Evil Empire 67Puerto Rico’s War on Its Poor
Marisol LeBrón
in february 1993, war was declared in Puerto Rico. In a special leg-
islative address, Governor Pedro Rosselló pronounced that the time
for half measures was over. The criminals and drug syndicates behind
Puerto Rico’s surge in violent crime had “asked for war... and war
they will have.” In a dramatic step, the governor would be deploying the
National Guard to assist police in drug busts and patrols. This would be
a critical component of his government’s new crime-fighting platform,
Mano Dura Contra el Crimen (Iron Fist Against Crime). Although
guardsmen initially patrolled beaches, movie theaters, malls, and other
public spaces, their presence quickly became concentrated in public
housing complexes and other low-income communities.
Mano Dura, although promoted as a matter of public safety, was
intimately linked with the reengineering of Puerto Rico’s public housing
authority. The second-largest under U.S. jurisdiction after New York City’s,
the authority had been marked for privatization by the prior administra-
tion, ostensibly as a neoliberal experiment in whether homeownership
would combat the “culture of dependency” that had supposedly taken