September, peak hurricane season, is over, and with its passage everyone in Puerto Rico can exhale with some measure of relief that this year, at least, didn’t see any hurricanes make landfall on the island like the devastating Hurricanes Irma and Maria of last September.

It has taken a full year of struggle for the people of Puerto Rico to gain some level of national recognition of the depth of devastation wrought by last year’s hurricanes. Only after a May 2018 report from Harvard estimated almost three thousand deaths from Maria and its after-effects did the government of Puerto Rico — which for almost a year clung to the early claim of only sixty-four deaths — publicly accept the scale of the hurricane’s toll in lives.

The reluctance to acknowledge such large-scale human death is criminal. But with this September’s reprieve from more hurricanes, it is a good time to situate the problems of government emergency response to tropical storms within a much broader set of problems of rule and sovereignty on the island. Beyond the feckless disaster relief effort staged by the U.S. government, the more pernicious crimes committed against Puerto Rico are the decades of economic and political exploitation that made the island a place where tropical storms could so lethally crash the entire social infrastructure and leave $123 billion of crushing indebtedness on its people.