Nearly a year later, the Puerto Rican government is finally coming clean about how many people died due to Hurricane Maria. According to the New York Times, through the online report “Transformation and Innovation in the Wake of Devastation,” the island’s government reluctantly conceded that “in all likelihood more than 1,400 people died.” This figure is well above the official death toll, which still remains at 64.
This has been a subject of much debate since Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017. Several studies conducted by journalists and academics have put the death toll anywhere from 300 to 5,000. Yet the government has refused to update the death toll, claiming that it is awaiting the results of a study being conducted by George Washington University. That study was supposed to be finished in late spring and there is no word when it will be released.
In the meantime, we should also never forget that Donald Trump didn’t take this crisis seriously and left Puerto Ricans to die. He began by ignoring it completely and then we he finally acknowledged it, he spent weeks trying to convince the American people that it wasn’t all that bad and then blamed Puerto Ricans for messing up the federal budget.
While in Puerto Rico on October 3, 2017, he said the following:
“Now, I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you've thrown our budget a little out of whack because we've spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and that's fine. We've saved a lot of lives. [...]
Sixteen [certified deaths]. Sixteen people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all of your people, all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people. You can be very proud. Everybody around this table and everybody watching can really be very proud of what's taken place in Puerto Rico.”
As usual, Donald Trump is dead wrong. No one should be proud of how the local government, the federal government, or this country’s illegitimate president handled what took place in Puerto Rico. And we can certainly anticipate that even though the island’s government is now admitting that more people died than it originally counted, Donald Trump and his administration will completely ignore this information. After all, they have immigrants to lock up and unnecessary trade wars to get into.
A draft of the report makes its way to Congress on Thursday, which also contains a request for $139 billion in recovery funding for Puerto Rico. Sadly, it seems that it took a request for lots of money for the Puerto Rican government to unearth the truth that we’ve known all along. The report also contains requests for several billion dollars in funding for highway renovations, education, energy, and the environment. Absolutely nothing is good about this tragedy. And don’t forget that Puerto Rico is in the process of making substantial cuts to its Medicaid program in order to deal with its massive debt, so things on the island remain precarious. But hopefully, Congress and the Puerto Rican government get one thing right and fund this recovery, so that Puerto Ricans can begin to get some of what they need.