Puerto Rico: ‘We need partners, not masters’
From the notebook of Marketplace correspondent Andy Uhler, who landed in Puerto Rico on Wednesday.
Day one began with a couple of interviews with Puerto Rican politicians. I expected Rep. Luis Vega Ramos and Sen. Ramon Luis Nieves to be your normal, everyday politicians, armed with canned answers about the future of Puerto Rico and how the federal government and United States Congress was letting the territory down.
Don’t get me wrong, there was certainly a lot of that rhetoric. But there were also some moments of honesty I wasn’t expecting (especially given Puerto Rico is in an election year). Sen. Nieves told me this:
“We are undergoing a massive depression here. Not on an economic sense of the word, but on an emotional sense of the word. People have lost hope about the future, about what kind of Puerto Rico we will have in the next few years. The conditions of living in Puerto Rico have become unbearable.”
And then things got a little heavier:
“If nothing happens, or if the only remedy that Congress provides is just a fiscal control board to reorganize Puerto Rico in order to pay for its debt and nothing more, we will really be in a position of starting a real conflict to fight for the survival of Puerto Rico’s society. And it will get bloody.”
Sen. Nieves and Rep. Luis Vega Ramos are certainly left of center and both talked a lot about sovereignty and Puerto Rican independence. They were coming at me with a pretty heavy agenda, but the manner in which they told me about it was awfully direct and surprisingly candid from someone in their position. Rep. Vega Ramos:
“What we need are partners, not masters. And what the United States and creditors should understand once and for all is that trying to be our masters is not going to work out for anybody, not for them, not for the federal government and certainly not for us. What they need to do is be our partners. And I don’t understand why they don’t want to understand that. It’s as simple, as clear as a glass of water that your child might drink.”
San Juan itself was also surprising. The island itself felt far less foreign than I thought it would. Most people in Old San Juan speak English and I can pick up a burger at Wendy’s or some chicken at KFC a couple of blocks from my hotel. Walking next to the pier, it felt way more like Orlando than I expected. It seems like I need to venture out from San Juan to get a better sense of what Puerto Rico is truly going through.
I was less surprised to hear about the tough climate students are facing. I grabbed a beer with Alex Betancourt, Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Puerto Rico, and he talked about a strike the students are putting together today and Friday to protest the allocation of money from the general treasury away from the university. Betancourt told me the students have an argument, but he thinks they’re barking up the wrong tree. He said the protest should be directed at politicians, not the University of Puerto Rico. The University can’t get anything changed — the changes have to come from El Capitolo.
With that, we’re heading to the University to talk to students and faculty to hear it more about it first hand.
