LeBrónincarceration for those swept up in the raids, but also the threat of eviction
for their family members, a kind of guilt by association.
Nonetheless, Puerto Rico became a pilgrimage site for U.S. and
Latin American policymakers and public officials looking to privatize
their own public housing and “modernize” policing in urban areas.
These visits to see Puerto Rico’s “revolution in public housing” were
reminiscent of the trips U.S. and Third World technocrats would take
during the 1950s to see Puerto Rico’s economic “miracle” following the
establishment of the commonwealth arrangement. Visitors included
the mayor of New York City, Mario Cuomo; U.S. Drug Czar Lee P.
Brown; governmental delegations from Costa Rica and Panama; and
officials from the Chicago Housing Authority, the National Center for
Housing Management in Washington, D.C., and the Cuban American
National Council in Miami.
For their part, Puerto Rican elites went out of their way to make
Puerto Rico into a kind of technocratic Disneyland. For example, in 1994
they produced a three-day conference about privatization and securitiza-
tion that was attended by, among others, representatives from the D.C.
Department of Public and Assisted Housing. The conference, hosted
at the luxurious Caribe Hilton, was attended by four staff members of
the D.C. agency as well as four of its tenants, and was meant to show
how the changes taking place in Puerto Rico’s public housing could be
translated to other public housing authorities around the United States.
The conference featured workshops on privatization, crime and drug
prevention, and entrepreneurship, in addition to tours of three occupied
public housing complexes. According to Anne Clark, chairwoman of
the D.C. Resident Council Advisory Board, the conference was gener-
ative: “We learned quite a bit.... We learned about the different ways
that residents are starting their own businesses and that the National
Guard carry M-16 rifles to secure public housing properties.” While