My Breakfast with Tony

It was a good thing, I decided, that the Internet decided to take the day off and go to the beach, because it allowed me to skip reading about today’s corruption and read about corruption in the past.

“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 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st. 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 11^th 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….