LeBrón
themselves felt in low-income communities of color across the United
States long before Rosselló had ever uttered the phrase Mano Dura
Contra el Crimen. As much as Mano Dura served as a policy model, it
was also an expression of larger transformations that we now recognize
as key components of the neoliberal common sense of our times, under
which poor people of color routinely find themselves gentrified and
surveilled out of their neighborhoods with the help of police who have
been trained and equipped as a domestic military.
As in Los Angeles, Chicago, Ferguson, and other communities rav-
aged by capital extraction facilitated by the power of a badge, the results in
Puerto Rico have been devastating. Public housing residents continue to
suffer the wide-ranging effects of systemic discrimination, while the storied
public-private partnership that began in the early 1990s—“Puerto Rico’s
public housing revolution”—has not prevented the physical infrastructure
of public housing from falling into various states of neglect and disrepair.
Nor has it prevented communities from being displaced through the
demolition of “particularly troubled” housing complexes that apparently
even privatization could not help. Entire communities disappeared in a
cloud of dust and debris, with any sense of ownership and investment
that residents had in their homes gone along with it. Corruption scandals
plagued the Rosselló administration, and it would go down as one of the
most corrupt in Puerto Rico’s history. The sweetheart deals, the massive
spending on public works projects, and the millions and millions spent
on securitizing the Puerto Rican landscape should be scrutinized as we
search for the roots of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. But this is also part of
the neoliberal order which we are now so primed to expect: the white
men at the top collect their pay while people of color at the bottom are
left with nothing.