For Immediate Release
“On this day in 2017, Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, only two weeks after Hurricane Irma had ripped through the Island. While this triggered the longest blackout in modern history, the real disaster hit when the local and federal governments, through ill preparation and outright neglect, failed the people of Puerto Rico. Thousands of our relatives, friends and colleagues are no longer with us because the only PR these governments were focused on was public relations.
“The Puerto Rican diaspora and allies rose to meet this unprecedented crisis, as we continue to do in the face of the situation today: a white supremacist president trying to sell off the Island and calling it dirty and poor; thousands of homes still under blue tarps; social workers inundated by people suffering the lingering effects of not only the hurricanes but also a series of earthquakes, an economic depression and a brutal austerity program; children with little to poor Internet access and schools without remote learning tools.
“In 1898, General Nelson Miles, who led the U.S. forces that invaded and occupied Puerto Rico, descended on the Island to bestow the virtues of U.S. democracy, as he expressed. We doubt, for those who embraced that intervention, that this is the situation they hoped for under the wing of one of the world’s wealthiest and advanced super powers.”