In July of this year, Puerto Ricans stood outside the governor’s mansion and shouted “LUMA out!” The monopoly that recently took over the colony’s power grid has failed to prevent blackouts, provide consistent power, repair damaged grid equipment, orto keep prices down. LUMA was formed overnight in January of 2020 by the enormous energy concerns Quanta Services, Inc. (U.S.) and ATCO (Canada), which own it. A secret no-bid contracting process began in June of 2020 granted a 15-year monopoly to LUMA and sold off Puerto’s Rico’s formerly-publicly-owned power grid, transforming a public utility which all of Puerto Rico relied upon into just another investment opportunity for North American monopoly capital.
The privatization of the power grid has been a dream of U.S. imperialists since at least 2017 when Hurricane Maria rocked the island. Capitalist grifter and notorious union-buster Elon Musk was the first person to publicly suggest buying out the colony’s power grid and replacing it with private “micro-grids.” His vacuous tech-company Tesla had already been given Federal grants to build private “micro-grids” on the Hawai’ian island of Kauai, and he soon moved in to the poorest and least-developed parts of Puerto Rico, promising the world, and ultimately delivering little more than weed-choked fields of solar panels and disconnected batteries. Musk left the island worse than it was before. Now, LUMA has come to try to squeeze more from the embattled people.
Now, five years after the idea was first floated, the power grid is in private hands: LUMA’s hands. In June of 2020 when LUMA was awarded the contract, power cost 17.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. In July of 2022, under LUMA’s federally-subsidized private money-making venture, power now costs 33.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. That is, in the two years since the privatization of the power grid, consumer prices for electricity in Puerto Rico have nearly doubled, while the colony’s power infrastructure has either not been improved or substantially worsened. As it has since it was taken by the United States from Spain, Puerto Rico is being made to serve as a piggy-bank for U.S. capitalists.
In 2016, under President Obama’s Administration, the U.S. imperialist class received a gift in the form of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). This was the culmination of over a century of indignities inflicted by the U.S. Empire: in 1898, as the U.S. behemoth began its first steps on the road to world-empire, Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States as booty stolen from Spain after the Spanish-American War. After over one-hundred years of U.S. vampirism, although Puerto Ricans still cannot control their own economy or political sphere, although they cannot vote for the officials who govern their island, and although the U.S. Congress has done its best to bankrupt Puerto Rico, the citizens of that island were finally informed that the ultimate decisions about how to govern Puerto Rico would not be made by politicians at all. They’d be made by businessmen.
La Junta, they call it, but the law calls it the Fiscal Control Board. There are seven board members on la Junta, all of whom are appointed by the president of the U.S. Empire — for whom the Puerto Rican people are not permitted to vote. There are five officers elected by the board. PROMESA gives all twelve of these people complete legal immunity againstlawsuits for their actions as board members. (The officers themselves, under U.S. corporate law, are also generally immune from lawsuits so long as they are acting “within the scope of their position” and not found to be violating criminal law.) These PROMESA vultures (who include Natalie Jaresko, a Ukrainian investment banker who was the Ukrainian Minister of Finance after the 2014 coup , Arthur Gonzalez, a rich lawyer and bankruptcy judge from New England, and David Skeel, a corporate law professor) determine financial policy for the Puerto Rican colony.
La Junta forced the island into privatizing the power grid and giving the contract to an American-Canadian joint-venture: LUMA. We’ve seen this pattern a thousand times before. LUMA is a corporation ready-made to loot the public coffers of Puerto Rico through the contract and the federal government through the subsidies being paid out to it. The most notable, of course, was the looting of the Weimar Republic through Nazi privitization. Even the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a bourgeois think-tank, decried the process by which Puerto Rico was forced to adopt LUMA. “[F]our of the five selection committee members gave identical scores to LUMA and one other bidder for the contract in 37 out of 38 categories; three of the members made the same mathematical mistake in tallying their scores. Scores recommended by… [a U.S. consulting company] also appeared to have been copied directly to the scoring sheets.” These scores were clearly ready-made and given to the selection committee with the instructions that LUMA be granted the contract.
According to court filings, LUMA requested $265 million in subsidies from the federal government for 2022 above and beyond the $700 million they received from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to repair the power grid and the $12.8 billion approved for distribution to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which will undoubtedly filter through into LUMA’s hands as well.
What is the result of all this privatization? “Sometimes when it rains a little bit, the power goes out,” says Ramón Luis Nieves of San Juan. In April of this year, a fire at a LUMA power plant caused another island-wide outage. The figurehead governor of the island, Pedro Pierluisi, estimated that it would take eight years to rebuild the power grid. Nieves says that the outages have actually gotten worse since the LUMA takeover.
Throughout the summer and culminating at the end of July, the governor’s palace was the scene of furious protests demanding the island’s government get rid of the LUMA contract. It is only through narrow, direct campaigns like this one that the people of Puerto Rico can express their dissatisfaction with the colonizing U.S. Empire safely. To be openly critical of the U.S. is to court death, like Filiberto Ojeda Rios, who was assassinated in a shootout with agents of the FBI — one arm of the U.S. secret police. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which also targeted mainland activists, primarily Black freedom fighters like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Chairman Fred Hampton, extensively surveilled (and undoubtedly continues to surveil) “malcontents” in Puerto Rico. In 1937, for instance, the governor of the island (appointed by Franklin Roosevelt) ordered protestors to be dispersed with force and the U.S. colonial police killed 19 people.
Under U.S. rule, there have been some 2,000 political prisoners held by the colonial government. Their total sentences, added together, come to 11,116 years. There are still political activists in prison for their work denouncing the U.S. colonial overlord today. In 2017, Carlos Lopez Rivera was released on a commuted sentence after serving 36 years in prison, 12 of those in solitary confinement. People like Rivera fought and are continuing to fight to overthrow the unjust regime that foists “bargains” like the rapacious LUMA deal on Puerto Rico. This current outrage is merely the latest in a history of abasements visited on the Puerto Rican people by the United States — and all efforts must be made to stop the leeches of U.S. capital from sucking the blood of Puerto Rico for their own gain.
Hurricane Fiona even now spends its energy on Florida after it ripped through Puerto Rico last weekend. The storm once again knocked out LUMA’s power grid. “A lot of people – more than (during) Maria – lost their houses now… lost everything,” said Juan Miguel Gonzalez of San Juan. Even now, fully one week after the hurricane swept the island, of the nearly 1.5 million “customers” of LUMA on the island, PowerOutage.us reports that 800,000 are still out of power. This is the legacy of U.S. colonialism — late to the colony game, the U.S. Empire nevertheless has learned to play it well. It is time for those in the U.S. who care about the crimes our government is committing to stand up and say no more! The fight for Puerto Rico is the fight for the liberation of all oppressed nations under U.S. imperialist domination.
