San Juan Mayor Says Trump's "Total Neglect' of Puerto Rico Must Be Called Out

Authored by commondreams.org and submitted by anutensil
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San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz tore into the Trump administration's response to the ongoing catastrophe on Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria and denounced the president's "total neglect."

Her comments to MSNBC on Sunday follow a Harvard study estimating that the death toll as a result of the storm was in the range of 793 to 8,498 and deeming the original official estimate of 64 excess deaths "a substantial underestimate."

"What is staggering is that the Trump administration has completely looked away when this death toll is announced. What is for real—we may not ever know many people died...and the government of Puerto Rico remains silent and idle while the federal government under the Trump administration was looking and continues to look the other direction."

"President Trump tweets about the crack of dawn and he hasn't even tweeted one time to say, 'Look, I mourn with the people of Puerto Rico,'" Yulin Cruz said.

She said that "this total neglect has to be called [out]. The United Nations says that when people are denied the access to basic human services—like electric power, like water, like food, like appropriate medical care—it is like a violation of human rights."

A new Atlantic hurricane season has begun, but Yulin Cruz said that Puerto Rico is not at all prepared and warned that even a hit by a Category 1 hurricane would mean disaster.

Watch parts of her interview in the tweets from the show, "Kasie DC," below:

yes_its_him on June 5th, 2018 at 21:52 UTC »

"Puerto Rico was a catastrophe of corruption, mismanagement, incompetence and ignorance long before the added misery wrought by Hurricane Maria, which exposed to the world what was there to be seen all along: an island ill-prepared for a sunny day, much less a stormy one. For at least a decade, the media has been sounding the alarm about the crumbling infrastructure and financial mismanagement of Puerto Rico.

But it all fell on deaf ears. Let’s flashback to August 2014, when Reuters reporter Luciana Lopez showed that Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority was teetering on insolvency. The power company relied too heavily on expensive oil and was plagued by aging infrastructure dating back to the 1960s, a bloated workforce, and a billing system that was arbitrary and difficult to justify."

http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/353506-puerto-rico-was-a-disaster-long-before-maria-ravaged-the-island

cthulu0 on June 5th, 2018 at 19:11 UTC »

Dear mayor,

I am Trump hater through and through. But not fixing quickly enought the already long neglected infrastructure (neglected by corruption) destroyed by the hurricane is not "denying".

VikingRevenant on June 5th, 2018 at 18:17 UTC »

Hurricane season is coming up again. These poor people are fucked...