Puerto Rico’s water crisis began long before the current shutoffs. Above, the Carraízo Dam in Loiza during a historic 1994 drought that left half of the territory’s population facing water rationing. Photo: U.S. Geological Survey/Mathew Larsen (United States government work).
Voices of Environmental Justice: Unpacking Puerto Rico’s Water Crisis
By Yessenia Funes
Ruth Santiago is a lawyer serving community groups pro bono in Salinas, a coastal municipality in southeastern Puerto Rico. She has also dabbled in journalism, co-founding a local print paper, Salinas Hoy, which she ran for a decade.
So Santiago can spot good reporting — and bad reporting, too. And she sees a lot of the latter when it comes to Puerto Rico. That’s a serious problem at a time when the U.S. territory is facing a politically driven water crisis.
I’ve been interviewing Santiago since 2017, after Hurricane Maria, when she was an attorney with El Puente’s Latino Climate Action Network in Puerto Rico. She now works primarily with Puerto Rico-based Comité Diálogo Ambiental (the Environmental Dialogue Committee), and her voice remains one I value most as a journalist.
She’s called Puerto Rico home since she was 12. She works directly with communities there — but she also collaborates with mainland-based organizations. She sees firsthand what is happening on the ground. She lives it.
Many people living in
the U.S. territory are going
two days at a time without water.
The media needs to uplift more voices like hers. Especially now. Puerto Rico is facing yet another media frenzy as some cities enter their second month of water rationing. Many people living in the U.S. territory, debilitated by a fiscal crisis and an undemocratic oversight board imposed by the Obama administration, are going two days at a time without water.
The Caribbean as a whole is facing an extreme-to-severe drought, made 30% more likely by oil and gas pollution that’s increasing global temperatures. But government negligence is the real culprit.
There are many layers to the Puerto Rican water crisis. The story doesn’t start with the most recent shutoffs.
Water rationing, despite abundance
In school, Santiago told me she was taught that the Taíno Indigenous people settled in Puerto Rico because water was abundant. That’s still the case, even amid the drought emergency.
“It’s not a matter of not having water resources,” she said. “It’s a matter of lots of water losses.” The Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority’s deteriorating infrastructure wastes about 60% of the island’s drinking water.
Many recent leaks and ruptures have occurred within the Superaqueduct, a 44-mile-long pipe that runs along the island’s north coast to San Juan. Ironically enough, the project culminated during a historic drought in 1994 that left about 2 million people — over half Puerto Rico’s residents at the time (may require subscription) — facing water rationing similar to today.
Santiago remembers how deliberations over the proposal went down then. Instead of investing in existing lines and a decentralized water system, the government opted for the glam of one giant $345 million project pushed by a few big companies, she said.
“We have a lack of water governance to serve the public interest, as opposed to the interests of these companies that profit so much from these Superaqueduct-type projects,” Santiago said.
We need to unpack Puerto Rican history and politics to help readers understand why.
Political context is key
Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz, a writer and researcher from Juana Díaz who currently lives in Bayamón, regularly covers food and agriculture, two sectors that can’t exist without water.
When I ask him what journalists should consider when writing about this topic, he doesn’t hesitate: “Do not overlook the political context of Puerto Rico as an unincorporated territory of the U.S.”
The island fell under U.S. jurisdiction after the Spanish-American War ended four centuries of Spanish colonial rule in 1898. The U.S. government might now recognize people born in Puerto Rico as citizens, but those same citizens still cannot vote in presidential elections or elect representatives to Congress.
They also have limited say in local decision-making, especially since President Barack Obama created the now 10-year-old “La Junta,” a fiscal oversight board that has veto power over the island’s budget.
Rodríguez-Cruz, who publishes an independent newsletter called La Fiambrera, calls Puerto Rico a neocolony, comparing its lack of autonomy to what tribal nations experience in the U.S. mainland.
“When you look at it through that lens, it’s easier to make those different connections on how local and federal decision-making and policies intertwine and shape those vulnerabilities that people are embedded in,” said Rodríguez-Cruz.
“It’s not just an infrastructure issue. It’s not only a climate issue, but also it’s a political, social issue,” he added.
Water stories waiting to be told
With that context in mind, Rodríguez-Cruz urges journalists to remember that Puerto Rico faces ongoing and pervasive structural inequities. He’s been hearing concerns about water from farmers since January — long before the current news cycle.
Household water access isn’t all that’s affected; there are also food systems and farm-based climate adaptation projects. In July, the island experienced over 300 wildfires, too.
What does that do to the soil and, thus, water? The degradation of land — due to wildfires, deforestation, development — is part of the story, too.
Indeed, Luis Joel Méndez González, a journalist with Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism (el Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), has been digging deep into the Esencia project, a $2 billion luxury resort and residential project in Cabo Rojo. Private developers remain a threat to the island’s precious water, as well.
“I would say 90% of the times I work on a story about tourism, people are always going to raise that concern,” Méndez González said. “They are concerned that their potable water service will be affected.”
These are urgent stories Puerto Ricans need journalists to watch. Santiago always appreciates when reporters can dive into documents and uncover new information. She commends the Center for Investigative Journalism: “They do a lot of good work,” she said, pointing to a piece on local ethylene oxide pollution, a problem she wasn’t aware of.
Not all of us need to conduct
deep investigations to do journalism
that matters. We just need to listen
to the needs of people on the ground.
But not all of us need to conduct deep investigations to do journalism that matters. We just need to listen to the needs of people on the ground.
Christian Chaz Monahan Vargas is a community social worker and executive director of the Community Project of Integration of San Isidro (or PICSI in its Spanish acronym). He works primarily with undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic who live in Puerto Rico, a particularly vulnerable population that has a long history of water troubles. There, water intersects with housing, education and electricity.
Right now, the people PICSI serves are lacking formal water services, which has been aggravated by the recent shutoffs. To make matters worse, many residents are too scared to go find bottled water due to local immigration enforcement activity. Puerto Rico is not exempt from Donald Trump’s deportation dreams.
This community is a part of the story, too, yet the media rarely speaks to them.
Coverage shouldn’t end with the problems
So, how do we do better? Certainly, we include the necessary and historical context to understand Puerto Rico’s problems. But we also don’t let our coverage end with the problems. Not when the island is home to creative minds tirelessly working on solutions.
“We don’t have to come like these white saviors to bring them the solutions,” Monahan Vargas said. “We have to just accompany them and work on the solutions beside them.”
For instance, his organization is currently working on a rainwater collection system to serve the immigrant community in San Isidro through a new $10,000 grant. I wrote about Puerto Rico’s potential for rainwater harvesting in a recent Wired article.
As Monahan Vargas told me, his group isn’t the only one working on these solutions. “But I think the media have been accustomed to only write about Puerto Rico’s problems.”
“It’s not all music and dance that’s happening here in our culture,” he added.
Journalists can also learn more by tapping local reporters, said Méndez González. Most are happy to offer their expertise to their peers living stateside, he said, providing background that can help dispel common misconceptions. Newsrooms should also consider partnering with Puerto Rico-based journalism organizations.
“Outlets in the U.S. have the resources and audience,” Méndez González said. “We have the context.”
Rodríguez-Cruz suggests that newsrooms prioritize publishing stories about Puerto Rico bilingually. He wants someone like his mom to be able to read his work. What’s the point of writing about a place if the words are inaccessible to the people who live there? That should be our goal as journalists: to serve the people we’re writing about.
For more resources on Puerto Rico, check these out:
Yessenia Funes is an environmental journalist who has covered the justice beat for a decade. She publishes a creative climate newsletter called Possibilities. Funes has written for publications like Atmos, Vogue, Vox, New York magazine, The Guardian and more. Her approach to storytelling amplifies the voices of those on the front line of our present-day ecological crises. Her reporting has taken her to the West Bank, remote Indigenous communities in Nicaragua, the hostile desert of the American Southwest and post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico. Her most recent Voices column was on why the loss of voting rights is a climate crisis.
* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 11, No. 31. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.