor of the city of Guaynabo, was found guilty of conspiracy, bribery and extortion and sentenced to more than five years in prison. In January, María Milagros "Tata" Charbonier, a PNP member of Puerto Rico's House of Representatives, was convicted of engaging in a years-long theft, bribery, and kickback conspiracy scheme where she fraudulently inflated a legislative assistant’s salary in exchange for a portion of it. Another PNP politico, Félix “El Cano” Delgado, who served as the mayor of the city of Cataño, which sits across the Bahía de San Juan from the island’s capital, and who was famous for his love of designer clothing, pleaded guilty to a bribery scheme while governing the city where more than 45% of the population lives below the poverty line. He was sentenced to a year in prison last month.
The PNP's Thomas Rivera Schatz, the party's minority leader in the senate and one of its most visible politicians (who also has a habit of lapsing into casual racism), is known to be an avid collector of expensive antique cars, with his collection estimated to be worth at least $500,000, though many believe that to be an underestimation. More than a decade ago, Rivera Schatz’s chief aid in the senate, José 'Pepín' Gómez Zaldo, was arrested as part of a federal operation in the southern city of Ponce focusing on the use of permits for businesses maintained by the heads of a local drug gang via which proceeds from the sale and distribution of cocaine was laundered. Before his own arrest in April 2011 for running a cocaine distribution centre located in a business next to his parents’ home, Rivera Schatz’s brother-in-law, Alfonso Urbina, bragged to undercover agents about his relationship to the senator and said simply “Call Tommy” when the cuffs were slapped on him. Urbina would subsequently plead guilty and be sentenced to six years in prison.
Not to be left out, in April 2023, two of Pedro Pierluisi’s own cousins - who were closely involved in his 2020 gubernatorial campaign - pleaded guilty to embezzling approximately $3.7 million in federal funds provided by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the administration of public housing projects in Puerto Rico, routing the funds to corporations and subcontractors they controlled. Upon their guilty plea, Pierluisi told reporters that “In this case we are talking about family members, two cousins, who failed my family, failed the country and now must face severe penalties.”
The PPD’s reputation is currently little better. Shortly after taking office, Puerto Rico's senate president, the PPD's José Luis Dalmau (the independentista politician Juan Dalmau's cousin) saw fit to buy a nearly $80,000 Chevrolet Suburban LT with public funds, explaining that the vehicle he had inherited from his predecessor, a 4 year old SUV of the same model, “was not in adequate condition” for use. In November 2022, in a move spearheaded by the PPD’s Luis “Narmito” Ortiz Lugo, Puerto Rico's lower legislative house showed where its priorities were by approving having gun shops and shooting clubs within 300 metres of the island’s schools (those that were lucky enough not to be among the more than 200 that have been shuttered in recent years, that is). On an island with an epidemic of gender violence so severe it led to a state of emergency being declared around the issue in 2021, a more deranged course of action would be hard to envision.
[Last month, Pierluisi presented what he calls his government’s “Comprehensive Plan for Social Reconstruction and Prevention of Violence,” which characterizes violence as a public health problem and seeks to establish a “culture of peace” along several different points including mental health care and expanding and promoting law enforcement practices around gender violence.]
During Pierluisi’s tenure as governor, Benjamín Torres Gotay, a columnist with the Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día, says “the overall deterioration of institutional integrity continued to manifest itself with various administrative and governance crises in all the most important aspects of collective life, such as health, public education, citizen security, and environmental protection.”
“The last four years, moreover, have made it clearer than ever the perverse effects that the invasion of foreigners attracted by tax incentives not available to residents of Puerto Rico and the lack of control in the proliferation of short-term rentals are having on the daily life of Puerto Ricans,” Torres Gotay continues. “Both phenomena have led to dramatic increases in the cost of housing, without the government showing the slightest willingness to address this situation. These and many other instances have helped strengthen the impression of a ruling class alienated from the needs of society.”
Invasion
Since Hurricane Maria, several areas of the island - Viejo San Juan, the coastal enclave of Dorado, some areas of the surfing mecca of Rincón - have become host to a strange new kind of fauna, blown onto the island not by the trade winds of the Atlantic but lured by the siren song of tax avoidance and often arriving aboard private planes. These new arrivals from the mainland United States have, over the last several years, thrown a harsh spotlight on the imbalance of power between the island and its ruler to the north.
The deformation of Puerto Rico’s economy long predates the storm, though. When, in 1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton wanted bipartisan support to pay for a minimum wage hike on the mainland United States, it came at the price of an end to Section 936, a provision of the Internal Revenue Code enacted in 1976 which gave companies from the mainland United States an exemption from federal taxes on income earned in Puerto Rico and helped spur growth in manufacturing jobs and other sources of work, especially in the pharmaceutical industry.
Over the next several years, the island’s government would impose a range of new taxes to cover the shortfall as the island’s general obligation bonds sank toward junk status, which brought about the arrival of capitalist adventurers. [During this period, the island was governed by the PNP’s Pedro Rosselló — the father of Ricardo Rosselló — who led a scandal-plagued administration and left office bequeathing the island a public debt of some $25.7 billion.] Hedge funds lent Puerto Rico more than $3 billion, envisioning a 20% return on the back of the island’s constitutional clause requiring that bonds be paid back. The funds were dominated by politically powerful entities, such as the Paulson & Co. hedge fund of leading Republican donor John Paulson, who would later serve as an early endorser of and economic adviser for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. [Paulson, the owner of several hotels and resorts in Puerto Rico, recently held a fundraiser in Florida that raised $50 million for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.]
Puerto Rico’s government, reduced to short-term bank credit financing and other schemes to stay afloat from month to month, effectively created a pyramid scheme where the state was borrowing money from some lenders to pay others. With the support of Pierluisi, then serving as Resident Commissioner, in June 2016, the U.S. Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which established the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB, though often referred to locally as “la junta”) with the power to restructure $70 billion of the island’s debt. It was signed into law by Obama that same month. Thus, an unelected federal entity was given the ability to manage the island’s finances over that of its elected government. In March 2022, after years of austerity measures to facilitate the largest public debt restructuring in U.S. history that dovetailed with recent natural disasters, the island formally exited bankruptcy, meaning it could resume its payments to bondholders and restore all or part of the more $1 billion owed to its pension system. The $9 billion debt accrued by island’s state power company - the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) - has yet to be restructured.
Around the same time, in 2012, with the support of both the PNP and PPD, the island’s government passed Act 20, which sought to promote export services on the island via tax credits and tax exemptions, and Act 22, which fully exempts high-net-worth individuals from local taxes on all passive income provided they reside in Puerto Rico (“residing” being defined as being present on the island for at least 168 days per year). In 2019, both acts were folded into the so-called Puerto Rico Incentives Code (known as Act 60). Though the logic of the law was to hopefully encourage these individuals to invest in the local economy, it seems to have attracted something else altogether, as a report from the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo found that the majority of Act 22 grantees “barely create jobs and represent a minimal impact on the local economy,” with many of the entities that are created consisting of “small financial advisory, investment management or real estate companies, headquartered in residences and apartments.” The impact on the ability of Puerto Rican to live on their own island, though, has been rapid and dramatic.
One of the most poignant memories of my years living in Viejo San Juan is how, one by one, my boricua neighbors moved out of the neighborhood in search of cheaper rents, many of the dwellings they once called home either consumed by high–wealth migrants (many of them involved with the crypto currency industry) or quickly flipped and remodeled into Airbnbs or other short-term rentals, the vast majority owned by individuals or corporations not based on the island. In the last apartment building I lived in, I was the only long term tenant, with all the rest of the units given over to short-term rentals. Eventually, unable to secure any permanent accommodation I could afford, I also had to leave, bidding goodbye to the beautiful morning walks along the walls of the old city and the two different colonies of street cats, beloved by local residents, I would feed every day. [In a most disturbing and frankly monstrous development, the U.S. federal government has recently decided that it wants to get rid of the cats, too.]
My experience was clearly not unique. Earlier this year, a report by the non-governmental Hispanic Federation (HF) concluded that the number of short-term rentals on the island had climbed from 1,000 a little less than a decade ago to more than 25,000 in 2023. A December 2022 investigation by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo revealed that cash sales of properties on the island increased by 740% between 2012 and 2021. Over the last four years, local and foreign companies have spent more than $400 million to purchase thousands of parcels of land, including in protected coastal and forest areas. In one recent case that has attracted widespread criticism, a family in Playuela, on the island’s west, is desperately struggling to hold onto land that has been in their family for over 100 years as a private company attempts to evict them. Among its other negative impacts, the proliferation of short-term rentals and ensuing scarcity of housing stock has also made it much more difficult for women fleeing domestic violence to find housing. The rapaciousness of the island’s new class of property owners can often curdle into Dickensian black comedy. Last year, for example, several short-term rental hosts in the San Juan neighborhood of Santurce were offering their clients “all inclusive” service with breakfast and lunch by directing them to the Fondita de Jesús, a nonprofit that serves the homeless, for their meals. Protests against this economic and physical dislocation are frequent.
“The Puerto Rican political system is broken,” says Pablo Torres Casillas, a Puerto Rican historian. “There is a lot of social unrest and little confidence that the government will be able to help solve things…[We have a] citizenry increasingly tired of reacting in the streets to defend what little we have left [and] many will seek to resolve their family situation through emigration.”
In a study published in 2022, a group of researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan and the Universidad de Puerto Rico concluded that more than 700,000 working-age adults had left the island over the last 15 years, resulting in an “accelerated pace of population aging…that has not been documented in any other region of the world.”
Though criticism of these new arrivals can sometimes descend into a more generalized, base xenophobia, the transplants seem to do everything in their power to offend local sensibilities, from gobbling up beloved historic buildings that are then allowed to sit vacant to deriding their local critics as “uneducated” in forums geared towards the arriviste set to mocking the lived experiences of Puerto Ricans as they endure indignities such as frequent blackouts, for years a factor of life in Puerto Rico that have grown markedly worse since the private power company LUMA Energy took over the island’s power grid in 2021.
Meanwhile, as the mainland tax fugitives frolic in their new home, the situation for average Puerto Ricans themselves grows ever-more dire.
A recent report from the World Bank suggested that Puerto Rico's maternal mortality rate climbed from 21 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2011 to 34 deaths per 100,000 in 2020. The report also concluded that “despite some progress, gender gaps, gender-based violence, and disadvantageous social norms facing women and girls persist” on the island, and “gains in human capital of women and girls remain untapped.” Some 294 bridges across the island are in an advanced state of deterioration, a number that represents some 13% of all bridges in total. A shortage of access to chemotherapies has severely impacted cancer patients, with medical professionals warning that the inaccessibility of treatments will lead to a higher risk of death from the disease.
Last November, a group of Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including Nydia M. Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service expressing concern at “the continuing tax avoidance by beneficiaries” of the incentives code and concluding that the need “to shed light on individuals cheating the law” made “it essential to understand to what extent the IRS and Puerto Rico’s Department of Treasury are monitoring U.S. individuals and businesses claiming tax benefits under Act 60.”
A New Country?
Confronting such a multifaceted crisis, one might suppose that Puerto Rico might be ripe for political realignment. In a survey by the polling company Atlas Intel commissioned by the newspaper NotiCel and published this past February, a startling near 70% of those asked said they disapproved of Pierluisi’s performance as governor, with only 24% rating it as good or very good. Another Atlas Intel poll, released last month, had Juan Dalmau, who is campaigning under the hopeful slogan “Una Patria Nueva” (A New Country) running a close second to Pierluisi in the governor’s race, 25.6% to 28.1%.
“Bipartisanship has led us to bankruptcy, poverty, marginalization, corruption and the imposition of a fiscal control board that has more powers [than the island's government],” Dalmau told me in a recent interview, using the term that many Puerto Ricans use for the years of uninterrupted PNP-PPD rule. “But in the last election there was a break with that trend…The 14% [who voted for me] are not all pro-independence…But I believe that people who have already taken the step to not vote for the parties that have governed Puerto Rico are people who are willing to take the step to make that change of governance…The country matured and realized that on the ballot in a general election, what is offered is not status formulas [but] people who make themselves available to govern the country and put the house in order.”
[My full interview with Juan Dalmau can be viewed here.]
At a press conference last November, Dalmau and the general coordinator of the MVC, Manuel Natal, announced that the two political currents had formed an “agreement” - called La Alianza de País - to strategically support one another’s candidates during the island’s November 2024 elections. Though, despite its name, the MVC and PIP’s union was not a formal political alliance - which is forbidden under Puerto Rico’s electoral code - and the two parties would still both field candidates for most positions, the agreement would encompass, among other strategies, the MVC and PIP jointly supporting Dalmau as candidate for governor and a candidate from the MVC for the position of Resident Commissioner, for which the party eventually settled on Senator Ana Irma Rivera Lassén. The MCV and PIP would collaborate, Natal and Dalmau said, by supporting the same candidates for the same positions. Natal himself would be running for the mayorship of San Juan, a position he narrowly and acrimoniously lost to the PNP’s Miguel Romero in 2020, under whose rule the once-grand zone of Viejo San Juan has seen marked by decay and the selling off of more and more of the city to real estate speculators, block by block.
In a highly controversial decision on 21 March, though, Rivera Lassén’s candidacy for Resident Commissioner and a number of other candidacies from the MVC and Proyecto Dignidad were disqualified by Judge Anthony Cuevas Ramos in response to a lawsuit bright by PPD representative Jorge Alfredo Rivera Segarra, PPD senator Héctor Santiago Torres and PPD candidates Yulixa Paredes Albarrán and Jorge Quiles Gordillo. Clearly anxious to protect their privileges of the bipartisan model they have benefited from, several PNP legislators also joined the action. Judge Cuevas Ramos gave as his rationale for disqualifying Rivera Lassén and eight other candidates the fact that the candidates had not collected sufficient endorsements during their party’s primary processes. The MVC’s appeal of the decision is scheduled to be heard on 17 April
Amid the struggles faced by the MVC, the new polling indicates an extraordinary turn of fortunes for the PIP, for many decades relegated to the lower rungs of political influence in Puerto Rico and often undermined by the sympathy that some leading PIP figures have shown to the totalitarian, anti–democratic left in Latin America, a trait that has been adroitly exploited by the island’s duopoly despite the links of both the PNP and PPD themselves to various nefarious characters and ideas.
In January 2015, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, named the PIP’s long-serving president, Rubén Berríos as his “advisor for international policies on decolonization,” a position Berríos accepted despite that fact that Ortega’s stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo, had by this point publicly accused him of serially sexually abusing her for years, one of several charges of sexual abuse of children leveled at the Nicaraguan leader. In the years since, the regime controlled by Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo has rigged elections, massacred protesters and imprisoned critics in acts United Nations investigators concluded rose to the level of crimes against humanity.
In 2019, while attending the awkwardly-named Encuentro Antiimperialista de Solidaridad, por la Democracia y contra el Neoliberalismo, sponsored by Cuba’s dictatorship in Havana, the PIP's vice president, María de Lourdes Santiago, who is currently a senator and served as the party's candidate for governor in the 2106 election, read a statement which expressed “solidarity with [Venezuela’s] Bolivarian Revolution and its legitimate president, Nicolás Maduro,” despite the fact that most observers regard Maduro’s 2018 election - which came after brutal abuse of protesters in 2017 which Human Rights Watch detailed as “security forces and armed pro-government groups…using extreme and at times lethal force, causing dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries” - as obviously rigged. A 411-page report by United Nations investigators the following year implicated Maduro and other high-ranking officials in systematic human rights abuses, including killings, torture and sexual violence, amounting to crimes against humanity.
Last year, however, in what perhaps marked the beginning of a significant shift, the PIP’s executive president and secretary of international affairs, Fernando Martín, denounced what he said was “the authoritarian and arbitrary drift” of the Ortega-Murillo regime in Managua and “the increasing repression of public freedoms that the current government has increasingly been carrying out.”
Juan Dalmau seems well aware of this discourse and rejects any suggestion the PIP lacks the democratic bonafides to govern Puerto Rico.
“We are a party that believes in social democracy,” Dalmau told me. “We believe in the free market. We believe in democratic rights and human rights, in civil rights, in democratic participation that the people must have the ability to elect their leaders. We have been an example of that democratic vocation, being a party that in 77 years has never had the favor of the people to govern. But we have always participated in electoral events with the faith and hope that the country would eventually make the correct determination regarding the policies that we promote. So we see ourselves in the case of Puerto Rico as a democratic country.”
It is hard to view Puerto Rico’s history, recent or long past, and not come away with the naked taste of colonialism in one’s mouth. It is not a pleasant flavour. To have more than 3 million people ruled by an entity 1,500 miles away that it totally unaccountable to them through any electoral recourse is not a condition that anyone should be forced to live under in the 21st century.
A two-part 2012 status referendum saw a majority (53.97%) vote against continuing with the current arrangement and 61.16% of those who answered the second question choosing statehood over a continuation of the current status or independence, though the tally was marked by controversy over voters who had intentionally left their ballots blank. In a 2020 ballot question - "Should Puerto Rico be admitted immediately into the Union as a State?" - with a yes or no answer, 52.52% of the those who cast ballots voted “yes.”
As the power to grant statehood lies with the U.S. Congress, in which the citizens of Puerto Rico have no vote, rather than with the people of the island itself, both votes (as with other votes on status) can be viewed as a kind of political theater, albeit one with the cruel undertone of an omnipresent and indifferent foreign power viewing the process with bemused skepticism. In March 2021, though, Florida Democratic Darren Soto, himself of Puerto Rican descent, and Jenniffer González-Colón introduced what they dubbed the “Puerto Rico Statehood Admission Act” with more than 50 co-sponsors. That same month, Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the “Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act of 2021,” which called for the holding of a convention regarding the political status of the island that permitted ranked choice voting after an “an educational campaign.” In December 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 233 to 191 on a compromise measure among the competing plans that, if ever passed by a fractious U.S. Senate (an unlikely prospect in the near term) would see a binding referendum placed before Puerto Rican voters.
After so many recent years of suffering and struggle, one wonders if the moment for a radical transfiguration has not finally arrived.
“I’m having this interview with you right after finishing a conference at the Universidad Interamericana in Bayamón,” Juan Dalmau told me as we concluded our chat “There were about 200 students there, and one notices that there is an absolute disconnection with respect to the narrative of the parties that have governed with respect to the feelings and desires of the younger generations. Likewise, yesterday I was at a school in Arroyo, and the day before yesterday I was visiting the Caguas area. I am visiting the entire island and, frankly, I can tell you, [Puerto Rico] is thirsty and desirous for real change.”