Puerto Rico

NOVANEWS By Reed Richardson FAIR Nearly five months after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, more than a hundred thousand US citizens there still lack clean drinking water, and almost one-third of the island has no reliable electric power. As initial life-sustaining recovery efforts still grind toward completion, Puerto Rico’s Gov. Ricardo Rosselló (image below) has wasted no time using his territory’s recovery as an opportunity to push a number of policy proposals right out of the “disaster capitalism” playbook: from privatizing the island’s power utility to converting nearly all of its public schools to charters. And while the mainstream US press has been mainly focused on the Trump administration’s woeful institutional response to the storm, it has barely noticed this much ...

NOVANEWS By Juan Carlos Dávila Residents form a human chain to load supplies to a truck at the Rio Abajo community in Utuado on October 17, 2017. (Photo: Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty Images) After Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, most telecommunications services collapsed, particularly cell phones and internet providers. People struggled for days to contact their loved ones, and although there have been some improvements, making a call, sending a text message, and connecting to the Internet is still a challenge in most areas. Only certain analog and satellite telephones managed to survive the category-four hurricane, and the landline of Cucina 135, a community center located next to San Juan's financial center, was one of them. "Having a phone line was a...

NOVANEWS By Joel Cintrón Arbasetti Latino Rebels Featured image: Antonsanti Street in Santurce, Puerto Rico (Joel Cintrón Arbasetti | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo) It’s the morning of Oct. 7 and a man stops traffic on Antonsanti Street in Santurce, behind the Ciudadela building. He is wearing a helmet, sunglasses, facemask, a vest with ammunition, gloves, plastic straps used for arrests, boots, camouflaged pants with knee pads, a knife and gun. There is a machine gun in his hand. He has no plaque or ID. He works for a private security firm hired by Nicholas Prouty, the owner of the Ciudadela complex. Prouty turned to that service after Hurricane María, he told the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI in Spanish) last week. “With a substantial reduction in the number o...

NOVANEWS by W. T. WHITNEY Photo by The National Guard | CC BY 2.0 Fans of socialist Rosa Luxemburg looking at Hurricane Maria’s assault on Puerto Rico may recall the deaths of 40 000 people in 1902 when Mt. Pelee erupted in Martinique, a French colony.  Luxemburg wrote then that “the lords of the earth,” who with “faith unshaken – in their own wisdom …have all turned to Martinique [to] help, rescue, dry the tears and curse the havoc-wreaking volcano.” They had plundered and murdered in colonies like Martinique and she was accusing them of hypocrisy in trying to comfort the survivors. Currently that accusation applies to U. S. words and deeds in the wake of two recent hurricanes – particularly Hurricane Maria – that left Puerto Rico in shambles. Food, water, and medical supplies w...

NOVANEWS By Stephen Lendman Global Research   Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke deplorably called the federal response to crisis conditions in Puerto Rico a “good news story,” adding she’s “very satisfied.” San Juan Mayor Yulin Cruz emotionally responded, saying “(w)ell, maybe from where she’s standing it’s a good-news story.” “When you’re drinking from a creek, it’s not a good-news story. When you don’t have food for a baby, it’s not a good-news story.” “When you have to pull people down from their buildings – I’m sorry, but that really upsets and frustrates me.” “I would ask her to come down here and visit the towns and then make a statement like that, which frankly is an irresponsible statement and contrast with the statements of support that I have be...