By 2016, Puerto Rico could no longer afford to pay its bills. Since the law that gave the US jurisdiction over nonstate territories made Puerto Rico a “possession” of Congress, it fell on the federal legislature—in which the island’s elected delegate had no vote—to decide what to do. Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act—shortened to PROMESA, or “promise” in Spanish. It established a fiscal control board appointed by the White House, with veto power over all spending by the island’s elected government. The board had authority over how the money the territorial government collected in taxes and utility bills could be used. It was a significant shift in the island’s autonomy.
“The United States cannot continue its state of denial by failing to accept that its relationship with its citizens who reside in Puerto Rico is an egregious violation of their civil rights,” Juan R. Torruella, the late federal appeals court judge, wrote in a landmark paper in the Harvard Law Review in 2018, excoriating the legislation as yet another “colonial experiment.” “The democratic deficits inherent in this relationship cast doubt on its legitimacy, and require that it be frontally attacked and corrected ‘with all deliberate speed.’”
Hurricane Maria struck a little over a year after PROMESA passed, and according to official figures, killed dozens. That proved to be just the start, however. As months ground on without any electricity and more people were forced to go without medicine or clean water, the death toll rose to the thousands. It would be 11 months before the grid would be fully restored, and even then, outages and appliance-destroying electrical surges were distressingly common.
The spotty service wasn’t the only defining characteristic of the new era after Puerto Rico’s great blackout. The fiscal control board—which critics pejoratively referred to as “la junta,” using a term typically reserved for Latin America’s most notorious military dictatorships—saw privatization as the best path to solvency for the troubled state utility.
In 2020, the board approved a deal for Luma Energy—a joint venture between Quanta Services, a Texas-based energy infrastructure company, and its Canadian rival ATCO—to take over the distribution and sale of electricity in Puerto Rico. The contract was awarded through a process that clean-energy and anticorruption advocates said lacked transparency and delivered an agreement with few penalties for poor service. It was almost immediately mired in controversy.
A deadly diagnosis
Until that point, life was looking up for Suárez Vázquez. Her family had emerged from the aftermath of Maria without any loss of life. In 2019, her children were out of the house, and her youngest son, Edgardo, was studying at an aviation school in Ceiba, roughly two hours northeast of Guayama. He excelled. During regular health checks at the school, Edgardo was deemed fit. Gift bags started showing up at the house from American Airlines and JetBlue.
“They were courting him,” Suárez Vázquez says. “He was going to graduate with a great job.”
That summer of 2019, however, Edgardo began complaining of abdominal pain. He ignored it for a few months but promised his mother he would go to the doctor to get it checked out. On September 23, she got a call from her godson, a radiologist at the hospital. Not wanting to burden his anxious mother, Edgardo had gone to the hospital alone at 3 a.m., and tests had revealed three tumors entwined in his intestines.
