THE BATTLE FOR PARADISE
THE BATTLE FOR PARADISE Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists
NAOMI KLEIN
© 2018 Naomi Klein First published by The Intercept (theintercept.com) Published in 2018 by Haymarket Books P.O. Box 180165 Chicago, IL 60618 773-583-7884 www.haymarketbooks.org
[email protected] ISBN: 978-1-60846-431-9 Trade distribution: In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,
[email protected] This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
CONTENTS Foreword A Solar Oasis Invasion of the Puertopians An Island Weary of Outside Experiments “Welcome to Magic Land” Shock-After-Shock-After-Shock Doctrine Desperation, Distraction, Despair, and Disappearance The Islands of Sovereignty Converge Race Against Time Acknowledgments
All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. For more information, visit juntegente.org.
FOREWORD Weeks after the passing of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, members of PAReS—a collective of professors created to defend public education during the 2017 University of Puerto Rico student strike—met to discuss how to confront the devastation that the country and our university faced. What concerned us was not only the enormous physical damage caused by the storm but also the intensification of neoliberal policies to come. We knew that the real disaster was not the hurricane but the terrible vulnerability imposed by Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the United States, as well as the forced privatization of health and other services; massive layoffs; huge numbers of school closures; reductions in social rights and in investments for collective well-being; abandonment of social and physical infrastructure; and high levels of government corruption and ineptitude. This vulnerability was aggravated by Washington’s imposition of the Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected body pushing for the privatization of electricity and schools, increased costs of basic services, massive cuts in public education, pensions, vacation time, and other rights—all in order to pay bondholders a $73 billion debt that was patently unpayable, ill