The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists

by Naomi Klein

Fearless necessary reporting . . . Klein exposes the 'battle of utopias' that is currently unfolding in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico - a battle that pits a pitilessly neoliberal plutocratic 'paradise' against a community movement with Puerto Rican sovereignty at its center." - Junot Diaz

"We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and Maria unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?" - Yulin Cruz, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico

In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich "Puertopians" are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation's radical, resilient vision for a "just recovery."

All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. For more information, visit http://juntegente.org/.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, documentary filmmaker and author of the international bestsellers No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, and No Is Not Enough.

"

Fearless necessary reporting . . . Klein exposes the 'battle of utopias' that is currently unfolding in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico-a battle that pits a pitilessly neoliberal plutocratic 'paradise' against a community movement with Puerto Rican sovereignty at its center."
-Junot Diaz

"We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and Maria unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?"
-Carmen Yulin Cruz, Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico

"A gripping and timely account of classic 'shock doctrine' being perpetrated in Puerto Rico. Naomi Klein chronicles the extraordinary grassroots resistance by the Puerto Rican people against neoliberal privatization and Wall Street greed in the aftermath of the island's financial meltdown, of hurricane devastation, and of Washington's imposition of an outside control board over the most important U.S. colony."

-Juan Gonzalez, co-host of Democracy Now! and author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. "Like so many of my generation, I've been a reader of Naomi Klein's since the late 1990s, always finding something to learn from her rigorous reporting and thoughtful analysis. There's no one better to tell the story of Hurricane Maria and its global significance than Naomi. In the face of speculation, exploitation, and climate crisis, this book calls on us to recognize Puerto Rico's struggle for democracy, justice, and human life itself, as our own." -Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona, Spain

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Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Economics, Environment, Social Justice, Climate Change

88 pages, Paperback

First published June 5, 2018

About the author

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, documentary filmmaker and author of the international bestsellers No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. She is a senior correspondent for The Intercept and her writing appears widely in such publications as The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and The Nation, where she is a contributing editor. Klein is a member of the board of directors for climate-action group 350.org and one of the organizers behind Canada’s Leap Manifesto. In November 2016 she was awarded Australia’s prestigious Sydney Peace Prize for, according to the prize jury, “inspiring us to stand up locally, nationally and internationally to demand a new agenda for sharing the planet that respects human rights and equality.” Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Reviews

[Ryan Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book now! It’s only 80 pages long. Shock Doctrine is probably the most important book of the last decade and Naomi Klein one of the most important journalists. This essay documents the shock doctrine unfolding in Puerto Rico which pits a people’s movement for self-determination and long term sustainability against movement of tax-dodging plutocrats.

haymarketbooks.org/books/1235-the…

[Leah Rachel von Essen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naomi Klein’s The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists is an excellent, in-depth, and short introduction to Puerto Rico’s plight after Hurricane Maria.

It outlines in quick and direct language how the US’s colonialist policies and parasitic history with Puerto Rico set it up for disaster. Klein outlines the ways that after the disaster, the government and cryptocurrency bigwigs are taking advantage of Puerto Ricans’ struggle to survive by trying to push through new policies and deals that would privatize much of the island. They are trying to make Puerto Rico a paradise for outside capitalists who would like to no longer pay high taxes and instead take over local beaches and real estate, not only by making deals that Puerto Ricans would oppose if they weren’t busy fighting for their own livelihoods—for things such as electricity and food—but also by sponsoring emigration and encouraging Puerto Ricans to leave to the US mainland. But Klein takes time to parallel this version of a “paradise” with the one being formed and envisioned by Puerto Ricans themselves: a self-sufficient, community-driven world based on traditional farming methods that removes the threats of losing the main harbor that brings in imports or of a monocrop approach. They are also pushing for less dependence on wider electricity grids that have failed Puerto Rico after the hurricane and that the government is threatening to privatize, instead trying to shift focus to microgrids or renewable resources such as solar panels that survived the hurricane.

The inside copy of the book says that “all royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island.” Klein’s small but invaluable treatise helped to more fully inform me on Puerto Rico’s struggles and the way that the US set it up for disaster and is setting it up for even worse in the future. I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and my honest recommendation is that it is required reading. The Battle for Paradise comes out from Haymarket Books on June 11 and is a must-read.

[Roxanne (The Novel Sanctuary) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this to get a good snippet of what's going on in PR and to get really mad

[Julian Worker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book given to me when I joined the Left Book Club.

The locals of Puerto Rico take on disaster capitalists.

Hurricane Maria caused catastrophic damage to Puerto Rico's infrastructure systems and housing and destroyed much of the commonwealth's electricity grid. It took more than 200 days to restore power to every Puerto Rico resident, although those who lived close to the Casa Pueblo solar site were able to receive solar-created electricity the day after Maria hit thanks to the micro-grid system installed in the area.

The disaster capitalists who want to restore the electricity grid, led by Governor Rossello, want to destroy these micro-grids by taxing them out of existence. They don't want the people of Puerto Rico to generate their own electricity cheaply and from a source not owned by a capitalist. The Governor wants the people to pay over the odds for electricity they won't be able to afford and won't be in control of generating. Democracy at work?

Hurricane Maria left $90 billion in damages and Congress allocated at least $63 billion for disaster relief and recovery operations. Four years later, about 71 percent of those funds have not reached communities on the island archipelago. Yet, in this book Naomi Klein shows how people in some areas are able to feed themselves and others using locally grown foodstuffs that grow in the ground - rather than bushes and trees - and so are less susceptible to damage by hurricanes.

These are brilliant ideas that the disaster capitalists despise. They want Puerto Ricans to import food from the US using the capitalist's ships, planes, and lorries.

Puerto Rico is a real litmus test for the return to local production of power and food versus the globalist ideas of the Governor and his associates.

The other factor at play is that the governor wants wealthy people to come to Puerto Rico and pay very little tax. The capitalists want to build golf courses, hotels, resorts, and infrastructure to support their schemes to attract the wealthy and yet there's little enough farming land as it is without it being bought up for building.

You see it's all connected.

[Karla Strand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September of 2017.

And despite Puerto Rico’s status as a territory of the United States, the US government has done embarrassingly little to assist the American citizens of this beautiful island.

While the absence of US assistance has been bad enough, there is a more malicious contingent at work. Naomi Klein takes aim at them – disaster capitalists – in her new book, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. In it, Klein makes a strong argument for fighting against selfish outside influences trying to make a buck on the backs of traumatized local Puerto Rican communities.

Does this situation sound familiar? It should because it is essentially another colonization of Puerto Rico by the US.

In this 96-page book, Naomi Klein gives her reader a short history lesson as well as reasons why Puerto Ricans would (and should!) be skeptical of outside actors (pp. 25-32). While lifelong Puerto Rican residents dig out from under the wreck of Maria, the governor and other self-interested players court the rich from the mainland US by offering major tax breaks to move there – tax breaks that residents do not get to take advantage of (pp. 18-19).

Often referred to as “Puertopians,” these wealthy libertarians seek to live tax- (and care-) free in Puerto Rico, all the while seeing themselves as saviors of the embattled island and its residents (pp. 15-25). As Klein explains, “In February 2018, [the governor of Puerto Rico] told a business audience in New York that Maria had created a ‘blank canvas’ on which investors could paint their very own dream world” (p. 25); never mind the over three million people who already call it home.

Read the full review: http://www.karlajstrand.com/2018/07/2...

[Randall Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given Naomi’s expertise in charting the rise of disaster capitalism and the shock doctrine, it should come as a relief that she would write this quick book. If you spend 183 days per year (Winter) in Puerto Rico, you can dodge U.S. taxes and live in a white gated community with private schools. Thanks to the U.S., there are 18 Superfund sites in Puerto Rico. Then there is the colonialism, and the huge problem with the 1920 obscure regulation known as the Jones Act. Then there is the simple fact that 85% of Puerto Rico’s food is imported. Best quote in the book, “The best cure for helplessness is helping, being a participant, rather than a spectator, in the recovery of your home, community, and land.”

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buy this for the cause it supports! It's basically an extended interview but it is crucial in presenting an alternative view on the current state of affairs in Puerto Rico.

[Briar Wyatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naomi Klein is one of the few writers that consistently make me cry with both sadness and hope in one text. The Battle For Paradise is no different. An extremely compelling case for decentralisation that everyone needs to read

[K Agbebiyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

On an audiobook kick.
Informative and short. A good primer.

[Veronika · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm sad.

[Niklas Pivic · Rating 5 out of 5]

We knew that the real disaster was not the hurricane but the terrible vulnerability imposed by Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the United States, as well as the forced privatization of health and other services; massive layoffs; huge numbers of school closures; reductions in social rights and in investments for collective well-being; abandonment of social and physical infrastructure; and high levels of government corruption and ineptitude. This vulnerability was aggravated by Washington’s imposition of the Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected body pushing for the privatization of electricity and schools, increased costs of basic services, massive cuts in public education, pensions, vacation time, and other rights—all in order to pay bondholders a $73 billion debt that was patently unpayable, illegal, and illegitimate. The net result was to leave the majority of people in Puerto Rico without a hopeful future, and that was all before Hurricane Maria hit our shores.

There are few persons alive today who has the voice, breadth, and prosaic succinctness that Klein has. Her ability to paint a picture, to show what's wrong, and how we can get to a better place, is like a breath of fresh air, a younger version of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I'm glad to know she is alive and kicking today.

And kicking she is. Puerto Rico has been smashed by neoliberal powers prior to Hurricane Maria, that left the island devastated.

Researchers at Harvard recently revealed the death toll from Hurricane Maria may be a staggering 70 times higher than the official count. The official death toll still stands at 64, but the new study estimates a death toll of at least 4,645, with some projections topping 5,700. The Harvard study found that “interruption of medical care was the primary cause of sustained high mortality rates in the months after the hurricane, a finding consistent with the widely reported disruption of health systems. Healthcare disruption is now a growing contributor to both morbidity and mortality in natural disasters.”

As noted, part of Klein's strength as a writer is to show how human beings are prone to help each other, and how; where corporations and kleptocracies fail us, we get by:

Several Puerto Ricans I spoke with casually referred to Maria as “our teacher.” Because amid the storm’s convulsions, people didn’t just discover what didn’t work (pretty much everything). They also learned very quickly about a few things that worked surprisingly well. Up in Adjuntas, it was solar power. Elsewhere, it was small organic farms that used traditional farming methods that were better able to stand up to the floods and wind. And in every case, deep community relationships, as well as strong ties to the Puerto Rican diaspora, successfully delivered lifesaving aid when the government failed and failed again.

It's interesting to see how Puerto Rico is basically being used as a sieve for the wealthy who seek to avoid paying their taxes. Here's a telling sign from the book:

Earlier this month, in San Juan’s ornate Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, the dream of Puerto Rico as a for-profit utopia was on full display. From March 14 to 16, the hotel played host to Puerto Crypto, a three-day “immersive” pitch for blockchain and cryptocurrencies with a special focus on why Puerto Rico will “be the epicenter of this multitrillion-dollar market.” Among the speakers was Yaron Brook, chair of the Ayn Rand Institute, who presented on “How Deregulation and Blockchain Can Make Puerto Rico the Hong Kong of the Caribbean.” Last year, Brook announced that he had personally relocated from California to Puerto Rico, where he claims he went from paying 55 percent of his income in taxes to less than 4 percent. Elsewhere on the island, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans were still living by flashlight, many were still dependent on FEMA for food aid, and the island’s main mental health hotline was still overwhelmed with callers. But inside the sold-out Vanderbilt conference, there was little space for that kind of downer news. Instead, the 800 attendees—fresh from a choice between “sunrise yoga and meditation” and “morning surf”—heard from top officials like Department of Economic Development and Commerce Secretary Manuel Laboy Rivera about all the things Puerto Rico is doing to turn itself into the ultimate playground for newly minted cryptocurrency millionaires and billionaires.

The official slogan of this new Puerto Rico? “Paradise Performs.” To underscore the point, conference attendees were invited to a “Cryptocurrency Honey Party,” with pollen-themed drinks and snacks, and a chance to hang out with Ingrid Suarez, Miss Teen Panama 2013 and upcoming contestant on “Caribbean’s Next Top Model.”

But make no mistake—the true religion here is tax avoidance. As one young crypto-trader recently told his YouTube audience, before moving to Puerto Rico in time to make the tax-filing deadline, “I had to actually look it up on the map.” (He subsequently admitted to some “culture shock” upon learning that Puerto Ricans spoke Spanish, but instructed viewers thinking of following his lead to put a “Google translator app on your phone and you’re good to go.”)

In early 2018, Governor Ricardo Rosselló announced the privatisation of PREPA, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. "Two days later, the slick, TV-friendly young governor unveiled his long-awaited “fiscal plan,” which included closing more than 300 schools and shutting down more than two-thirds of the island government’s executive-branch entities, going from a total of 115 to just 35."

The major preamble to his statement? Check this:

Broke and desperate, the Puerto Rican government turned to borrowing, in part by using its special tax status to issue municipal bonds that were exempt from city, state, and federal taxes. It also purchased high-risk capital appreciation bonds, which will eventually rack up interest rates ranging from 785 to 1,000 percent. Thanks in large part to these kinds of predatory financial instruments, borrowed under conditions that many experts argue were illegal under the Puerto Rican Constitution, the island’s debt exploded. According to data compiled by lawyer Armando Pintado, debt-service payments, including interest and other profits paid to the banking industry, increased fivefold between 2001 and 2014, with a particularly marked spike in 2008. Yet another shock to the island’s economy.

No matter what the outcome of this is, it is vital that we all not only react, but act.

With books like this, we can make haste.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll take Klein's journalism over her polemical side in a heartbeat.

Great contrast between two utopian projects in Puerto Rico. One is community based, working on building a decentralized solar power grid and switching to sustainable, longterm agriculture. The other is insidious, hoping to attract high net worth individuals to the archipelago with tax breaks and cryptononsense and breaking Puerto Ricans with the a strategy straight from Klein's Shock Doctrine: privatization, illegal debt, technocracy, strategic incompetency, etc.

“What they want is our land, and they just don’t want our people in it.”
Many Puerto Ricans I spoke with are similarly convinced that there is more than incompetence behind the various ways they are being pushed to the limits of endurance.
As has been extensively reported since the storm hit, the relief and reconstruction efforts have been a nonstop procession of almost impossibly disastrous decisions. A key contract to supply 30 million meals went to an Atlanta company with a record of failure and a staff of one (only 50,000 meals were delivered before the contract was canceled). Desperately needed relief supplies sat for weeks in storage, both in San Juan and Florida, where some became rat-infested. Materials key to rebuilding the electrical grid also sat in warehouses for unknown reasons. Whitefish Energy, a Montana-based firm with ties to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, had just two full-time staff when it landed a $300 million contract to help rebuild the electricity grid (the contract has since been canceled).
Then there were the common-sense measures that were simply passed over. As many pointed out, the Trump administration could have swiftly sent in the USNS Comfort, a massive floating hospital, to ease the strain on failing health care facilities. Instead, the ship was sent in late, sat nearly empty for weeks, and then was ordered withdrawn in November, with power still out on half of the island. Similarly, instead of relying on two-bit contractors like Whitefish, or notorious profiteers like Fluor, which has cashed in on disasters from post-invasion Iraq to post-Katrina New Orleans, PREPA could have requested that other state electrical utilities send workers to Puerto Rico and help with the rebuilding—its right as a member of the American Public Power Association. But it waited more than a month before putting in the request.

Each one of these decisions, even when they were ultimately reversed, set recovery efforts back further. Is this all a masterful conspiracy to make sure Puerto Ricans are too desperate, distracted, and despairing to resist Wall Street’s bitter economic medicine? I don’t believe it’s anything that coordinated. Much of this is simply what happens when you bleed the public sphere for decades, laying off competent workers and neglecting basic maintenance. Run-of-the-mill corruption and cronyism are no doubt at work as well.
There is reason to hope, however, that a post-Maria shock-resistance may be starting to take root. Mercedes Martínez, the indomitable head of the Federation of Puerto Rican Teachers, has spent the months since the storm crisscrossing the island, warning parents and educators that the plan to radically downsize and privatize the school system relies upon their fatigue and trauma.
While visiting a still-closed school in Humacao, in the eastern region, she told a local teacher that the government “knows we’re made of flesh and bones—they know that human beings get worn out and discouraged.” But, she insisted, if people understand that it is a strategy, they can defeat it.
“Our job is to motivate people to know that it’s possible to resist things as long as we believe in ourselves.” This was more than a pep talk: In the few months after Maria, the secretary of education attempted to keep dozens of schools from reopening, claiming they were unsafe. The teachers feared it was a prelude to closing the schools for good.
Again and again, parents and teachers—who had, in many cases, repaired the buildings themselves—successfully fought to protect their local schools. “They occupied the schools, reopened them without permission; parents blocked the streets,” Martínez recalled. As a result, more than 25 schools were reopened that the government had tried to close for good after the storm.
That’s why Martínez is convinced that no matter what is written in the governor’s fiscal plan and no matter what privatization laws have been introduced, it is still possible for Puerto Ricans to successfully resist the shock doctrine. Especially if the pre-storm coalitions rebuild and expand.
Watching this mass meeting segue seamlessly into a party, I was reminded of Yarimar Bonilla’s observation that amid Puerto Rico’s epidemic of despair, “the people who seem to be doing the best are those who are helping others, those who are involved in community efforts.” That was certainly true here. And it was true, too, of the young people I met in Orocovis, bursting with pride about how they were able to bring food home to their families.
It makes sense that helping would have this healing effect. To live through a profound trauma like Maria is to know the most extreme form of powerlessness. For what felt like an eternity, families were unable to reach one another to find out if their loved ones were alive or dead; parents were unable to protect their children from harm. It stands to reason that the best cure for helplessness is … helping, being a participant, rather than a spectator, in the recovery of your home, community, and land.
This is why the shock doctrine, as a political strategy, is more than just cynical and opportunist—”it’s cruel,” as Mónica Flores said to me through tears. By forcing people to watch as their shared resources are sold out from under them, unable to stop it because they are too busy trying to survive, the disaster capitalists who have descended on Puerto Rico are reinforcing the most traumatizing part of the disaster they are there to exploit: the experience of helplessness.

[Esther · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven’t read shock doctrine but a solid primer on disaster capitalism after hurricane Maria. Covers Ricky’s attempts to legislate privatization in the aftermath of the hurricane, school closures and the teachers strike, luring billionaires to the island,
as well as community based mutual aid projects and foreshadowing of what sustainable energy could look like on the island.

[Luisa Geisler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Naomi klein naomi kleining num tema bem grave. Só não dou cinco estrelas porque acho que poderia ter aprofundado mais alguns temas. Tem uma vibe meio introdutória às vezes.

[Leah]

this was super interesting/enraging, obviously. really need to get around to reading the shock doctrine, I do enjoy/think it's funny when an author is casually references their other work. makes me feel like I forgot to do the reading for class.

[Florin Pitea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive and relevant. Recommended.

[B Sarv · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein
Citation (APA): Klein, N. (2020).

Not too long after Hurricane Maria crushed the Caribbean, including Dominica and Puerto Rico, Ms. Klein visited Puerto Rico. Much of this book was a first-hand account of the experiences she had, the people she met and the grass-roots organizations she saw in action. In addition, she shared her knowledge of “Disaster Capitalism” throughout; explaining the unique position Puerto Rico was in before the hurricane and after it. (Ms. Klein is the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”). The main drawback of this book is that it lacked citations. Where Ms. Klein talks about personal experiences or quotes people she interviewed, what she shares with the reader is engaging. But when she cites figures or facts not drawn from these I was uncomfortable with the fact that there were no citations to sources. For me, this led me to decrease the rating on this book. I was particularly disappointed because Ms. Klein made many observations and arguments to which I am sympathetic, so I would have liked to seen these backed up by sources.

Having said so, I would like to share some of the aspects of the book that I really thought were positive and informative. First, all of the royalties from the book are being donated to a collection of Puerto Rican organizations named JunteGente. As I read through the book, I understood her connection to this group. At one event she attended this group came into existence when the various smaller groups attending decided to band together to fight against the exploitation of their community and country (let’s not split hairs) by neo-colonialism. The JunteGente organization is on one side of an ideological split, described early in the book, “In a sense, both are utopian projects—the vision of Puerto Rico in which the wealth of the island is carefully and democratically managed by its people, and the libertarian project some are calling “Puertopia” that is being conjured up in the ballrooms of luxury hotels in San Juan and New York City. One dream is grounded in a desire for people to exercise collective sovereignty over their land, energy, food, and water; the other in a desire for a small elite to secede from the reach of government altogether, liberated to accumulate unlimited private profit.” (Location 182 of 788)

In a chapter entitled “An Island Weary of Outside Experiments” Ms. Klein discussed events that I had read about in other books. (Harriet Washington’s “Medical Apartheid”, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s “How We Get Free”) “There were the notorious experiments in population control that, by the mid-1960s, resulted in the coercive sterilization of more than one-third of Puerto Rican women.” (Location 275 of 788) There was personal testimonial of experimentation as well, “Juan E. Rosario, a longtime community organizer and environmentalist who told me that his own mother was a Thalidomide test subject, put it like this: “It’s an island, isolated, with a lot of nonvaluable people. Expendable people.” (Location 87 of 788) These two excerpts show what is never taught in mainstream economics and history courses in America: that racist policies of the state and the veneration and protection of corporate interests will always rise above the value placed on the lives of black and brown people in the American system.

In an expose' of the environmental disaster allowed to take place in Puerto Rico, Ms. Klein explains, “And they are there in the swaths of land all over the archipelago that are so contaminated that the Environmental Protection Agency has classified 18 of them as Superfund sites, with all the local health impacts that shadow such toxicity.” (Location 293 of 788) (Although a source for this was not cited, I was able to verify this by using Google. Since I easily verified this, I included this quote.) Consider the size of Puerto Rico and its vulnerable status as a colony (Commonwealth, fancy name for the same thing), the inability of the people to influence federal policy (the franchise exists only for local elections) and the remnants of over a hundred years of American imperialism and it makes the presence of these environmental disasters clear cut cases of exploitation and oppression.

Ms. Klein’s discussion of colonialism was enlightening, “Colonialism itself is a social experiment, a multilayered system of explicit and implicit controls designed to strip colonized peoples of their culture, confidence, and power.” (Location 295 of 788) She quotes and address by Juan E. Rosario in which he explains colonialism’s true character, “We are not supposed to be dreaming; we are not supposed to be thinking about even governing ourselves. We don’t have that tradition of looking at the big picture.” This, he said, is colonialism’s most bitter legacy.” (Location 304 of 788) Anyone who spends any time in a land that had been subjected to colonialism can recognize the truth in what Mr. Rosario says. The beauty of it is that even though the people “are not supposed to be dreaming” the revolutionary spirit is still alive in many people and they simply do not abide by what the colonizer says they are not supposed to do. This spirit lives even in the face of oppression, retaliation and possible death.


In her chapter entitled “Welcome to Magic Land” Ms. Klein relates her experiences and the accomplishments of several grass-roots organizations. At a small rural school, ecologically friendly agriculture plays an important role: “Each grade tends to their own crops from seed to harvest. Some of what they grow is served in the school cafeteria, some is sold at market, and most goes home with the students.” (Location 352 of 788) In this and other examples Ms. Klein shows how on small, local levels, Puerto Ricans were finding ways to ensure one another’s security in the aftermath of this calamitous storm. This brought to mind one of my common themes – which seems like such a common sense notion – that food security is community security and a matter of sovereignty. Puerto Rico imports about 85% of its food (http://www.laht.com/article.asp?Categ...). Anything which enables Puerto Ricans to produce and eat their own is a threat to food exporters, mainly in the United States. Again we see this orchestrated policy enabling wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy shareholders of these food industry corporations. This too is a legacy of imperialism and colonialism. In what would seem familiar to many of my readers, Ms. Klein describes the locally produced food that survived Maria, “Yucca, taro, sweet potato, yam, and several other root vegetables are nutrient-rich staples of the Puerto Rican diet, and because they grow underground, where the high winds couldn’t touch them, they were almost entirely protected from storm damage.” (location 308 of 788) Ms. Klein describes the conflict, “Given the strength of the corporate agricultural lobbies they were up against, getting these kinds of messages through to the public has been an uphill battle. Their opponents painted them as backward relics, while imports and fast food were modernization incarnate.” (location 401 of 788) We find ourselves in the throes of a global pandemic and shortages or inaccessibility threaten people’s food security. Ms. Klein’s book is a record of efforts to ensure food security and a call to organize for food security in order to eradicate dependence on food imports.

In the chapter “Shock-After-Shock-After-Shock Doctrine” we see outlined attacks on the public energy system and the public school system. After Maria the Puerto Rican government moved to privatize the publicly owned electric company PREPA with an effort, as the governor said to, “sell PREPA’s assets to the companies that will transform the power generation system into a modern, efficient, and less costly system for our people.” (location 425 of 788) In the same way public schools were permanently closed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the governor proposed, “closing more than 300 schools and shutting down more than two-thirds of the island government’s executive-branch entities, going from a total of 115 to just 35.” (location 433 of 788). This is what Ms. Klein means by disaster capitalism: “This deliberate exploitation of states of emergency to push through a radical pro-corporate agenda is a phenomenon I have called the “shock doctrine.” And it is playing out in Puerto Rico in the most naked form seen since New Orleans’s public school system and much of its low-income housing were dismantled in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” (location 438 or 788) For a detailed account of the dismantling of New Orleans schools, I recommend “How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood.” by Peter Moskowitz.

In the chapter “Desperation, Distraction, Despair, and Disappearance” Ms. Klein elaborates a pattern recognizable to many who have read about our modern forms of imperialism, “But it’s also true that many governments have deployed a starve-then-sell strategy when it comes to public services: cut health care/transit/education to the bone until people are so disillusioned and desperate that they are willing to try anything, including selling off those services altogether.” (location 568 of 788). The privatization of everything ensures the flow of money from the poor and middle class to the rich and ultra-rich. This is not an accident. The strategy is intentional. While Ms. Klein was with Ms. Mercedes Martínez, head of the Federation of Puerto Rican Teachers, they visited, “a still-closed school in Humacao, in the eastern region, she told a local teacher that the government “knows we’re made of flesh and bones—they know that human beings get worn out and discouraged.” But, she insisted, if people understand that it is a strategy, they can defeat it.” (location 590 of 788) This caused me to think what would be necessary to give people the strength to prevent becoming “worn out and discouraged”. At a minimum people would: 1) need to be able to stand up against corporatist propaganda, 2) need to have an organization which was community based, 3) need to guard against infiltration by agents of the status quo and 4) need to have support to sustain the challenge.

In the penultimate chapter, “The Islands of Sovereignty Converge” Ms. Klein shares experiences of witnessing mutual assistance in the aftermath of Maria. Quoting one community activist, “Yarimar Bonilla’s observation that amid Puerto Rico’s epidemic of despair, “the people who seem to be doing the best are those who are helping others, those who are involved in community efforts.” “ (location 670 of 788) She elaborates that it, “stands to reason that the best cure for helplessness is … helping, being a participant, rather than a spectator, in the recovery of your home, community, and land.” (location 676 of 788) Like the colonizers and imperialists of recent history, the modern exploitation tries to undermine the Puerto Rican community, “By forcing people to watch as their shared resources are sold out from under them, unable to stop it because they are too busy trying to survive, the disaster capitalists who have descended on Puerto Rico are reinforcing the most traumatizing part of the disaster they are there to exploit: the experience of helplessness.” (location 678 of 788)

Finally, we see in the chapter “Race Against Time” another challenge the ordinary people are up against in all of this. “Earlier in the day in Mariana, one speaker had described the challenge they faced as a kind of race between “the speed of movements and the speed of capital.” “(location 683 of 788) “The trouble is that movements, unlike capital, tend to move slowly.” (location 705 of 788) I gather that part of the reason this is true is that movements are democratic and consensus building while capital is the antithesis of democracy. By reason of the corporate hierarchical structure and corporation's authoritarian nature democracy is an anathema to capitalism and corporations. If one were to read on how the New Jewel Movement was going to all the communities in Grenada in order to craft a constitution in which all people had a say, one would understand how consensus and democracy take time. Communities fight for this and it is indeed, as we saw in Grenada, a very perilous fight. Ms. Klein refutes any notion that the people in these communities are naïve and unsophisticated, “The grassroots groups here in Mariana are entirely unconvinced that becoming a fly-in bedroom community for tax-dodging plutocrats represents any kind of serious economic development strategy.” (location 693 of 788) I agree, it is just another way to squeeze the poor and ensure a one-way transfer of wealth to the already wealthy – in keeping with centuries of economic history.

Ms. Klein’s book is very readable, with an open and friendly style. It is a quick read and does an excellent job of reporting on a little known corner of the post Maria history. I recommend it in spite of its short-coming where citations are concerned.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since its publication in 2011, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine has provided many of us on the left with a useful model for making sense of the rampant imposition of neo-liberal practices in the wake of major crises. At the time of writing the clearest systematic evidence for that analysis was post-Katrina New Orleans (along with its initial outing in Chile after the overthrow of Allende), but since then we have seen the operation of disaster capitalism time and again, notably in Europe’s post-banking-crisis austerity boom and the evisceration of the public sphere in Greece, the UK, Ireland and Spain (elsewhere in Europe, disaster capitalism’s more evil twin, nationalistic xenophobia, has played out along the same lines – think Hungary, Poland, Italy and more).

In this engaging essay originally published at The Intercept in March 2018 Klein delves into Puerto Rico’s post-Maria disaster capitalism and the people’s struggles against it. She paints a picture of, on the one hand, community organisations that are finding themselves and each other in a developing democratic network building strength and visions of a future and are confronting, on the other hand, fast moving capital, crypto-currency libertarians and a dramatic push to destroy public infrastructure in an already smashed about colony. She shows how disaster capitalism makes use of people’s desperation (nothing can be worse than no services), distraction (all their days are taken up with survival), despair (prospects seem beyond bleak) and disappearance (relocation, voluntarily or with state insistence) to dust off previously defeated privatisation plans and more, in an effort to force them through as happened in much of New Orleans.

But she shows also how islands of resistance – argo-ecological projects, local sustainable electricity production and the like – are coming together in a network of resistance and self-organisation that has the potential to overcome the one thing disaster capitalism relies on most; people’s sense of helplessness. Puerto Rico has a long history of state built helplessness in that the state has encouraged export cropping and industrial agriculture and with it heavy dependence on imported food and goods; Puerto Rico also has a long tradition of resistance, to colonialism, to the presence of US military bases, to corruption and the power of the elite and other causes. All this means that despite the power and speed of the state’s attempts to impose a new order there is the basis of the deep resistance movement – but one that is much slower than capital.

Klein draws this contrast out carefully and in a way that inspires hope. She does so in two ways: first, by structuring the piece so as to play out the dialectics of the struggle, and secondly by introducing us to inspiring projects in community energy, food sovereignty and the like while also showing how the participants in those projects gain strength and confidence through that participation – all leading to an event where they come together. It is a carefully constructed essay in that sense that reminds us that although Power may seem like it is imposing its ways, it is being confronted by a growing almost subterranean movement that as the potential to build a different world.

Not only, then, is this an essential insight to a current, sustained drive to impose a neo-liberal order, this is also fine piece of writing structured to make its case more compelling and convincing. Highly recommended.

[Harry Marquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has more Vidal information the one that has 400 pages. I was I in tune am a history graduate from Boston that lived in NY and decided to live in Puerto Rico.I lived their raising a family and still own my property. I face Hurricane Hugo.and that was no joke. I relocated to Florida 3 years before Maria. She has penetrated the colonial plague that has and is destroying the progress to cultivate the island. It was colonial policies to destroy most of the crops to make the islanders self reliant. The US payed to burn most Banana, coffee, fruits to destabilize local market. Now we had to import all agricultural goods because they not enough. I had gone to Puerto Rico when I witnessed fruit still in abundance being crush on roads. That was 50 years ago. Because the demand for sugar they eliminated all harvest. Puerto Rico supplied the United States most of its sugar for 60 years. We became the model for further Latin American Neo colonialization for Papa Bush American Fruit company in Latin America. We became the colonial experiment that later economic hitman used in Countries with puppets around the World. We became that adopted stepchild only to acquire our ancestors claim to land and cheap labor with no voice, claims or birthright in our own island. We only used and abused in their wars for claims. This book given me hope and pride of the folk in our island. I noticed they very different in custom and care for each other when I first moved there. They might not have gone to libraries but their love and concern is remarkable and special. They not better but deep down that all they have is each other. You wrote a remarkable books on facts and we love you for it. ❤️

This book has more Vidal information the one that has 400 pages. I was I in tune am a history graduate from Boston that lived in NY and decided to live in Puerto Rico.I lived their raising a family and still own my property. I face Hurricane Hugo.and that was no joke. I relocated to Florida 3 years before Maria. She has penetrated the colonial plague that has and is destroying the progress to cultivate the island. It was colonial policies to destroy most of the crops to make the islanders self reliant. The US payed to burn most Banana, coffee, fruits to destabilize local market. Now we had to import all agricultural goods because they not enough. I had gone to Puerto Rico when I witnessed fruit still in abundance being crush on roads. That was 50 years ago. Because the demand for sugar they eliminated all harvest. Puerto Rico supplied the United States most of its sugar for 60 years. We became the model for further Latin American Neo colonialization for Papa Bush American Fruit company in Latin America. We became the colonial experiment that later economic hitman used in Countries with puppets around the World. We became that adopted stepchild only to acquire our ancestors claim to land and cheap labor with no voice, claims or birthright in our own island. We only used and abused in their wars for claims. This book given me hope and pride of the folk in our island. I noticed they very different in custom and care for each other when I first moved there. They might not have gone to libraries but their love and concern is remarkable and special. They not better but deep down that all they have is each other. You wrote a remarkable books on facts and we love you for it. ❤️

[Pia Cortez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amidst the destruction, Klein finds pockets of hope throughout the many communities she visited in January 2018. After being invited by a PARes–a group of university professors defending public education–to talk about her work on disaster capitalism, she writes about the ways Puerto Ricans have self-organized to help each other out after Maria.

In the small mountain city of Adjuntas lies Casa Pueblo, the community and ecology center that shone a light in the city for days. Literally and metaphorically. It became the community’s only source of power, its solar panels in tact after the storm. Its community-managed plantation also survived, and it was able to sustain its radio station which became the only source of information down power lines and knocked out cell towers.

What Klein illustrates are different versions of utopia for the Borinquen, one that begs the question of for whom is Puerto Rico really for? At a time when the island is at its most vulnerable, its people and its appointed leaders go on opposite routes. One lays the red carpet for millionaires while the other builds a just and sustainable world for its Brown and Black population. At the core is also the island’s colonial relationship with the U.S., one that has continuously ignored and disenfranchised the population through extreme dependence on fuel and food and an illegal debt.

To read the full review, check out my blog post here: https://libromance.com/2018/07/04/ano...

[kyma_booklover · Rating 4 out of 5]

ESCUCHADO EN AUDIOLIBRO

Muchas veces cuando algo te queda muy lejos y no te afecta directamente solemos pasar por encima de ello, pero cuando conoces a alguien que lo vive y lo sufre parece que la cosa cambia. Es algo que yo también hago, aunque no me guste admitirlo, y la situación que se vive en Puerto Rico cada vez que hay una tormenta o un huracán es para que se sepa y se escuche.
Tras el huracán María en septiembre del 2017 el reguero de destrucción que quedo en Puerto Rico, entre otros lugares, es escalofriante. En este libro podemos oír el testimonio de las consecuencias que tuvo el huracán y cómo se intentan solucionar. Me han impactado algunas cosas como por ejemplo el hecho de que se quedaran sin luz durante días enteros en todo un pueblo. A esto sumarle que solamente había un edificio en todo el pueblo que tenía suministro eléctrico gracias a unas placas solares de más de 20 años, convirtiéndose en el centro neurálgico durante días.
Es increíble como a pesar de ser conscientes del problema y de conocer posibles soluciones, aquellos que deberían tomar cartas en el asunto no lo hagan y dejen sufrir a su gente de semejante manera. No hay derecho.
Desde luego es un libro corto pero intenso. Que te hace reflexionar y que no te dejará indiferente.

[Liz Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This treatise deals with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in detail and with as strong an analysis as you'd expect from Naomi Klein. It can be read easily in one sitting and having it in book form helped me focus on the issues at hand. Klein never shies away from the complexities inherent when talking about PR and the geopolitical crises that affect the land and its people, and does so in an approachable manner. People are front and center of the work, and at the risk of sounding trite, there are glimmers of hope stemming from community response to the crisis. Of course if PR hadn't been exploited over the centuries, community resistance would be less necessary. An essential read for all living in, and with an interest in, the United States.

[Kaleb Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

As something of a "live feed addendum" to her former book "The Shock Doctrine," Klein must be excited (and depressed) to see her theory playing out in real time. The more I read about U.S. policy, the more I am coming to think that every action taken by the U.S. government is intended to make and keep rich people rich, leaving a line of oppressed in their wake.

Leí este libro por segunda vez en español para prepararme para un viaje a Puerto Rico. Es escrito muy claro para los lectores que no sean hispanohablantes nativos.

[Rachael · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important, short read. Puerto Rico must be rebuilt for its people, not for American, corporate interests.

“And nothing has done more to confirm this status [perspective that P. Ricans are disposable] than the fact that no level of government has seen fit to count the dead in any kind of credible way, as if lost Puerto Rican lives are of so little consequence that there is no need to document their mass extinguishment” (p. 29).

[Ellison · Rating 4 out of 5]

After Hurricane Maria there is a single house powered by solar energy which becomes a meeting place. This shares the many possible benefits of moving a business to the island and some of the things that have occurred to make a place of poverty. Insightful.

[Joanne MacNevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should really be read by everyone.

[Pablo Uribe · Rating 5 out of 5]

definitely read this short book, I’d say. both sobering and hopesome

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind--boggling! An eye--opener! A must-read!

[Jolanta (knygupe) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very short but important and necessary read!

[Benjamin Britton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like everywhere else in Puerto Rico, the small mountain city of Adjuntas was plunged into total darkness by Hurricane Maria.

Just off the main square, a large, pink colonial-style house had light shining through every window.

The pink house was Casa Pueblo, a community and ecology center with deep roots in this part of the island.

Already a community hub before the storm, the pink house rapidly transformed into a nerve center for self-organized relief efforts

Thanks also to those solar panels, Casa Pueblo’s radio station was able to continue broadcasting, making it the community’s sole source of information when downed power lines and cell towers had knocked out everything else.


Arturo Massol-Deyá, a bearded biologist and president of Casa Pueblo’s board of directors, took me on a brief tour of the facility: the radio station, a solar-powered cinema opened since the storm, a butterfly garden, a store selling local crafts and their wildly popular brand of coffee.

The community center was a strange hybrid of ecotourism lodge and revolutionary cell.

He had long warned of the risks associated with Puerto Rico’s overwhelming dependence on imported fossil fuels and centralized power generation: One big storm, he had cautioned, could knock out the whole grid — especially after decades of laying off skilled electrical workers and letting maintenance lapse.

The whole behemoth is monstrously expensive, resulting in electricity prices that are nearly twice the U.S. average.

And the power lines carrying electricity from the plants were down all over the archipelago. Literally nothing about the system worked.

This broad collapse, Massol-Deyá explained, was now helping him make the case for a sweeping and rapid shift to renewable energy...
And Puerto Rico, though poor in fossil fuels, is drenched in sun, lashed by wind, and surrounded by waves.


And “solar panels are easy to replace,” Massol-Deyá pointed out — unlike power lines and pipelines.

In part to spread the gospel of renewables, in the weeks after the storm, Casa Pueblo handed out 14,000 solar lanterns — little square boxes that recharge when left outside during the day, providing a much-needed pool of light by night.

Several Puerto Ricans I spoke with casually referred to Maria as “our teacher.”

And in every case, deep community relationships, as well as strong ties to the Puerto Rican diaspora, successfully delivered lifesaving aid when the government failed and failed again.

Massol-González shares his son’s belief that Maria has opened up a window of possibility, one that could yield a fundamental shift to a healthier and more democratic economy — not just for electricity, but also for food, water, and other necessities of life. “We are looking to transform the energy system. Our goal is to adopt a solar energy system and leave behind oil, natural gas, and carbon,” he said, “which are highly polluting.”

As in Adjuntas, residents here have seized on the post-Maria electricity failures to advance solar power, through a project called Coquí Solar.


Among them: the island’s extreme dependence on imported fuel and food; the unpayable and possibly illegal debt that has been used to impose wave after wave of austerity that gravely weakened the island’s defenses; and the 130-year-old colonial relationship with a U.S. government that has always discounted the lives of Puerto Rico’s black and brown people.

There is also another, very different version of how Puerto Rico should be radically remade after the storm, and it is being aggressively advanced by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló in meetings with bankers, real estate developers, cryptocurrency traders, and, of course, the Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected seven-member body that exerts ultimate control over Puerto Rico’s economy.

The real problem, they argue, was the public ownership of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, which lacked the proper free-market incentives.

This is just one part of a sweeping vision that sees Puerto Rico transforming itself into a “visitor economy,” one with a radically downsized state and many fewer Puerto Ricans living on the island.

At the core of this battle is a very simple question: Who is Puerto Rico for? Is it for Puerto Ricans, or is it for outsiders?

From March 14 to 16, the hotel played host to Puerto Crypto, a three-day “immersive” pitch for blockchain and cryptocurrencies with a special focus on why Puerto Rico will “be the epicenter of this multitrillion-dollar market.”

Last year, Brook announced that he had personally relocated from California to Puerto Rico, where he claims he went from paying 55 percent of his income in taxes to less than 4 percent.

But inside the sold-out Vanderbilt conference, there was little space for that kind of downer news. Instead, the 800 attendees — fresh from a choice between “sunrise yoga and meditation” and “morning surf” — heard from top officials like Department of Economic Development and Commerce Secretary Manuel Laboy Rivera about all the things Puerto Rico is doing to turn itself into the ultimate playground for newly minted cryptocurrency millionaires and billionaires.

The pitch goes like this: You don’t have to relinquish your U.S. citizenship or even technically leave the United States to escape its tax laws, regulations, or the cold Wall Street winters. You just have to move your company’s address to Puerto Rico and enjoy a stunningly low 4 percent corporate tax rate — a fraction of what corporations pay even after Donald Trump’s recent tax cut. Any dividends paid by a Puerto Rico-based company to Puerto Rican residents are also tax-free, thanks to a law passed in 2012 called Act 20.


With just a 3 1/2-hour commute from New York City to San Juan (or less, depending on the private jet), all it takes to get in on this scheme is agreeing to spend 183 days of the year in Puerto Rico — in other words, winter.

As Laboy told The Intercept, for the 500 to 1,000 high-net-worth individuals who relocated since the tax holidays were introduced five years ago — many of them opting for gated communities with their own private schools — it’s all about “living in a tropical island, with great people, with great weather, with great piña coladas.”

The official slogan of this new Puerto Rico? “Paradise Performs.”

Mining cryptocurrencies is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, with the industry’s energy consumption rising by the week. Bitcoin alone currently consumes roughly the same amount of energy per year as Israel, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index.

Some call it “Sol,” others call it “Crypto Land,” and it even seems to have its own religion: an unruly hodgepodge of Ayn Randian wealth supremacy, philanthrocapitalist noblesse oblige, Burning Man pseudo-spirituality, and half-remembered scenes from watching “Avatar” while high.

As a breed, the Puertopians, in their flip-flops and surfer shorts, are a sort of slacker cousin to the Seasteaders, a movement of wealthy libertarians who have been plotting for years to escape the government’s grip by starting their own city-states on artificial islands.

And there’s no need to go to the trouble of building your own islands on elaborate floating platforms — as one Puerto Crypto session put it, Puerto Rico is poised to be transformed into a “crypto-island.”

The Puerto Rican governor’s office predicts that over the next five years, the island’s population will experience a “cumulative decline” of nearly 20 percent.

Brock Pierce argues (without offering any specifics), that crypto-money is going to help finance Puerto Rican reconstruction and entrepreneurship, including in local agriculture and energy.

Gov. Rosselló himself seems to agree. In February, he told a business audience in New York that Maria had created a “blank canvas” on which investors could paint their very own dream world.

There were the notorious experiments in population control that, by the mid-1960s, resulted in the coercive sterilization of more than one-third of Puerto Rican women.

Vieques — more than two-thirds of which used to be a U.S. Navy facility where Marines practiced ground warfare and completed their gun training — was a testing ground for everything from Agent Orange to depleted uranium to napalm.

In the ’50s and ’60s, well before the free-trade era swept the globe, U.S. manufacturers took advantage of Puerto Rico’s low-wage workforce and special tax exemptions to relocate light manufacturing to the island, effectively road testing the model of offshored labor and maquiladora-style factories while still technically staying within U.S. borders.


The deepest scars may be even harder to see. Colonialism itself is a social experiment, a multilayered system of explicit and implicit controls designed to strip colonized peoples of their culture, confidence, and power. With tools ranging from the brute military and police aggression used to put down strikes and rebellions, to a law that once banned the Puerto Rican flag, to the dictates handed down today by the unelected fiscal control board, residents of these islands have been living under that web of controls for centuries.

And nothing has done more to confirm this status than the fact that no level of government has seen fit to count the dead in any kind of credible way, as if lost Puerto Rican lives are of so little consequence that there is no need to document their mass extinguishment.


With next to no resources, communities have set up massive communal kitchens, raised large sums of money, coordinated and distributed supplies, cleared streets, and rebuilt schools.

But one result of being forced to save themselves is that many communities have discovered a depth of strength and capacity they did not know they possessed.


As a legacy of the slave plantation economy first established under Spanish rule, much of the island’s agriculture is industrial scale, with many crops grown for export or testing purposes. Roughly 85 percent of the food Puerto Ricans actually eat is imported.

Just as the upheaval revealed the perils of Puerto Rico’s import-addicted and highly centralized energy system, it also unmasked the extraordinary vulnerability of its food supply.

According to Puerto Rico’s Department of Agriculture, more than 80 percent of the island’s crops were completely wiped out in the storm, a $2 billion blow to the economy.

The Port of San Juan was in chaos, with shipping containers filled with desperately needed food and fuel sitting unopened. For weeks, the shelves at many supermarkets were virtually empty.

But many of the crops the students had planted were fine: the tomatillos, the root vegetables — pretty much everything that grows low to the earth or underneath it.

The visitors were part of a wave of international “brigades” that had been going from farm to farm rebuilding chicken coops, greenhouses, and other outdoor structures, as well as replanting crops, an ambitious effort organized by Puerto Rico’s Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Ecológica, the U.S.-based Climate Justice Alliance, and the global network of peasants and small farmers, Via Campesina.

And those rare estates that still used traditional methods— including planting a diversity of crops and using trees and grasses with long roots to prevent landslides and erosion — had some of the only fresh food on the island.


The first step was to be the immediate privatization of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA, one of the largest public power providers in the United States and, despite its billions of dollars in debt, the one that brings in the most revenue.

Two days later, the slick, TV-friendly young governor unveiled his long-awaited “fiscal plan,” which included closing more than 300 schools and shutting down more than two-thirds of the island government’s executive-branch entities, going from a total of 115 to just 35.

And the process is far from complete. There is a great deal of talk about more privatizations to come: highways, bridges, ports, ferries, water systems, national parks, and other conservation areas.

No large-scale protests greeted the first wave of Rosselló’s rapid-fire announcements. No strikes in response to his plans to radically contract the state and roll back pensions. No uprisings against the Puertopians flooding into the island to build their libertarian dream state.

Yet Puerto Rico has a deep history of popular resistance and some very radical trade unions. So what is going on? The first thing to understand is that Puerto Ricans are not experiencing one extreme dose of the shock doctrine, but two or even three of them, all layered on top of one another — a new and terrifying hybridization of the strategy that makes it particularly challenging to resist.

This was such a deep shock to the island’s economy that in May 2006, much of the government, including all the public schools, was temporarily shut down.

Thanks in large part to these kinds of predatory financial instruments, borrowed under conditions that many experts argue were illegal under the Puerto Rican Constitution, the island’s debt exploded.

In 2009, Puerto Rico’s governor passed a law declaring an economic “state of emergency” and used it to lay off more than 17,000 public sector workers and strip negotiated benefits and raises from many more — this at a time when unemployment was already 15 percent.

The board, which is essentially charged with overseeing the liquidation of Puerto Rico’s assets to maximize debt repayments and approving all major economic decisions, is known in Puerto Rico as “La Junta.”

The school system was particularly hard-hit in this period. Between 2010 and 2017, roughly 340 public schools were shut down; arts and physical education programs were virtually eliminated in many elementary schools; and the board announced plans to slash the University of Puerto Rico’s budget in half.

By early 2017, she pointed out, parts of San Juan looked very much like they had been hit by a hurricane — windows were broken, buildings were boarded up. But it wasn’t high winds that did it; it was debt and austerity.



It was clear that this movement had authorities worried.

Then came Maria, and all those same rejected policies came roaring back with Category 5 ferocity.

The jury is still out as to whether this latest attempt at the shock-after-shock doctrine approach will actually work.

It’s helpful to break the extreme state of shock that is being exploited into four categories: desperation, distraction, despair, and disappearance.

Desperation because the relief and reconstruction efforts have been so sluggish, so inept, and so apparently corrupt that they have understandably instilled a sense in many that nothing could be worse than the status quo.

It’s circumstances like these that make the prospect of privatization more palatable.

Related to this is distraction: Daily life in Puerto Rico remains an immense struggle.

Add all this together and for many Puerto Ricans, the mechanics of survival can take up every waking hour — a state of distraction not very conducive to political engagement.



They vanish daily onto planes headed for Florida and New York and elsewhere in the mainland United States. Many of them have had the direct help of FEMA, which built what the agency called an “air bridge,” airlifting people off the island and boarding others onto cruise ships.

The disappearance of so many people in such a short time, Bonilla explained, “operates as a political escape valve, so right now you don’t have people protesting in the streets because a lot of the people who are really desperate for medical care or who had real needs where they couldn’t live without electricity have just left.”



Is this all a masterful conspiracy to make sure Puerto Ricans are too desperate, distracted, and despairing to resist Wall Street’s bitter economic medicine? I don’t believe it’s anything that coordinated. Much of this is simply what happens when you bleed the public sphere for decades, laying off competent workers and neglecting basic maintenance

And if Rosselló and the Trump administration have seemed remarkably unconcerned about the nonstop relief and reconstruction screw-ups, the attitude may be at least partly informed by an understanding that the worse things get, the stronger the case for privatization becomes.

Many fear this experience will be repeated — that if PREPA is privatized, the Puerto Rican government will lose an important source of revenue, while getting stiffed with the utility’s multibillion-dollar debt.


That’s why Martínez is convinced that no matter what is written in the governor’s fiscal plan and no matter what privatization laws have been introduced, it is still possible for Puerto Ricans to successful resist the shock doctrine.

I asked Martínez if her members feared taking action that would disrupt the lives of families that have already been through so much. She was unequivocal. “Absolutely not.


Key leaders from last year’s surge of anti-austerity activism were here too — organizers from the student strike, the lawyers and economists calling for an audit of Puerto Rico’s debt, trade union leaders and academics who had been researching alternatives for Puerto Rico’s economy for a long time.

For generations, the struggle for national sovereignty has defined politics in Puerto Rico: Who favors independence from Washington? Who wants to become the 51st state, with full democratic rights? Who defends the status quo?

I heard talk of “multiple sovereignties” — food sovereignty, liberated from dependence on imports and agribusiness giants; energy sovereignty, liberated from fossil fuels and controlled by communities. And perhaps housing, water, and education sovereignty as well.

It makes sense that helping would have this healing effect. To live through a profound trauma like Maria is to know the most extreme form of helplessness.

It stands to reason that the best cure for helplessness is … helping, being a participant, rather than a spectator, in the recovery of your home, community, and land.

By forcing people to watch as their shared resources are sold out from under them, unable to stop it because they are too busy trying to survive, the disaster capitalists who have descended on Puerto Rico are reinforcing the most traumatizing part of the disaster they are there to exploit: the sense of helplessness.


The trouble is that movements, unlike capital, tend to move slowly. This is particularly true of movements that exist to deepen democracy and allow ordinary people to define their goals and grab the reins of history.

Indeed, they have been preparing for this moment for generations, from the height of the independence struggle to the successful battle to kick the U.S. Navy out of Vieques, to the anti-austerity and anti-debt coalition that peaked in the months before Maria.


The Puertopians dream of a radical withdrawal from society into their privatized enclaves. The groups that gathered in Mariana dream of a society with far deeper commitments and engagement — with each other, within communities, and with the natural systems whose health is a prerequisite for any kind of safe future.

For now, these diametrically opposed versions of utopia are advancing in their own parallel worlds, at their own speeds — one on the back of shocks, the other in spite of them. But both are gaining power fast, and in the high-stakes months and years to come, collision is inevitable.