The Puerto Rican Right Is Rallying Against a Rising Left
For years, Puerto Rico’s right-wing establishment has branded the Left as “communists” seeking to impoverish the island by isolating it from the US. Yet decades of economic mismanagement have discredited the Right and strengthened the populist Alliance.
Demonstrators protest power rate increases in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on June 28, 2023. (Gabriella N. Baez / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
November 5 will see elections not just in the United States but in Puerto Rico, the island that has been a colony of the United States for 126 years. Throughout much of the twentieth century, opposition to the deeply unequal economic system that has predominated within Puerto Rico has been easily dismissed as anti-Americanism by critics who seek to provoke islanders with threats of economic isolation. However, in the last year, Puerto Rico’s left-wing parties, some of which are pro-independence, have cobbled together a loose bloc. This alliance now threatens to win at the upcoming election, a possibility that Puerto Rico’s ruling elite are terrified of.
On September 24, hundreds of billboards flooded Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, bearing messages critical of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP) and its candidate for governor, Jenniffer González. Later in the day a tweet with photos of the billboards appeared, declaring that they were “paid for by Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio,” better known by nom de plume Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper, singer, and producer. A couple of days later, another well-known artist, René Pérez, aka Residente, appeared in a video interviewing and endorsing González’s main rival in the November election, Juan Dalmau. Dalmau is the candidate for governor for the Alliance, a progressive electoral coalition comprising the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), to which Dalmau belongs, the Citizens’ Victory Movement (MVC), and several other organized political and religious organizations.
The Alliance, which was recently endorsed by Democratic congressmembers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez, seeks to oust the PNP and the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) from their decades-long stronghold in electoral politics, political discourse, and the management of the finances of the colony. Status-wise, the coalition is interested in developing bilateral and binding mechanisms for solving Puerto Rico’s colonial status, as an alternative to the millions of dollars continuously wasted on sterile referenda on status formulas (i.e., independence, statehood, or commonwealth) that the traditional two-party system has provided so far.
The Alliance owes its growing strength to its focus on the local protagonists that facilitate and benefit from the institutional decay of the colony. This is a reflection of a growing wave of discontent with how the different government administrations of the PNP and PPD have dealt with the social crisis effecting most Puerto Ricans. The island, which was once celebrated as an example of rapid capitalist development, is suffering from the effects of a dangerous cocktail of austerity, debt peonage, and extreme corruption.
According to a recent study, 47 percent of households would be unable to pay a debt of $2,000, a not unlikely threat given the costly impact that near-continuous power outages have had on the island’s residents. These failures have been the order of the day since September of 2017, when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, and have been more pronounced since 2021, when the production and distribution of electricity on the island began to be privatized.
Some of the Bad Bunny billboards sought to draw a connection between the energy crisis and the PNP. One of them reads, “Voting for the PNP is voting for LUMA,” LUMA Energy being the current private monopoly that was awarded the distribution and transmission contract by the PNP under the then governor and former secretary of justice Wanda Vázquez. Vázquez, and the whole process that led up to LUMA being awarded this contract, is currently being investigated in an ongoing process plagued by irregularities.
The imposition in 2017 of a Fiscal Control Board to manage the finances of the island and pay off the debt acquired by various governmental administrations of the PNP and PPD has only worsened the situation. These are the same administrations that for decades have made Puerto Rico a tax haven for corporations and wealthy individuals in an economic system that has developed into a mechanism for wealth transfer and extraction. This model benefits both local and international capital while creating substantial income inequality. Puerto Rico is among the top-ten most unequal places in the world, and its poverty rate is significantly higher than that of the United States, with a population increasingly dependent on federal transfers in the form of Social Security, Medicare, reconstruction funds, and nutritional assistance funds.
These flows of income and resources coming from the US federal government, which have been increasing for almost a decade because of hurricanes, earthquakes, and COVID-19, are continuously mismanaged and swallowed up, even though they are supposed to provide a lifeline to many families on an island in which 43 percent of people sit below the poverty line. For comparison, the figure for the United States is 12 percent.
This is the reality confronting the Alliance, which faces a historic situation in which both main parties have been losing support while their once-fragmented electoral opposition has been slowly gaining ground. When the Alliance ran in the 2020 election as separate parties, the PIP and MVC, the main members of the Alliance, obtained a combined 28 percent of the vote, while the current PNP government got 33 percent, the lowest percentage in its history. The PPD, its historical rival, meanwhile won 32 percent of the vote. All these results followed on the heels of popular protests that ousted the PNP governor in 2019.
In that same 2020 election, a current member of the Alliance, Manuel Natal, who had been supported for a long time by important workers’ organizations, almost won the mayorship of the capital city of San Juan in a process also marred by irregularities. Natal is running again against the incumbent, Miguel Romero, who was secretary of the department of labor under then governor — and now Donald Trump advocate for Latinos — Luis Fortuño.
Fortuño’s tenure saw the firing of thousands of public employees in 2009 and the passing of more tax exemption laws that cost millions to the public coffers in the midst of a fiscal crisis; some of these laws, critics noticed, personally benefited Romero. Finally, Romero was a senator who endorsed the privatization of the power utility’s functions and the awarding of the contract to LUMA Energy, a private firm with no experience in the provision of electricity for such a large-scale operation.
Threat Response
It is not surprising that the weakening popularity of the PNP and PPD among voters has been accompanied by a concerted response to try and stop the growing momentum of discontented opposition. A whole generation of Puerto Ricans have now grown up in a post–Cold War era, and this has weakened the appeal of the two main parties. The backdrop to the lives of this generation has instead been the two-decade socioeconomic crisis devouring the island.
Some have been able to emigrate to the United States, a process contributing to the island’s depopulation and aging, but for many of those that stay, the prospects are bleak. A power outage on September 3, which interrupted the registration process of hundreds of students at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus, became emblematic of this sorry state of affairs.
There was also the case of thousands of citizens encountering problems with the digital platform that the State Election Commission had purchased for $3.7 million. At some point, around 60,000 electoral transactions, many of which were requests by citizens to register to vote, were reported to not have been processed through what was advertised as an “efficient” digital platform. Worryingly, thousands of dead people appeared in the official registry lists for voting in the upcoming election.
This last irregularity was a result of a fraud scheme recently uncovered by the Center for Investigative Journalism and published on September 24, the same day that the Bad Bunny billboards appeared across Puerto Rico. According to this report, this scam, which allowed the dead to cast ballots, could be traced to at least the 2016 election, when the now exiled Ricky Rosselló of the PNP was elected governor of Puerto Rico in administration shortened after a wave historic popular protests ousted him during the summer of 2019.
Rossello’s running mate in the 2016 election as resident commissioner, a nonvoting position in the US Congress, had been Jenniffer González, who still holds that seat and, after defeating Pedro Pierluisi, the current governor, will be the PNP’s candidate for governor in a primary for the upcoming November election. González, a self-identified Republican and fan of Benjamin Netanyahu, endorsed Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Like her current running mate for the capital’s mayoralty, Miguel Romero, she was a leader in the Legislative Assembly when it fired thousands of public employees and was implicated in a scandal involving the illegal raising of debts.
Following in the footsteps of her Republican leaders in the United States, the González campaign has decided to use Cold War and anti-communist propaganda against the Alliance. “The communists here are threatening to take power,” she said in one speech. She has, for example, sought to highlight how the Alliance’s candidate for governor, Juan Dalmau, believes in independence for Puerto Rico, independence being for them a codeword for “communism” and complete isolation from the United States.
Still, the war of words is just a complement to attacks on other fronts. The problems with the State Electoral Commission, which exposed the number of dead people potentially voting in Puerto Rico’s election, were handled by the same commission that generated them. Rather than look into these concerns, the State Electoral Commission threatened to file a lawsuit against the Center for Investigative Journalism for not making their sources public.
The Enemy Behind the Enemy
The economic crisis that started in 2006 and the debt default that came in 2017 directly affected those that earned property income on the island. They would continue to profit, but their accumulation of rents, interest, and profits would slow down with the arrival of the Fiscal Control Board and its purported focus on balanced budgets and happy creditors. In this new scenario, many representatives of Puerto Rico’s capitalist class decided to organize themselves as “Bonistas del Patio,” a group of local bondholders appealing to both the fiscal junta and the island’s citizens for priority in the payment of the public debt, because they were the fellow Puerto Ricans “most negatively affected” in what effectively was their collaboration in the dismantlement of the public welfare.
These creole capitalist groups, which thrive on politics being defined solely in terms of the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and which have for decades benefitted from preferential tax treatment and regulatory laxity and pushed for labor market precarity while the country’s debt increased, have now organized themselves as a super PAC that has actively endorsed members of the PNP and PPD that have undermined the Alliance. They have done this by preventing PIP and MVC from formally running together and disqualifying currently elected members in the legislature from running under an official party banner.
By joining the “anti-communist” chorus of the two main parties and other ultraconversative groups, this coalition of the private sector has revealed the real motivations behind its ideology: a need to sustain the colonial status quo that allows them to continuously enrich themselves while costs are socialized.
Looking to the Future
It’s undeniable that the Alliance has made important strides in capturing much of the generalized discontent with how previous administrations have managed the socioeconomic crisis in Puerto Rico. This anger, which previously erupted in 2019 and led to the ousting of the then governor, has contributed to expanding the coordinates of political understanding in an increasingly polarized society beyond the usual status discussions. Against this, the PNP, the PPD, the creole capitalist class, and ultraconservative sectors have all fallen back on old tactics to try to keep a hold on their decaying hegemony. Their battle cry that this is an “election between the Left and those that believe in a relationship with the United States” still resonates with many.
It seems that whatever the election outcome, the results are likely to be contested given the substantial loss of credibility of the State Electoral Commission in running the process. This “credibility flaw,” which was created and developed by the status quo, is already being used by both sides in a struggle that will intensify after the elections, and where the street will be center stage, in a context where the status quo is being pulled by the extreme right wing and the Alliance keeps gaining more supporters.