As Puerto Rico entered its first summer since Hurricane Maria, and with it the beginning of another hurricane season, the dominant narratives on the island appeared to be those of, once again, austerity and profiteering.
At the end of January, FEMA had announced it would “officially shut off” its food and water aid for Puerto Rico, saying that its own analysis demonstrated that only 1 percent of islanders were still relying on assistance. Up to that point it had dispersed $3.2 million in unemployment aid to people whose jobs were affected by the storm and approved—though not dispersed—an additional $500 million in public assistance. In some communities, such as Morovis, where almost the entire town still lacked electricity, up to a third of citizens still depended on the food rations and 51 percent of residents lived below the poverty line.473 What the economic crisis over the previous years began, Hurricane Maria appeared to accelerate, and US census data would eventually show that Puerto Rico’s population declined by 129,848 people—nearly 4 percent of its total population—between July 2017 and July 2018, the largest population drop ever registered on the island.474
Around the same time, Rosselló announced that PREPA would be privatized as it had “become a heavy burden for our people, who today are held hostage by its poor service and high cost . . . deficient and obsolete system of generation and distribution of energy is one of the great impediments to our economic development.” As PREPA was bankrupt, a judge would have to approve any sale.475
As hurricane season loomed, and despite $3.8 billion being spent on the power grid, officials warned that it was “teetering.” It been only been partially rebuilt, patched together in piecemeal fashion by crews often working with inadequate supplies, nailing lines to trees in violation of safety codes in a desperate race to electrify the darkened island.476 One of the contractors recruited to get the grid up and running, a subsidiary of Oklahoma-based Mammoth Energy dubbed Cobra—had been awarded $1.8 billion in federal money and in many cases was charging $4,000 per worker, per day.477 In March, Walter Higgins, the former CEO of Bermuda-based Ascendant Group Ltd., who had decades of experience in the energy industry, was appointed PREPA’s new chief executive officer.478 The general approval, however, soon turned to rage when it was revealed that Higgins was to be paid $450,000 a year, plus bonuses, with PREPA board chairman Ernesto Sgroi citing a 2016 law that required the utility to pay competitive salaries.479
Tired of waiting, in the mountain town of Coamo, residents wielding machetes and shovels began trying to restore the power grid on their own, burrowing holes where they hoped new electrical posts would stand and collecting cables strewn amid the tropical fecundity. In San Sebastian, retired PREPA workers, municipal employees, and other volunteers chipped in.480 This spirit of resilience was celebrated in one of the more moving responses to the island’s state, from New Orleans-based band Hurray For The Riff Raff, whose Bronx-born lead singer and main songwriter Alynda Segarra was of Puerto Rican descent and whose song and video “Pa’lante” powerfully articulated a tradition of struggle, hope, and resistance.
On May 1—May Day—a general strike called by workers and students convulsed the capital, with protesters marching down Ponce de León Avenue, popularly known as the La Milla de Oro (Golden Mile), in San Juan’s Hato Rey financial district. A day earlier, the FOMB had ratified a doubling of tuition to the Universdad de Puerto Rico, from $56 per credit to $115. Carrying placards assailing the school closings and cuts in education and benefits that had battered the island, the protesters called for a moratorium on pending austerity measures. At the end of the rally, a few dozen protesters clashed with police, leading to latherings of tear gas and thirteen arrests.481
After less than four months on the job, Walter Higgins, who had been appointed PREPA’s CEO, would resign in early July, citing the furor over his nearly half a million dollar a year compensation as one of the reasons.482 On the heels of Higgins’s departure, Rosselló announced that he was appointing Rafael Diaz-Granados, a member of PREPA’s board, as the utility’s new CEO. When the disclosure that Diaz-Granados’s salary would be $750,000 provoked a storm of criticism (especially from Rosselló, who assailed the board for agreeing to such an arrangement, the new CEO and most of the board quit less than twenty-four hours later. Rosselló then announced that the new CEO would be former PREPA board chairman José Ortiz, who agreed to a $250,000 yearly salary. Ortiz became the fifth PREPA CEO since Maria had hit ten months earlier.483
The priority of the FOMB continued to appear to be secrecy, as it refused to comply with local disclosure requirements and tried to avoid sharing with creditors a draft of its fiscal plan and what economic model served as its basis. The FOMB said that creditors sought to exploit any potential discrepancies between drafts of the outlines “in order to mount a challenge to the fiscal plan.”484 In late June, the FOMB announced that it would cut the $25 million scholarship fund from the Universidad de Puerto Rico and a $50 million fund for various municipalities because the island’s legislators rejected a change in labor laws that would allow private employers to dismiss workers without cause at any time. Senate president Thomas Rivera Schatz charged, with a touch of hyperbole, that the FOMB threatened to be “worse than Hurricane Maria.”485 In February, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit had concluded that the members of the FOMB were “high level federal officials,” and thus, the mechanism used to name them violated the Constitution as the appointments had not been sent to the US Senate for approval.486 The body appealed the ruling.
“We are getting deeper into the colonial relationship. They’re not solving that lack of democracy,” my friend Juan Ruiz, a thirty-one-year-old who worked in real estate, told me when I visited him in Old San Juan that summer. “Nobody voted for them. It’s completely undemocratic.”
Many Puerto Ricans had long ago concluded that the FOMB was not working for them, which begged the question: Who were they working for?
Shortly after its formation, the FOMB had hired the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which began gobbling up nearly a quarter of its budget. By the autumn of 2018, McKinsey would publish a 148-page fiscal plan that advocated even more draconian austerity measures, such as service reductions and job cuts, than had been proposed on the island before. McKinsey itself had by this point billed the board $72 million, and there was plenty of money in its plan going forward: $1.5 billion, to be exact, to be paid to those overseeing the “restructuring”—including, naturally, itself—an amount that would come directly from the Puerto Rican taxpayers the FOMB and its ancillaries were purportedly trying to help.487 After the island’s Centro de Periodismo Investigativo sued the FOMB to obtain its emails with McKinsey, those released revealed that the firm’s subsidiary, the McKinsey Investment Office (MIO), directly owned at least $20 million in Puerto Rico bonds through its investments in the hedge fund Whitebox Advisors, and was connected to $170 million more. The blatant conflict of interest of McKinsey advocating a program of brutal austerity that it stood to directly financially benefit from elicited hardly a murmur in Washington.488
As the gospel of belt-tightening did not apparently extend to the board itself, the FOMB would go on to sign a $120,000 contract with Washington, DC, consulting firm Fuentes Strategies, a firm with offices in both DC and San Juan, to approach “key” sectors in the United States in order to shape its message before decision makers and the public. Fuentes Strategies would join Williams & Jensen, Off Hill Strategies, and Holland & Knight in lobbying full-time for the junta. By this point, the four firms were being paid over $1.6 million by the FOMB, money which, like that paid to McKinsey, came out of the budget of the government of Puerto Rico.489
As chaos roiled PREPA, islanders looking to Puerto Rico’s political class for a unified vision forward would be sorely disappointed. At the beginning of July, Rosselló signed into law a version of the island’s budget that had been approved by its legislature instead of the one that the FOMB had sought to impose days earlier, which had included $345 million in budget cuts. Promising “to use all the tools I have in my arsenal to be able to defend the people of Puerto Rico,” while admitting that the bill signing was likely “a symbolic gesture,”490 Rosselló, together with the legislature, would subsequently sue the FOMB to avoid implementing the budget.491 A day later, eighteen of Puerto Rico’s twenty-two senators rejected a bill looking to curtail the rights of some workers who had been fired, a move the FOMB had demanded in order to avoid cutting vacation days, sick days, and Christmas bonuses.492
In early August, Judge Laura Taylor Swain ruled that the FOMB had the power to make “binding policy choices” over the objections of the island’s elected government, but that it had “only budgetary tools and negotiations to use to elicit any necessary buy-in from the elected officials and legislators” in terms of adopting new laws or modifying or repealing existing ones. The decision was a rebuke to Rosselló’s attempt to avoid the board-imposed austerity budget, and he responded by charging that the ruling gave “total budgetary authority to the unelected members of the oversight board, which supersede that of the elected officials of the Government of Puerto Rico and its legislature.” FOMB Chairman José Carrión called on Rosselló and others to “get back to work” and said the ruling left “no doubt” that the austerity budget “must be enforced.”493
Nearly a year after the storm, when I drove back into the cordillera central to visit Victor Díaz, the Utuado pharmacist, I found a region still struggling to move on despite the time that had passed. Some life had returned, with coffee shops, small informal bars, and clothing stores doing a brisk trade. But elsewhere, the town’s lanes remained lined with shuttered businesses.
“Electricity comes and goes but we never know when,” sixty-two-year-old Annie Salva Mercado told me as she stood behind the counter at the bakery she ran near the central square. It was late summer and I had ventured inside to escape a tropical downpour, which had quickly drenched me, only to find my refuge without light, stewing in the humidity. “Things remain very fragile.”
In a nearby bodega selling beer, foodstuffs, and candies that children come to purchase after school, a mural of Albizu Campos, his face just above a painted machete, gazed soberly down at patrons. Next to the image were scrawled some words referencing a popular tune by the singer Roy Brown, whose music had become associated with the independentista cause. It read, aunque naciera en la luna, sigo siendo puertorriqueño. Even though I was born on the moon, I’m still Puerto Rican.
“We have friends and neighbors who still need help,” Díaz told me as we drove around the town, examining damaged bridges that remained closed and stoplights that still hadn’t begun working again. “We thought FEMA was going to be more proactive with the people of Puerto Rico. People have been going around begging for help and getting ‘no’ all the time. Things have not gone back to normal. We are not even at 30 percent after the hurricane.”
He was right. At the beginning of April, HUD had announced that Puerto Rico would receive $18.5 billion to help it rebuild its housing, less than the $46 billion Rosselló requested.494 A year after the hurricane, though insurance companies had paid out a total of $4.4 billion in claims, of the 279,000 total claims for hurricane-related damage, 13,600 claims had still not been closed (by law, insurance companies had ninety days to resolve claims). For the damage that hit Loiza, for example, an insurance company had only paid out $500,000 of a $9 million claim.495 Survivors also filed some 279,000 claims to insurance companies.496 By late June, FEMA had approved—but not disbursed—457,000 applications for individual assistance that would total $1.3 billion. And many who did receive assistance complained it was too little, a couple hundred dollars to repair a house that had been rendered almost unlivable.497
By September, Rosselló’s administration would sue insurance companies it accused of dragging their feet on responding to claims in the hopes that the claims would expire and there would not have to be payouts. The suit said that sixteen thousand claims had not been resolved and demanded $2.6 billion to compensate those who had been affected by the storm.498 When I drove to Barranquitas to try and talk to FEMA there about what progress had been made, they refused to speak with me, instead issuing a response via email saying that FEMA’s response to Hurricane Maria had been “unprecedented” and “the largest and longest federal response to a domestic disaster in the history of the United States.”499
HUD’s inspector general would eventually find that the body had deliberately stonewalled the congressional-mandated investigation into Hurricane Maria-related aid by a policy of “delayed access to departmental records” and a “systemic lack of cooperation,” which could cause “oversight efforts to be diluted, become stale, or worse, halt entirely.” The Trump White House, reverting to conspiratorial form, had ordered all government agencies to work closely with it on any oversight or document requests.500
Driving through the winding mountain roads of the cordillera central, it was still common to encounter communications poles bent nearly double over the roadside. On some secondary roads, cables and tree branches remained across the path. Many houses seemed abandoned, overlooking sweeping, lush valleys with a sighing melancholy, as if waiting for their owners to return. On one mountainside near Jayuya, I stopped to chat with a pair of PREPA contractors working on an electric pole just off a narrow road. I asked them how the situation was. One, who would only give his name as Javier, summed up the situation using the same word Annie Salva Mercado had in Utuado: fragile.
A year after the storm, another lawsuit filed by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo forced the government to admit that, contrary to what it had claimed previously for months, it still had no fully completed emergency plan for the island to deal with a Hurricane Maria-scale disaster in the future. After maintaining that the plans had been kept secret for a variety of security concerns, the government conceded that it did not even know when—or if—the plan would be completed.501 Another major report issued by thirteen federal agencies concluded that Puerto Rico could lose 3.6 percent of its total coastline, eight thousand structures, and drinking water and sanitation pipelines due to climate change–related sea rise. The report also predicted that elevated sea temperatures would increase the intensity of the hurricanes the island would experience.502
Lacking any solid disaster response plan, the Rosselló administration instead got into an angry dispute with the Estadísticas de Puerto Rico, the entity tasked with providing the island with independent data. The summer before, the governor had been accused of stacking the institute’s board with political cronies, and at the end of 2018, in the eyes of many, he had done much the same again, with three different board members. The institute filed—then voided—a lawsuit against the governor and suspended its executive director, Mario Marazzi, after it was revealed that his ex-girlfriend had obtained an order of protection against him.503 Marazzi would eventually resign, charging that “virtually all the members of that illegal board have made political donations and have close economic ties with the government.”504
The image of an all-blows-allowed fight over government spoils, when so many Puerto Ricans still lacked basic necessities, was dispiriting to watch. In early October, after years of opposition, the island’s creditors finally relented and said they would no longer oppose a plan to restructure the circa $4 billion in debt issued by the Government Development Bank, which had been defunct since the previous year. The plan was designed take the bank’s portfolio of loans, real estate, and cash and shift it to a debt recovery authority, which would then issue new bonds equal to 55 percent of the outstanding debt.505 Between June 2017 and June 2018, the island’s gross national product had contracted by about 7 percent.506
The struggling island had also witnessed the arrival of another kind of investor.
After the storm, a wave of investors and entrepreneurs with links to the cryptocurrency industry and its transaction ledger blockchain arrived in Puerto Rico from the mainland, their most visible representative being Brock Pierce, an eccentric former child actor who became a multimillionaire via the industry. They rented out palatial buildings in Old San Juan, initially using the entire twenty-thousand-square-foot Monastery hotel as their base, and started speaking of how they were going to transform Puerto Rico.507 Rosselló even established a blockchain advisory council.508 Pierce, dressed in a leather vest and hat, became a familiar sight wandering around Old San Juan, blasting trance music from a “portable pill-shaped Bluetooth speaker.”509 Even as much of the island lacked power, cruise ships had begun docking in Old San Juan’s port the previous December. By the late summer of 2018, the neighborhood was nearly restored to its former glory, even if a number of stores remained closed.
Pierce himself had a somewhat complicated background, to say the least. After appearing in films such as The Mighty Ducks as a child actor in the 1990s, Pierce retired from acting at seventeen to eventually cofound, with a businessman in his late thirties named Marc Collins-Rector, a startup called Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), which promised to deliver original video content amid the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. Pierce was a frequent visitor to Collins-Rector’s $4.2 million faux-Spanish colonial mansion that had, improbably, once belonged to Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight.510 Collins-Rector lived there with his twenty-three-year-old boyfriend, Chad Shackley, who had been linked to the investor since he was sixteen. In October 1999, DEN filed for its initial public offering of $75 million, but a month later Collins-Rector settled a suit brought by a man who said he had molested him for years beginning when he was thirteen.511
Within months, Collins-Rector was accused of having molested multiple teenage boys and fled to Europe; he was later located and arrested after nearly two years on the run.512 Other lawsuits would be filed, these naming all three men (Pierce insisted he didn’t know about any abuse) and around $4.5 million in judgments were awarded by default.513 A witness who was a teenager at the time of the alleged abuse said that Pierce “did not take part in this, not at all.”514 By Pierce’s own account, he spent most of the next year and a half immersed in the online role-playing game EverQuest.515 In May 2002, the house in Marbella, Spain, that all three shared was raided and the men were detained (Shackley and Pierce were released without charges). Collins-Rector would finally plead guilty to eight counts of luring teens across state lines for sex, paying only a small fine.516
Pierce’s subsequent internet venture was Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), in which he said Collins-Rector “had no official or unofficial role,”517 and he would later describe Collins-Rector as “a shit beyond belief.”518 However, the paperwork for the US incorporation of IGE was filed by Collins-Rector’s brother, Matthew Rector, and Collins-Rector’s former business partner, attorney Randy Maslow, who at the time also served as IGE’s executive vice president.519 (In 2014, Matthew Rector said he did not know Collins-Rector’s whereabouts and hadn’t spoken to him in years.520)
Pierce would later say of this time, “I was dealt a really difficult hand at a young age for not having done anything wrong. Just by association and then, really bad, irresponsible journalism,”521 and would worry that “anything I accomplish in my life ends up being discredited because of this narrative.”522 Returning to the States and setting about trying to rebuild his life, Pierce crossed paths with none other than Steve Bannon, then a former banker for Goldman Sachs, his career as a cofounder of the bomb-throwing right-wing website Breitbart and chief strategist for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump still in the future. Pierce described Bannon as his “right-hand man” during this time, and Bannon quickly warmed to the avant-garde world of Pierce’s cryptocurrency proclivities, saying, “this whole populist revolt is going to come down to this concept of currency.” For his part, Pierce described Bannon as “very smart, very driven, very patriotic. He’s not most of the things that people say.”523
Pierce’s own interest in Puerto Rico, he said, began while visiting the island as a teenager, and he first started thinking of using the island as a business base around 2014.524 By the time he landed in San Juan, he was most known for his association with the blockchain company Block.one, which he had sold for some $200 million in EOS virtual currency, and as the director of the Bitcoin Foundation.525 Many followed him, and despite Pierce’s frequent admonitions that they were there to help, the ambitions they voiced often seemed to go beyond mere investing—this new form of arrival seemed reminiscent to some of the old form of colonialism. At one point, Lottery.com cofounder Matt Clemenson told the New York Times that the group consisted of “benevolent capitalists,” while Pierce said their ethos would be “compassion, respect, financial transparency.” In the same article, Blockchain Industries chief technology officer Bryan Larkin declared, “we’re going to make this crypto land” as he sipped a frozen piña colada.526
Some in Puerto Rico appeared to say “not so fast.” When the crypto advocates held a public meeting in Rincón in May 2018, they were met with an often-caustic response on the part of audience members, with Pierce and the others, most of whom could not interact with the audience in Spanish, accused of having “a lack of respect” for the island and its citizens.527 Attempting to win the audience over to his side by telling them, “It’s not about compounding interest, it’s about compounding impact,” Pierce was at times shouted down and even asked, “Why don’t you go to Detroit?” One Bitcoin advocate, relocated from Hawaii, stood up and told the audience, “If this was in place before the hurricane, you wouldn’t have to wait for the government to kick in. . . . Now we will be prepared if you allow us to share a new tool, that’s all it is. We’re not here to take over.”528
When I spoke to Adam Krim, then acting executive director of the Restart One Foundation, which described itself as a nonprofit organization supporting the redevelopment of Puerto Rico and which was largely seed funded by Pierce, he insisted the new flock of investors came in peace.
“I’m aware that the crypto community came down here without a well-thought-out game plan,” Krim told me. “Nonetheless, they came down with the proper intention. We’re in the process of building that trust, which is going to take time.”
It was not hard to find the anger boiling just below the surface, though. One day, I struck up a conversation with Gabrielle Perez, a twenty-seven-year-old shop assistant in one of the stores selling trinkets to tourists in Old San Juan.
“We are infested with these people who think they are coming to save the primitive people of Puerto Rico who can’t get it together,” she told me, looking at Calle Fortaleza where Pedro Albizu Campos and Luis Muñoz Marín both once strolled. “How dare you? It hurts. It’s insulting. They want this garden and they see us as the weeds.”
But her anger, an anger I heard in many different parts of Puerto Rico, went beyond just the new arrivals and to the government of Puerto Rico itself.
“They’re focused on foreign investment, they’re focused on tourists, they’re focused on everyone but the local community, and I think that’s incredibly evident now,” she said, speaking in calm, measured tones.
“If it wasn’t obvious enough before Maria that we’re second-class citizens, now more than ever it’s clear where we stand with regard to the United States,” Perez continued. “I’m twenty-seven years old and I hope within my lifetime I get to see independence for Puerto Rico. This is a joke. The United States is a superpower, one of the greatest powers in the world, and they can’t get the lights on and the water running for a 100-by-33-mile island? What’s the point? They can take their citizenship and get out of here. Let us have our island.”
Despite Donald Trump’s skill at self-promotion and financial sleight of hand, his understanding of global economic matters was often primitive, so when, in late September 2018, he erroneously got the idea into his head that Puerto Rico was using its emergency relief money to pay off its debt, he allegedly lectured White House chief of staff John Kelly and Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney that no more money should be disbursed to the island. At a meeting several weeks later, Department of Housing and Urban Development deputy secretary Pam Patenaude—who, unlike most administration officials, had visited Puerto Rico at least half a dozen times since the storm—allegedly explained to White House officials that the money had already been appropriated by Congress and could not be withheld or rerouted. She resigned from the administration a few days later.529
Beneath the ramparts of Old San Juan, the Caribbean sea splashed onto the shore only feet away from the warren of brightly colored dwellings that were home to the struggling people of La Perla, for whom life trudged on regardless of the dealings of the powers above them. Despite its struggles, the neighborhood, situated on some of the most desirable real estate in the capital and yet housing some of its poorest inhabitants, had become a symbol of the never-say-die spirit of the island. It was memorialized in not only Ismael Rivera’s “La Perla” and the video for Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” but also in the song “La Perla” by the Puerto Rican radical group Calle 13, which celebrated the zone’s many rough-hewn charms.
It was around dusk one afternoon when the Puerto Rican journalist Joel Cintrón Arbasetti and Old San Juan resident Juan Ruiz-Robles, who had helped run the community kitchen in La Perla in the immediate aftermath of the storm, were sipping ice cold Medalla beers at a makeshift bar in what was once a home, but had now been largely destroyed by the storm. The walls were mostly gone, but the shower in one corner still worked. A local artisan had made a wood carving in the shape of the Puerto Rican flag, through which one could view the tumbling surf as the cruise ship passengers wandered through the streets of the city’s colonial gem in the neighborhood above.
“We are in survival mode, here,” Antonio Rosario Fernández, a forty-four-year-old salsa bandleader, told me as he relaxed after his day job. “This place was abandoned, with no light, no water, and very little information for a long time and there are still a lot of houses where people can’t live.”
After our visit to the bar, we wandered through the maze of narrow lanes and found sixty-three-year-old Sonia Viruet, who had lived her whole life in the neighborhood, sitting outside of her humble abode.
“I thought that we would not have the strength to get up again,” she told us. “But yes, there was a lot of unity between adults, children, young people, and everyone. The community joined up and the day after Maria, everyone went to collect the rubble, to clean the streets, and to collect wood to try to build some houses.”
I asked her if there had been a lot of help from the outside.
“Most of the help we got from private individuals,” she said. “From the federal government there was very little, and the mayor didn’t even come back to ask us what had happened, who had passed away, what people needed. She hasn’t come at all since the storm.”
Viruet was echoing a complaint that I had often heard about San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, whose office in Old San Juan was only a few blocks away. Despite the respect she had gained for forcefully advocating for Puerto Rico in the wake of the storm and pushing back against Trump’s wild slanders, she was increasingly seen as detached and remote, powwowing with Democratic Party grandees on the mainland but virtually absent on the island itself.
A few doors down, fifty-six-year-old Irma Navarez González told much the same tale.
“Many people left during the storm, but I stayed in my house,” she told us.
I was very scared that the sea was going to rise and take me but it was my home, so I stayed. . . . When we went out the next morning, the streets were filthy, with debris everywhere, but we all made groups, in every sector, to start cleaning up. By the night after the storm, we had mountains of debris, but the streets were clean. After that, the government did not help at all, but we received aid from groups like Calle 13—they brought us water and ice—and [the singer] Luis Fonsi and [actor] Osvaldo Ríos. Afterward, it seemed like everyone who would go to FEMA was told they did not qualify for aid. And the people who did—like my neighbors who lost their entire roof, for example—were given $300 or $400. And they continue to live life like that—with no real roof—even today.
We stayed in the neighborhood late. As stars dappled the night sky, some denizens of La Perla sat in a little park beneath the colonial castle’s walls, laughing and talking as the sound of crashing waves echoed nearby, the sweet smell of marijuana drifting on the tropical breeze. Ruiz-Robles and I sat chatting and drinking with a chef who lived in the neighborhood. The strains of salsa and reggaeton weaved through the palm fronds of the moonlit trees.
“This kind of life,” he said, as he took in the scene, “this is a kind of resistance.”
473 Adrian Florido, “FEMA To End Food and Water Aid For Puerto Rico.” National Public Radio, January 29, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/29/581511023/fema-to-end-food-and-water -aid-for-puerto-rico.
474 “New data shows 4 percent drop in Puerto Rico population since Maria,” Associated Press, April 17, 2019, https://apnews.com/df63a2f9186a4eaaaa531d69d59adf4e.
475 Danica Coto, “Puerto Rico Moves to Privatize Troubled Power Company,” Associated Press, January 22, 2018, https://apnews.com/5221fe5a9b1247e1ad1af0e1c35bf5e6.
476 Michael Weissenstein, “Puerto Rico Grid ‘Teetering’ Despite $3.8 Billion Repair Job,” Associated Press, May 31, 2018, https://apnews.com/fa210cd1434c4d909e6030c7da884bce.
477 Michael Weissenstein and Danica Coto, “Turmoil slows rebuilding of Puerto Rico’s power grid,” Associated Press, July 19, 2018, https://apnews.com/11893d2477e04e7f9b9c8befbea295ad.
478 Nick Brown, “Puerto Rico’s PREPA Gets Energy Industry Veteran Higgins as New CEO,” Reuters, March 20, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-puertorico-prepa-ceo-idUSKBN1GW32G.
479 Eva Lloréns Vélez, “Puerto Rico Power Company Chairman Defends New CEO’s Pay,” Caribbean Business, March 22, 2018, https://caribbeanbusiness.com/puerto-rico-power-company-chairman-defends-new-ceos-pay/.
480 Danica Coto, “Puerto Ricans grab machetes, shovels to help restore power,” Associated Press, February 7, 2018, https://www.apnews.com/394fe201adf64649a92fe8e9b82000e1.
481 Patricia Mazzei, “Protest in Puerto Rico Over Austerity Measures Ends in Tear Gas,” New York Times, May 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/us/puerto-rico-protests.html.
482 Andrew Scurria, “Puerto Rico Power Utility CEO Resigns After Less Than Four Months on Job,” Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/puerto-rico-power-utility-ceo-resigns-after-less-than-4-months -on-job-1531328679.
483 Karen Pierog, “Puerto Rico Governor Names New Utility Head after Board Members Quit,” Reuters, July 18, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-puertorico-prepa/update-1-puerto-rico-governor-names-new-utility-head -after-board-members-quit-idUSL1N1UE1EV.
484 Simone Baribeau, “Puerto Rico Oversight Board Pushes For Secrecy,” Forbes, June 18, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/debtwire/2018/06/18/puerto-rico-oversight-board-pushes-for-secrecy/.
485 Danica Coto, “Puerto Rico Faces Austerity Measures amid Budget Wrangling,” Associated Press, June 29, 2018, https://www.apnews.com/0ad6c5ab85f740f187b8acb6c26ed084.
486 José A. Delgado Robles, “La Junta de Supervisión Fiscal firma un nuevo contrato en Washington,” El Nuevo Día, April 14, 2019, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/lajuntadesupervisionfiscalfirmaunnuevocontratoenwashington-2487922/.
487 Andrew Rice with Luis J. Valentín Ortiz, “The McKinsey Way to Save an Island,” New York magazine, April 17, 2019, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/mckinsey-in-puerto-rico.html.
488 Andrew Rice with Luis J. Valentín Ortiz, “McKinsey: Puerto Rico Bondholder and Fiscal Board’s Lead Adviser,” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, December 12, 2018, http://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2018/12/mckinsey-puerto-rico-bondholder-and-fiscal-boards-lead-adviser/.
489 José A. Delgado Robles, “La Junta de Supervisión Fiscal Firma un Nuevo Contrato en Washington,” El Nuevo Día, April 14, 2019, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/lajuntadesupervisionfiscalfirmaunnuevocontratoenwashington-2487922/.
490 Danica Coto, “Puerto Rico Governor Rejects Budget in Challenge to Board,” Associated Press, July 2, 2018, https://www.apnews.com/aa134f04810b45f193f97d348e3f9549.
491 Luis J. Valentín Ortiz, “Puerto Rico Bankruptcy Judge Upholds Oversight Board Powers Over Gov’t,” Reuters, August 7, 2018, https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-puertorico-lawsuit/puerto-rico-bankruptcy-judge-upholds-oversight-board-powers-over-govt-idUKKBN1KS2IP.
492 Danica Coto,“Puerto Rico Senators Deal Blow to Governor amid Budget Clash,” Associated Press, July 3, 2018, https://apnews.com/258712ef76ba4a55a7b88514f8747a72.
493 Ortiz, “Bankruptcy Judge Upholds Oversight Board.”
494 Luis J. Valentín Ortiz, “Puerto Rico to Get $18.5 Billion to Rebuild Shattered Housing Market,” Reuters, April 10, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-puertorico-housing/puerto-rico-to-get-18-5-billion-to-rebuild-shattered -housing-market-idUSKBN1HH3IR?il=0.
495 Danica Coto, “Puerto Ricans Fight for Insurance Money a Year after Maria,” Associated Press, October 23, 2018.
496 Coto, “Puerto Ricans Fight.”
497 Ben Fox, “Many in Puerto Rico still under tarps as storm threat looms,” Associated Press, June 20, 2018, https://www.apnews.com/a99551194b144db490b25c7f0e6d46fd.
498 “Puerto Rico Sues Insurance Companies amid Unresolved Claims,” Associated Press, September 18, 2018, https://www.apnews.com/aca22421b73e4ad8b0bbcd9c78631668.
499 FEMA, email to author, August 30, 2018.
500 Tracey Jan and Josh Dawsey, “HUD’s Top Watchdog: Agency Impeded Probe into Puerto Rico Hurricane Aid,” Washington Post, April 30, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/30/huds-top-watchdog-agency-is-impeding-probe-into-puerto-rico-hurricane-aid/.
501 “Gobierno Confirma que no está Listo el Plan de Manejo de Emergencias para todas las Agencias,” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, October 30, 2018, http://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2018/10/gobierno-confirma-que -no-esta-listo-el-plan-de-manejo-de-emergencia-para-todas-las-agencias/.
502 D.R. Reidmiller et al., Fourth National Climate Assessment: Volume II Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States (Washington, DC: US Global Change Research Program, November 2018).
503 Nicole Acevedo, “Puerto Rico’s Government, Independent Agency Clash,” NBC News, February 1, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/puerto-rico-s-government-independent-agency-clash-n965531.
504 CyberNews, “Puerto Rico Statistics Institute’s Marazzi resigns,” Caribbean Business, February 11, 2019, https://caribbeanbusiness.com/puerto-rico-statistics-institutes-marazzi-resigns/.
505 Luis Valentin Ortiz, “Puerto Rico Creditors End Opposition to Bank Debt Restructuring,” Reuters, October 5, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-puertorico-creditors-idUSKCN1MF2HH.
506 Yalixa Rivera and Jonathan Levin, “Can Crypto, Cannabis, and Nicolas Cage Boost Puerto Rico’s Economy?” Bloomberg, September 10, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-10/can-crypto-cannabis-and-nicolas-cage-boost-puerto-rico-s-economy.
507 Nellie Bowles, “Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico,” New York Times, February 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/technology/cryptocurrency-puerto-rico.html.
508 Rivera and Levin, “Crypto, Cannabis, and Nicolas Cage.”
509 Neil Strauss, “Brock Pierce: The Hippie King of Cryptocurrency,” Rolling Stone, July 26, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/brock-pierce-hippie-king-of-cryptocurrency-700213/.
510 John Gorenfeld and Patrick Runkle, November 5, 2007, http://web.archive.org/web/20080117004139/http://radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/11/den_chads_world_marc_collins_rector_1.php.
511 Julian Dibbell, “The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire,” Wired, November 24, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/.
512 Dibbell, “Decline and Fall.”
513 Ibid.
514 Strauss, “Brock Pierce.”
515 Dibbell, “Decline and Fall.”
516 “Fast Company,” Radar.
517 Ellie Hall, Nicolás Medina Mora, and David Noriega, “Found: The Elusive Man At The Heart Of The Hollywood Sex Abuse Scandal” BuzzFeed, June 26, 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/found-the-elusive-man -at-the-heart-of-the-hollywood-sex-abus.
518 Strauss, “Brock Pierce.”
519 “Fast Company,” Radar.
520 Hall, Mora, and Noriega, “Found.”
521 Dean Takahashi, “Blockchain Billionaire Brock Pierce on Saving Puerto Rico, Cryptocurrency Games, and Fighting Controversy,” VentureBeat, October 29, 2018, https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/29/blockchain-billionaire-brock -pierce-interview/.
522 Strauss, “Brock Pierce.”
523 Ibid.
524 Ibid.
525 Bowles, “Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico.”
526 Ibid.
527 La Isla Oeste, “Rincoeños cuestiónan el propósito de los cryptosueñit,” YouTube video, 4:04, May 21, 2018 https://youtu.be/nwvHylZLMxY.
528 Michael Murray, Facebook video, May 17, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/michael.murray.752861/videos/pcb.10212430775030958/10212430727829778/?type=3&theater.
529 Tracy Jan et al., “After Butting Heads with Trump Administration, Top HUD Official Departs Agency,” Washington Post, January 16, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/top-hud-officials -departure-follows-disagreements-over-housing-policy-and-puerto-rico -disaster-funds/2019/01/16/e6ba5be4-1839-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081 _story.html.