Vice-Kamala Harris “Grandisimo” Error y Perdida en Puerto Rico

 Kamala Harris arrived in San Juan, P.R., last Friday for her first official visit as vice president. The trip was meant, in part, to highlight the Biden administration’s dedication to aiding the island’s recovery. What unfolded instead was a revealing tableau of Democrats’ missteps and misjudgments.

Ms. Harris’s roughly five-hour visit began in the community of San Isidro, in the municipality of Canóvanas. There she visited María Ramos de Jesús, an 86-year-old whose home was only recently rebuilt with funds from a program of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It was a curious choice. Many of the residents lack land titles, which made them ineligible for the Federal Emergency Management Agency programs Ms. Harris aimed to promote. The area was originally an informal settlement built on public wetlands by those displaced after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. The HUD funds come attached to a new FEMA flood map, which means that more than 250,000 homes like these across the island that are identified to be at high risk of flood are ineligible for reconstruction.

The fact that it took seven years for Ms. Ramos’s home to be reconstructed after Hurricane Maria is indicative of how the federal government repeatedly fails Puerto Ricans, no matter which party is in charge. 

While the Trump administration may have left Puerto Ricans in the dark after the hurricane, it was the Democrats who set the stage for the storm’s disastrous aftermath. Things might have turned out differently had the Obama administration fairly confronted Puerto Rico’s financial crisis by offering debt relief, addressing historical injustices, and protecting essential services rather than saddling residents with a federally appointed fiscal control board that has only caused more harm.

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While on the campaign trail, Joe Biden pledged to reverse the austerity policies imposed by the fiscal board and to support an audit of Puerto Rico’s debt to identify any illegally issued debt. These promises, however, fell by the wayside once he was in office.

Even though the board acknowledged that much of the island’s debt is invalid, it dismissed citizen demands for a comprehensive audit. Instead, it focused on privatizing and dismantling public services, which in turn caused living expenses and utility costs to soar, even as essential services like electricity, water, health care and education became increasingly unreliable or inaccessible.

The board operates with a chilling lack of oversight. The Supreme Court ruled that its members are exempt from standard federal appointment procedures, given the “territorial” nature of their duties. The court also ruled against local journalists who sought access to the board’s internal records. This, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in an opinion, has left the board in “a twilight zone of accountability.”

While working-class Puerto Ricans suffer the blows of austerity and second-class citizenship, tax incentives have attracted a wave of investors and remote workers, further straining the island’s resources and displacing its residents. Under the tax incentives consolidated under Act 60 in 2019, wealthy investors receive breaks on local and federal taxes as long as they buy property in Puerto Rico and reside there half the year. This has led to a loss of billions of dollars in revenues for the island’s coffers and a land grab that has significantly raised housing costs.

 

Local activists had hoped to voice these concerns to the vice president when she visited La Goyco, a closed school in San Juan reclaimed as a community center. Other valuable public lands have been sold or leased to wealthy investors for pennies on the dollar, only to be turned into exclusive private schools or luxury vacation homes.

Ms. Harris’s visit to La Goyco was contentious. Several activist groups staged protests, denouncing the federal government’s policies not just in Puerto Rico but also in Gaza and Haiti. Some groups chanted “Yankee, go home” and “U.S.A., U.S.A., we want statehood.”

In a scene reminiscent of the HBO show “Veep,” the vice president clapped haplessly along to the Spanish protest songs that greeted her, apparently not realizing the lyrics were critical of her visit.

After briefly experiencing the local culture, Ms. Harris moved on to a fund-raising event with wealthy “expat” donors. The event was held at the upscale residential and commercial complex Ciudadela, owned by an Act 60 beneficiary named Nicholas Prouty, whom Ms. Harris acknowledged as a good friend who kept her updated on the situation in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Ciudadela is also a symbol of Act 60, with a working-class community having been cleared to build luxury apartments and a dog park. It also played a role in the corruption trial of Puerto Rico’s former secretary of education Julia Keleher, who pleaded guilty to charges related to signing a letter ceding to developers the right to build on land adjacent to a public school in exchange for a discount on an apartment in the Ciudadela complex. 

The Government Accountability Office is scrutinizing the Act 60 tax breaks, and the Internal Revenue Service is investigating those who have tried to benefit from the law while skirting its requirements. Ms. Harris left Puerto Rico with what was reported to be nearly half a million dollars in donations for President Biden’s re-election fund.

Rather than seek photo ops, the vice president would have done better to listen more closely to her party’s Puerto Rican House members, including Nydia Velazquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have long been calling for greater federal oversight over Act 60 beneficiaries, greater scrutiny of the antidemocratic fiscal oversight board and a true federal commitment to addressing Puerto Rico’s status.

In the end, Ms. Harris’s visit encapsulates the contradictions of U.S. policy toward Puerto Rico. On the one hand, there’s a perfunctory nod to grass-roots empowerment, on the other, a cozying up to the very forces that are driving gentrification and displacement. While she did not toss paper towels, her visit was what Puerto Ricans call a papelón — an embarrassing spectacle.

Yarimar Bonilla, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author and editor of “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” and “Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm.”

The New York Times