“It’s going
to be one LONG book,” I had told my friend Tony—more formally known as Antonio Quiñones Calderón,—when he first told me about his project, a book entitled “Corrupción
e impunidad en Puerto Rico”—and
yes, it means exactly what you think. In fact, it came in at fewer than 600
pages, which surprised me, until I realized that the bulk of the book—very
logically—concerns the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.
In fact, the book is divided by decades, and 1900 starts on page 61.
Why
decades, I wondered, instead of administrations? And obviously, others must
have posed the question to Tony as well. His answer, sensibly, is that
corruption isn’t limited to one party or another.
This, of
course, on an island where partisan politics reigns, tends to be sniffed at.
“Those damned populares are just better at
it,” once cried Mr. Fernández, when I reminded him of the flagrant corruption
in the Rosselló
government. Nor was it any use to suggest that incompetence was hardly an
excuse for dishonesty.
So having
had breakfast with Tony, and having gotten a copy of the book—thanks, Tony!—I
went to the café, where the Internet had decided to go off somewhere, and
without leaving a note. So I sat down, and began reading—and fascinating
reading it is.
One of the
most troubling things about living in a society riddled with corruption is
that, over the long run, you go numb to it all. Was that the theme of William
Bennett’s book, The Death of Outrage? If so, it’s true. So it was
instructive to read, in the first chapter, three months of reports of
corruption, starting with one of my favorites, albeit forgotten. (See?) And
that was the arrest,
on 7 October 2010, of 61 state police, 16 municipal police—133 law and order
guys in all—offering their services to protect drug dealers at their work. In
fact, there were 125 audio recordings and videotapes of some 89 officers
providing protection with their weapons in the sale of cocaine in the amounts
of five kilograms or more. No wonder that Eric Holder came out and said
that it was the biggest police corruption case in FBI history….
‘Aha’ I
thought, ‘so that’s the answer to the question.’ And the question was?
“Where is
your nearest punto de drogas
(drug hot spot),” I would ask the students, and it was a rare student indeed
who couldn’t tell me—though they all denied vehemently having even thought
about using drugs, not even marijuana in college.
“So why do
you guys know, and not the cops?”
¿Cómo se
dice “shrugs” en
español?
In short,
the cops not only knew but were providing protection to the drug dealers.
As Tony
points out, corruption isn’t unique to Puerto Rico. Still, it’s a bit
off-putting to read, towards the end of the first chapter, that Puerto Rico,
with its 130 convictions of corruption in 2011, had the highest rate of
corruption of any federal district. California, he writes, with its four
districts and ten times the population of Puerto Rico, had “just” 52
convictions.
Nor is it a
recent problem—the first recorded case was in 1720, though why do I think that
there had to be others preceding it? Historically, one of the most famous
cases—though by no means the worst—was the practice in the 1940’s and 50’s, a
week or two before the elections, of high leaders in the political parties
walking through the mountain towns, distributing shoes. Well, jaundiced
tongues—a medical impossibility, but you know what I mean—said it was a clear
attempt at vote buying, but any reasonable person could see: how could any soul
walk barefoot over the rocky roads to the polls to cast their vote? The
practice ensured a fair election!
Then there
was the practice of routinely walking up and down the aisles of the government
offices and stopping by each desk, in order to collect money for the political
party in power. After all, the reasoning went, you had your job due to the
party, so shouldn’t you give back?
Presumably,
none of these practices are occurring now—although I did hear reports in the
90’s that the Office of the First Lady was doing essentially the same thing—but
it may be that the corruption has both gotten far more underground and
pernicious. In the year 2009, as Tony wrote, the cost to the taxpayer in Puerto
Rico was 860 million dollars. The average in the 90’s? 417 million dollars.
It goes on
and on. Today’s print edition of El Nuevo Día, for example, has an article on Crece 21, a program paid for by federal monies
from No Child
Left Behind that was supposed to provide training and certification in
specialized areas like math, science, and English to 5,000 teachers around the
island. The Feds paid the Department of Education; the Department in turn
contracted the University of Puerto Rico to provide the instruction and
administer the tests. According to the university, they put in 44 million
dollars; the total amount of the funding was 49
million dollars.
Of course
people are fighting about what happened. The Department of Education points out
that only 350 teachers ever got recertified, and that they won’t pay another
nickel. The university says that they only got paid 26 million dollars, and
that the program didn’t require that 5,000 teachers passed the test, but only
that 5,000 teachers “updated their knowledge and were specialists,” according
to Yanaira
Vázquez Cruz, the director of the program. Oh, and the teachers complained
that they didn’t get materials, among which were computers that they could keep
if they were certified.
“Some of
those teachers really made me angry,” said Lady, the owner of the café, when I
told her about all this. “You know, I was in the public schools when I was
doing Poetry Out Loud, so I saw how
they worked. And one teacher—of 11th grade, no less—was spelling
“that” as “taht.” Not once, but in every sentence. So I corrected him, and he
got angry and started shouting that it was HIS classroom, and how dare I correct
him in front of the students….”
I’ve only
read a few chapters of Tony’s book, but I wonder if he ever comes to the
conclusion that I—sadly—have come to. And that is?
The
intention on Crece 21 was never to certify 5000 teachers, or expand the knowledge
of 5,000 teachers, or even to do anything at all to improve the education of
the kids on the island. What was the point of the program?
It was
about taking the money that was there. There were funds available, there had to
be a program, one was created, Washington sent the money down. What happened to
it after that?
We’ll never
know. The documents don’t exist; the documents are incomplete; the documents
contradict each other. Most likely it will be a combination of all three. Oh,
and the feds will have to send someone down, someone who speaks Spanish,
someone who can wade through the mess of mildewed documents, flared tempers,
pointed fingers.
A friend
once told me that the worst thing about totalitarian governments was not the
repression, not the suppression of free speech and essential liberties, not the
sound of footsteps on the pavement outside and the dreaded knock on the door in
the middle of the night. No, on a day-to-day level, the worst thing was
inefficiency.
I hate
corruption on moral grounds. But on an island where an English teacher cannot
spell the word “that,” I hate corruption on other grounds as well.
We don’t have
this money to waste….
