Puerto Rico: three million people are not wrong

Absolutely extraordinary. Sending love and solidarity to Puerto Rican revolutionaries who are showing the world how it's done. This is about #RickyRenuncia but also the anti-democratic Junta, the odious debt and the right to sovereignty on every front! https://t.co/LDxRwJNkWM

— Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) July 22, 2019

In case you've missed it: the people of Puerto Rico are in uproar. Three million people protest the extremely dire straits that the country is in and has been in for many years.

Naomi Klein's retweet above is apt, mainly as it accentuates how dire the situation has been for Puerto Rico for a long time; read my review of her brilliant book The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists here.

The following quote from The Mind Unleashed says a lot about the state of affairs in Puerto Rico:

The protests were mainly galvanized by a spectacular, nearly 900-page leak known as “RickyLeaks” containing text messages between Governor Ricardo Rosselló and his private circle that were sent in December 2018 and January 2019. The leaks were filled with vulgar, homophobic and misogynistic messages about other politicians, media members, celebrities, and a range of other Puerto Ricans. While some of the leaked chats read like drunken rambling, many of the messages have touched the sore nerves of various segments of the Puerto Rican population.

In one message, Rosselló calls Melissa Mark-Viverito, the Puerto Rico-born former speaker of the New York City Council, a “whore.”

In another exchange, government critic and popular San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz also comes under harsh fire from Christian Sobrino Vega, then Puerto Rico’s chief fiscal officer, who says, 

“I am salivating to shoot her.” The governor responds: “You’d be doing me a grand favor.”In other messages, the governor claims that the San Juan mayor is either “off her meds” for deciding to run against him, “or she’s a tremendous HP,”—the Spanish acronym for hijueputa, or “son/daughter of a bitch.”

Openly gay “King of Latin Pop” Ricky Martin is also derided by Sobrino Vega as “such a male chauvinist that he fucks men because women don’t measure up. Pure patriarchy.”

It's a clear case. The people are taking over. Let's just hope the USA don't unleash repression against Puerto Rico yet again.