This is Democracy – Episode 62: Puerto Rico: Statehood Debate

Multiple Speakers:        This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational and intersectional, unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Jeremi Suri:                   Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today we’re going to discuss an ever present but often ignored issue, which is the question of Puerto Rico’s place within the larger American democracy.

Jeremi Suri:                   We’re very fortunate to have my friend and a fellow professor at the University of Texas, Alberto Martinez here. Al is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He’s a Professor of History of Science among other topics here at the university and he’s published a wide range of really interesting books.

Jeremi Suri:                   A recent book on Galileo & the Inquisition called Burned Alive. A book on The Cult of Pythagoras. A book called Science Secrets: The Truth About Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths. I love the title of that one. A book called Kinematics: The Lost Origins of Einstein’s Relativity and a book that Zachary and I have actually red part of, Negative Math: How Mathematical Rules Can Be Positively Bent.

Jeremi Suri:                   We were reading this when Zachary was trying to convince his teachers that one plus one was not two. In fact-

Alberto Martinez:          Good. Somebody’s got to do it. (laughs)

Jeremi Suri:                   Exactly. Al, it’s great to have you here.

Alberto Martinez:          Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank y’all for having me.

Jeremi Suri:                   Zachary, what is the title of your scene-setting poem for this episode.

Zachary Suri:                 To Puerto Rico.

Jeremi Suri:                   To Puerto Rico? Well, let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri:                 To Puerto Rico

Zachary Suri:                 I remember you when I was five years old in the old Fort of San Juan and drinking Shirley Temples at the resort bar in the tropical humidity. And I remember the first time my dad had to explain what a territory was. And I remember never learning about you in history class, never hearing about your votes when the elections came and disappeared into the rest of November except to some hypothetical democratic addendum on the edge of the electoral maps.

Zachary Suri:                 And how is it that to us all you are farther than Hawaii in our minds, some forgotten cousin of the pineapple colony that became our 50th state, except you are still a pineapple colony in the minds of too many of us, slipping into the rage of hurricanes, losing power for months because you didn’t have a senator. Thousands dead because there was no one to call out for you with some piercing voice that was reason.

Zachary Suri:                 But you were like when you are lost in the mountains and the forests keep changing under your feet, demanding debt payments and austerity like you were spilled orange juice on allowance from an inanimate napkin holder on the table that demanded you pay back your devalued bonds.

Zachary Suri:                 Puerto Rico, I wonder how many of us can find you on a map, a piece of American insulation between Punta Cana and the BVI, bigger than Delaware.

Zachary Suri:                 Puerto Rico, I get so frustrated sometimes thinking about taxation without representation, so worried when they don’t mention you on the debate stages or the bright lights. But sometimes you give me hope when you vote clearly in referendums and find a way to keep the lights on.

Zachary Suri:                 And maybe it’s sometimes it makes you feel a little bit of glee to think of Harry Truman cowering under the bed and maybe you’re just a little bit lucky to be so far away from anyone’s mind that you can fly through three governors and no one notices.

Zachary Suri:                 Oh, Puerto Rico, in bondage to the bonds, I just can’t understand why a language barrier and a little over a thousand miles of seawater is enough for you to still be some imperial oddity of American democracy, for you not to have a voice beyond the ignored SOS that occasionally washes the ashore.

Jeremi Suri:                   There’s a lot in that poem, Zachary. What is it about?

Zachary Suri:                 My poem is really about how Puerto Rico has never really been a major part of the American conscience and how it really to all of us seems very remote and we think of it as this completely different place. And we forget that everyone in Puerto Rico is an American citizen and that it’s American territory, and we treat it as if it’s completely different. And even though culturally it is, but we treat it as if we can just ignore it, but we can’t.

Jeremi Suri:                   Al, how do you think about this? I mean, Puerto Rico has this strange relationship to the United States and you deal with this every day, right?

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah. Some people call Puerto Rico the oldest colony in existence. I mean, we were invaded or discovered by Spain in 1493 and subsequently the United States took over, invaded in 1898 so that’s around, more than 500 years of colonial status. And even though there is a variety of euphemisms available to get rid of that reality, it is real.

Jeremi Suri:                   Yes. Yes. And why has this prolonged? Why has this status not been rectified in the way that other territories, like Texas, became states at some point?

Alberto Martinez:          I think internally, part of the neglected reality, even in Puerto Rico it’s somewhat invisible, is that there were enormous actions and efforts in the mid-20th century to repress the independence movement. So for example, by 1948 there is a so-called gag law in which you could not talk about independence, you could not sing the Puerto Rican anthem, you could not wave a Puerto Rican flag. If you did, you’d be incarcerated for 10 years.

Jeremi Suri:                   Wow.

Alberto Martinez:          So, you take that kind of political and police pressure, which went on… For example, the police kept records on roughly 100,000 Puerto Ricans over a 60 year period, 1.8 million pages of documents.

Alberto Martinez:          When you take that effect over two generations or more of censorship, people get used to living in a colony. You just don’t talk about certain things. You don’t think about it. And in some sense, the status quo ceases to sound so bad because the independence movement just goes underground.

Jeremi Suri:                   So it gets normalized?

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah. It gets normalized. Nowadays everybody’s got their cell phone, their flat screen TV and a pack of beer. So people can relax with the modern conveniences regardless of the fact that we do live in a colony.

Jeremi Suri:                   And so what does that mean in practice? I mean, what is it like growing up in Puerto Rico? How is it different from living in a place like Austin, Texas?

Alberto Martinez:          Well, for example, from an early age, we know that we don’t get to vote for president or vice-president or that we have no representation in Congress, no senators.

Alberto Martinez:          So, we also have a sense of a lack of authority as a nation or a location, meaning if Puerto Rico wanted to strike a business deal with Japan or Venezuela, whether it’s for cars or gasoline, it’s just impossible.

Jeremi Suri:                   Right.

Alberto Martinez:          Any such transactions have to be mediated through Congress and the Puerto Rican government has no authority whatsoever to say approve a shipment of fruit from Central America without perhaps traveling to Florida first and then making its way to Puerto Rico.

Jeremi Suri:                   So as I understand it, in some ways, Congress actually governs Puerto Rico rather than having a state government governing itself, right?

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah, certainly. And around 2015, there was an important Supreme Court case decided in which the Supreme Court clarified that Puerto Rico certainly has no sovereignty. The sovereignty of Puerto Rico resides in Congress.

Alberto Martinez:          This matters because to many Puerto Ricans, it was eye-opening. They had been sold the lie, especially by Puerto Ricans themselves, not by Americans. They’d been sold a lie since 1952 that Puerto Rico is a freely-associated state, meaning that we’re not a state, but we sort of are. We’re free bus, we’re sort of not. And we chose to be associated by this constitutional compact in 1952.

Alberto Martinez:          They coined a phrase to identify the entity known as Puerto Rico, “Estado Libre Asociado” which literally means Freely Associated State… A phrase that does not exist anywhere in federal government records. It’s a euphemism for a thinly disguised colony. The US instead referred to Puerto Rico as a commonwealth, which is a nice way to talk about a territory, because then it sounds as though there’s a wealth we shared in common. We’re all getting along.

Alberto Martinez:          But to get to my point, we have many layers that disguise the Puerto Rican reality, so that one has to actually overcome our blindness, to see this unfortunate relationship. As a child growing up, one is not very aware of these things. As the years go by, one becomes more aware.

Jeremi Suri:                   Right, right. Zachary?

Zachary Suri:                 How big a role do issues like race and the language barrier in Puerto Rico… How do they play a role in the relationship between Puerto Rico and the mainland?

Alberto Martinez:          People certainly have concepts of race. It’s somewhat different from the US meaning that say in schools and jobs. It’s not so clear what the racial groups are. And what I mean by that is there are many people in Puerto Rico that say might be considered black by someone who’s visiting Puerto Rico, but who do not consider themselves black in Puerto Rico.

Alberto Martinez:          In Puerto Rico, likewise, when the US Census was last done in 2010 it turned out we had, I don’t know, say something like 76% of people who self-identified as white, which means more people self-identified as white in Puerto Rico than in the US which makes Puerto Rico seem to be one of the whitest places in the United States.

Alberto Martinez:          It’s nonsense. Anybody who goes there knows that most people are brown or dark and certainly not white. But these concepts are different. In regards to the US, as you asked Zachary, there certainly is an awareness that a Puerto Ricans are not gringos, that gringos are white or whiter and there is an asymmetry of power.

Alberto Martinez:          So, for example, racism might manifest itself in a family in which people might actually want their daughter to marry a whiter guy or a white guy than a black guy because again, there is a colonial history of slavery that has had its long-term effects in people trying to be of one group that gets more inclusion rather than another that tends to get less inclusion.

Jeremi Suri:                   Do Puerto Ricans tend to think of themselves as Americans?

Alberto Martinez:          Ah, yeah. But there’s something general, which is throughout Central and South America, there’s this feeling that the United States kind of stole term that, we were all America… Central America, Latin America.

Jeremi Suri:                   Sure.

Alberto Martinez:          And the US just took it and we’re all Americans. And so, when one says Los Americanos in Puerto Rico, one is consciously referring to North Americans. So North Americans kind of did win that fight by their common usage.

Alberto Martinez:          Do we identify as people of the United States? Yeah. I think young people are proud to be US citizens. Citizenship was granted in 1917 and it’s something we all appreciate. Imagine any of us can simply buy any airplane ticket in any airport or online and fly to any state without asking anyone for permission, not even getting a visa, means anybody can move to the US without even answering a single question on a line of paper. Nothing. So that’s an interesting power.

Alberto Martinez:          At the same time, it came at an enormous expense, meaning one month after Puerto Rican citizenship was granted, thousands of Puerto Rican men were shipped off to fight in World War I.

Jeremi Suri:                   Right. It’s a swap.

Alberto Martinez:          It’s a strange coincidence that we… It’s not just a gift. This is a trade of blood and sacrifice that is given with… The US decides one month after giving Puerto Rico their citizenship, they announced that they’re entering World War I and they instantly are sending thousands of Puerto Ricans.

Jeremi Suri:                   Why didn’t… I know having gone back and read some of the debates, there was discussion of Puerto Rico getting fuller representation in Congress after that moment. Why didn’t that happen?

Alberto Martinez:          I don’t know. I haven’t personally analyzed that history in detail. I can tell you the similar situation nowadays, which is you consider the population we have. We have had nearly 4 million people just say 15 years ago in Puerto Rico. Now we’re down to around 3.1 to 3.2 million.

Alberto Martinez:          But if we have 3-4 million people, that’s more than many States. It’s more than South Dakota. It’s more than Wyoming. It’s more than, I don’t know-

Jeremi Suri:                   Delaware.

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah. So we would have more seats in Congress. Similarly, if we were a state, it would have certain conveniences to Puerto Rico such as we would get better benefits and Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, funds for poverty and welfare; but at the same time, that’s not that good for the other states who are vying for those same funds. There’s going to be less funds available because more of them are going to be allocated to Puerto Rico.

Jeremi Suri:                   Right. I know we wanted to talk about a Hurricane Maria.

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah.

Jeremi Suri:                   And I know you were very personally involved in going down and helping the community. Could you share with us some of your experiences and also how this issue of statehood affected the, in many ways, insufficient US federal government assistance given to Puerto Rico, especially in comparison to what was given to places like Houston.

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah. The federal government claims that the funding that they’ve allocated for Puerto Rico is greater than any other natural disaster or hurricane that they’ve tended to in US history. However, those funds have not actually made it to Puerto Rico. Something on the order of maybe $5 billion have been actually used, especially for the reconstruction of the power grid, which was already falling apart before the hurricane struck.

Alberto Martinez:          If Puerto Rico had been a state, then I do think some of the structure would have been more quickly agitated to provide supplies and assistance to Puerto Rico. But much of the disaster that happened in Hurricane Maria is local, meaning countless shipping containers and supplies of food and water bottles were simply not distributed. And there’s local incompetence, there’s corruption. People were making money by not distributing food.

Alberto Martinez:          Literally, if you have a company that rents shipping containers and they charge by the day and now you have somebody who has to give the permit for that shipping container to move, and there’s a conflict of interest there The longer they delay the actual delivery of the food, the more money all these places make; whether it’s a shipping container, the employees who are charged with distributing it, the warehouses where the shipping containers are held.

Alberto Martinez:          So, it was a disaster of unprecedented proportions. I mean, one cannot… Even going there, one has to travel a bit to get a sense of just how bad this is. We’re talking about roughly 60,000 utility poles knocked down, hundreds of thousands of houses partially destroyed or fully destroyed. To this day, it’s over two years after the hurricane, we have more than 30,000 homes still without roofs; 30,000 homes. So the logistical problems are extraordinary.

Alberto Martinez:          I do think that if Puerto Rico had been a state, the aid would have somehow made it there a little more efficiently.

Jeremi Suri:                   Why is there so much corruption in Puerto Rico? That’s a stereotype, often a negative stereotype of Puerto Rico.

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah, good question. It could be that the colonial government, since the times of Spain, was serving the interests of moneyed groups and that kind of practice continues throughout the American phase. More particularly, this is symptomatic of the development of capitalism, which is international; meaning the banks are taking over.

Alberto Martinez:          It used to be that feudal lords and kings held the lands and you worked like a surf. Eventually that structure is eliminated and we get these industrialists and the investors. And now we’re in a situation where, you’ll be driving from one side of Puerto Rico to the other, say an 83 mile stretch of highway and every 10 minutes or so you pay a toll. Maybe every six minutes you pay six tolls in 83 miles. And none of those tolls say that 49% of that money is going to Goldman Sachs. But like all the parking meters in Chicago, the money goes to Goldman Sachs. So it’s almost like a vulture capitalism.

Alberto Martinez:          There’s something really unfortunate happening in Puerto Rico whereby since Puerto Rico is not a state and doesn’t have the same kinds of protection against certain exploitative practices, you have experimental forms of this corruption that sometimes seem pioneering and unprecedented in human history. I mean some of the things, I’ll give you one example just cause I have it written down. I wanted to share this one with you just so you can see the degree of conflict of interest.

Alberto Martinez:          There is a prominent bank in Puerto Rico, Banco Santander. One of the top guys in Santander was Carlos Garcia. After creating investment products for Banco Santander as head of securities, he becomes President of the Government Bank of Development. So he goes from the private sector that is pitching investment products to the government to start working for the government itself.

Alberto Martinez:          While he’s working for the Puerto Rico government, He appoints six executives from Santander to the Government Bank of Development, which is a conflict of interest.

Jeremi Suri:                   Of course. Of course.

Alberto Martinez:          At the same time, he gave government contracts to the Bank of Santander.

Jeremi Suri:                   I’m so surprised.

Alberto Martinez:          And the Bank of Santander coincidentally became the number one issuer of Puerto Rico bonds. Puerto Rico issued $2.7 billion in bonds in connection with this. And once he leaves the government, what does he do? He goes back to Santander in 2011.

Alberto Martinez:          Incredibly, once the government bonds failed to pay, because of course these bonds are worth trash. You’re not going to make the investment you’ve been promised. This is all a Ponzi scheme. This is a way to get investors to sacrifice their money, money that they’ll never see again. When these bonds fail, the Congress appoints the Financial Oversight Management Board to control Puerto Rico… To literally end democracy.

Alberto Martinez:          No longer does the duly elected democratic governor of Puerto Rico have ultimate word. Instead, it’s the Financial Oversight Board. And who’s one of the seven members appointed in 2016? Carlos Garcia. It’s unbelievable that something like this not only happens but continues to this day, he’s still on the board.

Jeremi Suri:                   Right.

Alberto Martinez:          There is no case, there is no accusation of corruption or double dipping. These things are… It boggles the mind how this happens.

Jeremi Suri:                   The fox guarded the henhouse.

Alberto Martinez:          Yes, the fox is guarding the hen house again and again and again.

Jeremi Suri:                   Wow. So you were saying before that you had mixed feelings about statehood though.

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah.

Jeremi Suri:                   Why?

Alberto Martinez:          Well, unlike many people, I don’t think political formulas are solutions in themselves. I think they all have positive and negative aspects and it depends on the individuals who happen to be involved trying to pull it off. So yes, statehood could work just as it works, I don’t know, for places like Texas. In Texas, we’re doing relatively well. Many other jurisdictions in the US are doing relatively well.

Alberto Martinez:          It could work. For example, certainly it would work for poor people… Poor people, aging people, retired people, people needing medical care would be enormously helped if Puerto Rico were a state. At the same time, part of the problems of Puerto Rico are created by the lack of its own leadership, its own defense of its own business.

Alberto Martinez:          For example, there’s a bunch local pharmacies. Can we defend them when Walgreens moves in or are we going to let them be destroyed? If you’ve got people making food, are we going to fund their business when Burger King moves in? And no, you’re going to find more Walgreens and Walmarts in Puerto Rico per square mile, then you will in any other part of the United States, meaning there’s something antithetical in Puerto Rico’s connection to the US whereby we become the third or fourth largest market of the US, meaning we’re a hostage market. So the more we buy American products, which are good, we all like the American products, but the more we buy them, the more we destroy our local industries.

Alberto Martinez:          So, in some of the alternatives to statehood, for example, being in independent, we would be able to do business more freely with other countries. Everything would go down in price because we’d be able to buy fruit and gasoline directly from other countries rather than getting them shipped from Florida, even if they came from Japan. And likewise, we might have a bigger opportunity in actually creating and protecting our own local businesses than we do as it is with a freely-associated state or as a state whereby all these franchises pour in from the US.

Jeremi Suri:                   So as I understand it, then you’re arguing that either statehood or independence would be better, and maybe there are pros and cons both ways, but not the status quo.

Alberto Martinez:          I agree. I agree. And the status quo has done so much damage under both parties. Puerto Rico, like many places even of course the US is split between two political parties. In Puerto Rico, these parties in some sense are fake; meaning that neither of them really represents progress or the betterment for advancement for say poor people or uneducated people. Instead, they serve the common interests.

Alberto Martinez:          One party is pro status quo; the other party is pro-statehood. There’s good people in both parties, especially many wonderful public servants who are dedicated. But there’s also this weird team spirit, which is… From childhood, you’re branded with the party of your family; you love a particular baseball team; you love a basketball team and you’re a member of a party just like you’re a member of your church.

Alberto Martinez:          So, this two party system is irrational. It destroys Puerto Rico with partisan politics. I don’t know. I don’t like the status quo. I’ve seen too many bad things happen within it all my life. All my life it has just been disaster upon disaster. So I do think a change of formula would be much better.

Jeremi Suri:                   Sure. Sure. So as you know Al, we like to close every show with some sort of positive ways we can use this historical background. You’ve given us really a rich understanding, a rich emotional and intellectual and historical understanding of the trajectory of at least the last few generations in Puerto Rico and going back much further, also.

Jeremi Suri:                   What are some of the positive opportunities moving forward? If you were asked, or if young people listening are trying to think about how they can contribute to a more productive dialogue surrounding Puerto Rico, what would you suggest?

Alberto Martinez:          I think many people have already contributed to Puerto Rico in many ways. We have to dedicate a moment to thank the countless, many people who flew in from the United States to help Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria.

Alberto Martinez:          I’ll give you an example. One day I was in Old San Juan shortly after the hurricane and there were six trucks from Con Edison, which I think is either in New York or New Jersey, parked on the same street, working. I mean, it was just astonishing to see that these vehicles had been transported and that I was seeing six on one street.

Alberto Martinez:          So, along those lines, what are other things that people can do nowadays? I think that keeping Puerto Rico in mind, in discussions when we talk about politics and governance and democracy and Congress is essential. As Zachary mentioned, there’s something about this invisibility of… There are 50 States. Why is it that Puerto Rico gets less than 1/100th of the attention? So it’s unfortunate. It’s toxic.

Alberto Martinez:          It’s a wonderful, lovely place to visit.

Jeremi Suri:                   I agree. I agree.

Alberto Martinez:          If people would just buy an airplane trip and go there and discover, “Wow, this is part of the United States.” People will welcome you there. It’s a wonderful, comfortable, welcoming place for tourists and for visitors. It would help remind people that we’re good neighbors and we like being part of the family. And even though we’re an extended family, we appreciate many interactions and things we learn from one another.

Jeremi Suri:                   Do we do enough as universities and other institutions to reach out to young people in this community?

Alberto Martinez:          You mean reach out to Puerto Ricans in particular?

Jeremi Suri:                   Yes.

Alberto Martinez:          No, unfortunately we don’t. I think one of the downsides of diversity is we tend to think of diversity as this rainbow spectrum in which we’ll do something in the name that diversity and we hope that net captures everyone.

Alberto Martinez:          The particular example of Puerto Rican students is since Puerto Rican students come from a colony, even if we don’t want to call it a colony, it is what it is. Because they come from a colony, we don’t register them as foreign students. So they don’t even exist as a group that can be identified for the university.

Alberto Martinez:          So yeah, better efforts to identify, to recognize their experience as culturally different and to incorporate the perspectives they can bring and the concerns, the worries, the opportunities that are extended to many students. It would be wonderful, but we’re just not there yet.

Jeremi Suri:                   It would seem that being more conscious of the history you’ve laid out so well would allow us as fellow students, as faculty, as fellow citizens, to be more attentive to concerns and needs and anxieties that emerge for people who are coming to a different part of the United States from Puerto Rico.

Alberto Martinez:          Absolutely.

Zachary Suri:                 Do you see any opportunities in the future for this issue to really take center stage again and for us to talk about Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States?

Alberto Martinez:          I think so. Part of what’s happening that’s really wonderful now, it’s not just telecommunications and internet, but the propagation of history. It’s unbelievable the degree to which many of us are becoming aware of things that we just did not know.

Alberto Martinez:          I’ll give you an example just so that you can envision how as an American citizen, you might be surprised just as I was a few years ago. I grew up in Puerto Rico and I went to public schools in Puerto Rico. And I didn’t know, and nobody ever told me why… I lived in Puerto Rico… That in 1950 there had been an attempt at a revolution in Puerto Rico. I just did not know that.

Alberto Martinez:          I knew that in 1952 we had created this Commonwealth and yada, yada, yada, and that we had a constitution. I knew that. But how does it happen that we’re blind to some of our history and we’re blind to some of these conflicts.

Alberto Martinez:          So, for example, if we think of Puerto Ricans as people who don’t pay federal taxes, which they don’t, then we think, “Wow, it’s just a bunch of freeloaders. They should pay federal taxes.” And we don’t realize, we know part of the reason they don’t pay federal taxes is because they’re losing their money in countless, many other ways. It’s so much money that an average wage there is $18,000. They get less money in Medicare. You have a really-

Jeremi Suri:                   You don’t get Social Security, right?

Alberto Martinez:          You do have Social Security, but not quite in the same way. But what I’m getting at is existence in Puerto Rico is more difficult and impoverished than in the US. But if we simply hear one aspect, which is Puerto Ricans don’t pay federal taxes, it creates an image about Puerto Rico.

Jeremi Suri:                   Of course.

Alberto Martinez:          Now I’ll propose a different image. In 1950, Puerto Ricans are so upset about their colonial status and they’re so worried that the United Nations will not pay attention to Puerto Rico and help Puerto Rico decolonize, many of them decide, “We have to stage a rebellion.”

Alberto Martinez:          They carry out this effort to assassinate the Governor of Puerto Rico. They fail. They try to assassinate President Truman. They fail. And hundreds of men are shot and thousands are incarcerated.

Jeremi Suri:                   Yes, yes.

Alberto Martinez:          And this revolution is suppressed. And it happens in many towns… Bombing in Puerto Rican towns by American bomber planes is reported. I mean, it’s just astonishing when one looks at the history of the struggle to be free, the struggle to have democracy.

Alberto Martinez:          If one actually looks at that story, the perspective starts to change in which you realize, “Boy, these people have been oppressed.” They’ve at some points been so desperate that they’ve been willing to engage in suicidal missions, meaning they had no chance of killing President Truman. They had no chance. These people went there to die.

Alberto Martinez:          The more you get close to it, the more you start to understand there’s some crisis going on here. Why did some of these guys go up there to try to assassinate Truman? Well, because there had been a series of police murders in their hometowns and eventually these people are so desperate.

Alberto Martinez:          So there is a human struggle that was not caused by anyone who’s in government in the United States right now, and at the same time has a legacy of inequity, indifference that if one invested time to learn about it, inevitably one starts sympathizing more with these neighbors that we call Puerto Ricans.

Jeremi Suri:                   Yes. Yes. I think that’s a wonderful point.

Alberto Martinez:          People who worked, who fought in wars-

Jeremi Suri:                   Of course.

Alberto Martinez:          People who have been in service to the US in many different ways.

Jeremi Suri:                   Absolutely. Been major contributors to every war of the 20th century, 21st century, dying patriotically for the United States. Absolutely right.

Jeremi Suri:                   Zachary, do you think this is something that could be worked into the education of young people in our society?

Zachary Suri:                 Yeah. I think that even today, there’s a greater emphasis on looking at American foreign policy, particularly in the late 19th century and early 20th century. We’re discussing it more in terms of imperialism and less in terms of sort of a democratic American expansion. I think that Puerto Rico plays a large role in this.

Zachary Suri:                 I do think we need to make sure that Puerto Rico does not get ignored because I think that if many Americans were actually aware of the issues going on in Puerto Rico, this wouldn’t be something where the status quo is just continued for decades.

Jeremi Suri:                   Right. And we’re fortunate to have a prominent figures like Al Martinez and like Lin Manuel Miranda and others in our society today who are reminding us and I think as Al said so well, that’s a sign of progress. That’s something actually to be optimistic about. Do you agree, Al?

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah. Certainly many people have made it and they’ve gained visibility on a national scale. In terms of how do we incorporate Puerto Rico more into conversations about the future of the US, I think another point I’d recommend is that Puerto Rico is an experiment. There are things that happen in Puerto Rico that later are carried out in other jurisdictions in the US.

Alberto Martinez:          When we look at the unfortunate process whereby long delayed democracy reached Puerto Rico and was finally replaced by this Financial Oversight Management Board, which means the bankers control the island. You see that happening in Puerto Rico… Bear in mind, it is coming to the United States.

Alberto Martinez:          This has happened in Greece and Portugal, in the European Union and numerous other places; these experiments whereby we managed to push away the control of the people and hire some technocrats who are mostly by bankers and other finance experts who are simply issuing and lending digital currencies.

Alberto Martinez:          There is something really threatening to democracy that is happening in Puerto Rico. It’s alarming. It’s offensive. The person who runs the Financial Oversight Board in Puerto Rico makes far more money than the governor and far more money than the US President.

Alberto Martinez:          This is something really unusual. This is what’s happening in Puerto Rico. It’s something that has to be kept in mind because otherwise it’s going to happen here too.

Jeremi Suri:                   And I think Al, this captures perfectly one of our central themes on this podcast week after week, which is that the evolution of American democracy does not just occur in the usual places where we look at it.

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah, it’s going away. Democracy is a beautiful word, but whatever it originally meant to the ancient Romans… In Puerto Rico, it’s really astonishing to see… First, you have this conflict between these two political parties where like airplane food in the olden days, “Chicken or lasagna?” And you’re like, “Well, I don’t know that there’s any big difference between the two.”

Jeremi Suri:                   Right, right.

Alberto Martinez:          You had a choice and then eventually you get this system whereby the non-elected highly paid individuals appointed at extraordinary conflicts of interest are making the biggest decisions.

Jeremi Suri:                   You made this point so well. And I think it’s not unique to Puerto Rico as you say. Democracy is a dynamic process and there are evolving threats and evolving opportunities and one of the great opportunities is for us to expose this.

Alberto Martinez:          Yeah.

Jeremi Suri:                   Thank you, Al for joining us in this conversation. Thank you, Zachary. And thank you for joining us for this week of This is Democracy.

Alberto Martinez:          Thank you, Zachary. Thank you, Jeremi. It’s been great.

Speaker 4:                    This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Speaker 5:                    The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music@harrisonlemke.com.

Speaker 6:                    Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy.