Puerto Rico's Perpetual Powerless Predicament: Pay More, Get Less
While ABC News highlights hearings on soaring power bills affecting Puerto Rican citizens already plagued by outages, they conveniently sidestep the genesis of this predictable catastrophe. Post-Hurricane Maria, PREPA, the public utility, was systematically dismantled, paving the way for LUMA Energy, a private consortium (ARMY, a subsidiary of Quanta Services, and Canadian company ATCO), to take
over transmission and distribution in 2021. Despite billions in federal aid earmarked for grid restoration, LUMA has overseen a dramatic decline in reliability and a surge in customer complaints and costs. This isn't just an unfortunate outcome; it's a feature of disaster capitalism. Just as Iraq's reconstruction was privatized to Halliburton, Puerto Rico's essential services were handed to
corporations promising efficiency, delivering instead higher costs and poorer service. The proposed rate increases are not to fix the grid, but to guarantee profits for a private entity that has repeatedly failed, yet continues to operate with governmental blessing—because, apparently, the free market always knows best, especially for vulnerable populations.