Puerto Rico, The Colony, Part 2: Puerto Ricans Resist

Feature

Worker's World

Berta Joubert-Ceci

Puerto Rico has been selling itself off since the 1990s, when the telephone
company was privatized under Gov. Pedro Rosello. Since then, all Puerto
Rico’s governments have been privatizing all public property, including the
airports, health services, roads, the valuable pineapple industry, etc. The slo-
gan of the progressive independence movement since then has been, “Puerto
Rico is not for sale.”

The “reconfiguration” of schools is actually another attempt to privatize edu-
cation. The few agencies that remain under public control do so thanks to the
ceaseless struggle of their workers. The class-conscious union UTIER, for
example, has defended the nationalized Electric Power Authority tooth and
nail.

Apart from the sell-off, the government wanted to pay the debt by applying
tax measures that the working class would have to pay. While transnational
giants and megastores like Walmart take in billions in profits while paying
minimal taxes, if any, the government loaded a tax on sales and services of
11.5 percent — the IVU — with the possibility of imposing a Value Added
Tax later. In fact, the 16 percent VAT that García Padilla wanted to impose
was rejected by the legislature in mid-May due to the population’s massive
rejection of this tax...[CONTINUE READING]

Puerto Rico, The Colony, Part 1: The ‘Miracle’ of Indebtedness

Feature

Worker's World


In the late 1940s, the United States baptized Puerto Rico the “Showcase of
the Caribbean.” It was to be a role model for countries in the Caribbean and
Latin America. This would supposedly be the outcome of the miracle of in-
dustrialization that the giant capitalist benefactor from the North carried out
in a poor, colonized, underdeveloped small island.

It was a false miracle.

Colonial economy

After destroying Puerto Rico’s agriculture, Washington encouraged foreign
investment — that is, U.S. investment — which initiated a model that first
set up light industries such as textiles, then imposed pharmaceutical and pe-
trochemical companies, and later biotechnology and electronic firms.

Beside causing enormous environmental destruction, this process contrib-
uted nothing at all to the real development of the island. It did generate in-
creased revenue for one sector of the working class — those in industries
based on foreign capital that are export-oriented. They don’t produce what
is needed on the island nor do the products of their labor benefit the econo-
my of Puerto Rico — only Wall Street....[CONTINUE READING]