Puerto Rico

Major League Baseball celebrated its 21st annual Roberto Clemente Day on Thursday, with festivities centered in New York, where the Mets hosted the Hall of Fame outfielder’s former team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Clemente died in a plane crash at age 38 attempting to deliver relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua on New Year’s Eve 1972.

Latino Rebels Radio: September 15, 2022

Five years after Hurricane María slammed into Puerto Rico and exposed the funding problems the Caribbean island has long faced, philanthropists warn that many of those issues remain unaddressed, just like the repairs still needed for the American territory’s physical infrastructure.

Poet Lola Rosario speaks with legendary bomba dancer Raquel Ayala and renowned painter and sculptor Samuel Lind, two Afro-Puerto Rican artists whose work preserves and celebrates the history and culture of the coastal town known as Puerto Rico’s “Capital of Tradition.”

Agro Power, a farm equipment company owned by Puerto Rico’s Agriculture Secretary Ramón González Beiró, has earned over $100,000 in sales of equipment purchased by farmers through the federal Re-Grow PR Urban-Rural Agriculture Program.

On Sunday, August 28, a coalition of Puerto Rican independence groups and their allies gathered outside a hedge fund’s office building in Midtown Manhattan to protest its predatory lending practices.

After a string of blackouts that left many without electricity throughout August, Puerto Ricans came together on Thursday to protest LUMA Energy and Gov. Pedro Pierluisi in Old San Juan. The protest ended with the streets thick with tear gas and multiple journalists and protesters wounded by police.

An audit by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General revealed that the local agency erred in the number of students it identified as “displaced” to receive a multimillion-dollar grant after Hurricanes Irma and María struck.

Experts say that mental health among Puerto Rico’s youth is getting worse at an alarming rate, exacerbated by compounding natural disasters, faltering infrastructure, and a lack of mental health resources.

The Puerto Rico Status Act is “the product of an our-way-or-the-highway approach from pro-statehood House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer that has backed advocates of a fair and just decolonization process for Puerto Rico into a corner,” the two groups said in a joint statement.

Puerto Rico’s governor on Thursday denounced the private company his administration contracted to take over the island’s power transmission and distribution system amid a recent spike in electricity outages that have outraged many in the U.S. territory.

The legislative clock is running out on the Puerto Rico Status Act, and according to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), votes have yet to be counted due to what he says are “outside interests” delaying progress on the bill.

The Puerto Rico Department of Education expects to have antiracist teaching resources in the classrooms by 2023, after securing $12 million from the American Rescue Plan Emergency Funds for Schools.

Domingo García, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told Latino Rebels that CEO Sindy Benavides has been “temporarily suspended pending an investigation by the personnel committee of LULAC.”

Manuel “Manny” Suárez del Rio was one of those rare journalists who never let the bastards get away with it, hounding stories until he broke them wide open, as with the Cerro Maravilla murders in 1978.

Former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez was arrested Thursday in the U.S. territory on corruption charges, marking the first time that a former leader of the island faces federal charges, an official told the Associated Press.

Near-record amounts of seaweed are smothering Caribbean coasts from Puerto Rico to Barbados, killing fish and other wildlife, choking tourism, and releasing stinky, noxious gases.

After seven consecutive increases, the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau has announced the first reduction in the price of electricity since 2021. The decrease went into effect on Monday, August 1.

La cortina de humo que lanzaron los agarra perlas —que es un irrespetuoso mal hablado y un soldado de la izquierda (algunos lo comparan con un joven Fidel Castro)— no puede tapar la verdad: Bad Bunny le pertenece a su generación y dice las cosas en su propio idioma.

Not only did the CEO remove the meat and heart of the acknowledgment —the part where I say that the LULAC gathering is on Taíno land that has been occupied, seized, and unceded since 1493— but I was told that those words were violent.

Rep. Grijalva, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee which has jurisdiction over Puerto Rico, says the sudden increase in lobbying against the Puerto Rico Status Act is not about process but instead about maintaining the island’s current colonial status.