National agitation day, March 22nd, 2025

On New Year’s Eve, Puerto Rico experienced an island-wide electricity blackout, cutting off millions of people’s access to healthcare, food, and light. Hospital patients’ lives were put in jeopardy as medical equipment lost power. Costly groceries went bad. People who had looked forward to celebrating the new year with loved ones were trapped in their homes. This wasn’t a one-time catastrophe. 

The US territory’s already crumbling electric grid was privatized in 2017, following the devastation of Hurricane Maria and a six-month blackout. Following the typical playbook of imperialist powers after a disaster in an oppressed place, in 2020, a US/Canadian business group called LUMA Energy rushed in with an opportunistic money grab. Since then, Puerto Ricans have faced constant power outages, all while paying double the cost of electricity of the average US household. The instability has continued to increase as global climate change further damages and taxes the energy grid. Heat waves, hurricanes, and rising sea levels threaten to displace people from the island entirely.  ​​​​​​​

Despite widespread opposition in Puerto Rico to LUMA’s profit-hungry, unsustainable, and incompetent control of the power grid, as a US territory, Puerto Rico has no say over major structural decisions. The US Congress-appointed board that makes these decisions undermines Puerto Rican unions and impoverishes the people in the name of paying off Puerto Rico’s “debt” to the US. This piles on top of other crushing realities for the island, including crumbling infrastructure, poverty,  and overall complete lack of political self-determination, with many forced to leave their homes and search for a living as migrants. But these problems aren’t freak accidents, they are the intentional outcomes of US imperialism’s plot to displace the Puerto Rican people off the island, opening it up to real-estate developers and creating a displaced people it can exploit for profit.

Despite years of promises of granting statehood and other reforms, the fact is neither of the two wings of US imperialism have any intention of ending Puerto Rico’s suffering, as their profit margins would dry up if they could no longer exploit the island for their investments. Many Democrats have used the promise of statehood, just like they have used the issue of abortion, as a way of hyping up voters for an election before doing nothing for them. While these Democrats may claim that Puerto Rico’s problems are solely to blame on the Republican Party, the reality is that the Obama administration is responsible for handing over the monopoly of the electrical grid to LUMA. The reality is, the only way for the Puerto Rican people to free themselves from these debts, private monopolies, and political repression is to dismantle and remove the empire responsible for all of it.

As people in the belly of that same empire, we have a responsibility to stand with the people of Puerto Rico. That means going to the masses, exposing the enemy’s crimes, and cutting off the tentacles of empire. From Palestine to Puerto Rico to the Philippines, the empire is the enemy. Stand with the people of the world.