Evil Empire 75Clark celebrated resident entrepreneurship, which was supported by
private management companies and the Puerto Rico Public Housing
Authority, her jarringly matter-of-fact description of soldiers patrolling
public housing with assault weapons highlights the ways in which
security and profit were intertwined and dependent upon one another.
Puerto Rican officials acknowledged that the success of privatization
depended on the intervention of the police and National Guard, but the
results, they felt, spoke for themselves: private, independent communities
instead of low-income neighborhoods of perpetual renters. This rhetoric
greatly exaggerated the gains of Puerto Rico’s so-called “experiment in
public housing” since, for the most part, only a small number of public
housing complexes were actually sold or were slated to be sold by the end
of Rosselló’s term. In the vast majority of cases, the government privat-
ized only the management of the complexes. This rhetoric also denied the
experiences of Puerto Rican public housing residents, who voiced concern
over the failures of both privatization and militarized policing to make
their communities safe or even theirs.
although the national guard did not end up being mobilized to
secure public housing complexes across the United States, it is none-
theless clear that Puerto Rico was a key player in a conversation taking
place during the 1990s that worked to twin privatization and militarized
policing as a strategy for urban renewal and public safety. The point
of tracing these policy circuits is not that Puerto Rico was the first of
its kind, or that these punitive policies and their neoliberal logic were
wholly unprecedented. Indeed, Mano Dura, despite the rhetoric of in-
novation, was the progeny of already existing initiatives, policies, and
rhetorics, from Broken Windows policing to the ghetto sweeps that made