AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

In Puerto Rico, the month of July was the driest on record in more than 120 years, accompanied by record-breaking heat. Reservoirs are so low, the governor has declared a state of emergency for more than two dozen cities and towns. Agricultural areas, as well as cities, are impacted. The Aqueduct and Sewer Authority implemented a water-rationing schedule in early August, where 180,000 households and businesses in San Juan and surrounding areas receive public water only every other 48 hours, complicating daily life for more than a half a million Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens.

But the current water crisis in Puerto Rico is not an isolated event. Juan Carlos Dávila filed this report from Puerto Rico.

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: Puerto Rico’s water crisis is worsening, and this summer’s record drought isn’t the only reason why. In early August, the Water and Sewage Authority began rationing water services for residents of San Juan and surrounding areas due to the drought. But even before the drought was declared in July, communities in Loíza and San Juan were having water problems, and people depend on water trucks to meet their needs.

This is Melody Arévalo, who runs a local restaurant in Loíza.

MELODY ARÉVALO: [translated] Well, the problems began three months ago. A day like today has been difficult, because we had water needs since yesterday. And because of the chaos that’s been happening around the country, our cistern was not filled yesterday. Today, we had very little water, and we had to dispatch the clients we already had here.

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: In some places, like Residencial Luis Lloréns Torres, Puerto Rico’s largest public housing project, the government has installed water cisterns to mitigate the crisis. This is Antonio “Puruco” Látimer, community leader and former Puerto Rican basketball player.

ANTONIO ”PURUCO” LÁTIMER: [translated] Our country should not be living this way. Public housing projects should not be having these types of cisterns in different areas to solve a situation, because supposedly we live in a country where we shouldn’t have to be dealing with these kinds of water problems that have been created over time.

AIDA LUZ PEÑA: [translated] Not even a drop. Every time I open it, I grab it and say, “Oh my goodness.” Not even a little sound comes through.

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: Aida Luz Peña lives in a third-floor apartment at Lloréns Torres. But the water rarely reaches her on the third floor. And she needs to buy water bottles so she can cook, which strains her limited budget.

AIDA LUZ PEÑA: [translated] They’ve left us without water, yet we still get the bill. Charge us for what we actually use when the water is on.

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: Many Puerto Ricans understand that the ongoing water shortages and water rationing could have been prevented. According to estimates of Puerto Rico’s Water and Sewage Authority, about 60% of water gets lost through pipes and other broken infrastructure. Hydrologist Amira Odeh says the water rationing could have been prevented.

AMIRA ODEH: The amount of water that we lose through old, broken pipes equals to three lakes. So, while people are suffering scarcity, the government is talking about just mitigating the crisis right now. But they are still not talking about solving the crisis from the root, fixing the broken infrastructure.

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: We also spoke to community leader Erwin González in San Juan.

ERWIN GONZÁLEZ: [translated] This isn’t a question of today or the day before yesterday that you come and help by bringing us a small water tank. This is something that you could have been working on and repaired with anticipation years ago, government after government, you know? It has been 12 years of the same administration, and we haven’t seen anything — anything, absolutely anything — where Puerto Rico is progressing.

ANTONIO ”PURUCO” LÁTIMER: Sometimes they create the problem and the chaos, so they can bring a solution. All these people, from chaos, they make money. Water in Puerto Rico is a chaos. Who’s making money? The people with the trucks is who got to transport water. The people who are selling the blue big cisterna. Supermarkets, they’re going to sell water. So, they’re making money. So, from chaos, a lot of people make money, but the ones who suffer are the poor people.

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: Hydrologist Amira Odeh says the government of Puerto Rico has to come up with a robust plan to address future droughts, a reality that is expected to only get worse with climate change.

AMIRA ODEH: Our government has ignored climate and environmental experts for decades, and this is just the result of what is happening. This drought and this rationing is not a surprise. The Caribbean is expected to have worse droughts. So, we are going to have more extreme temperatures. More heat means more evaporation of the water that we have in our lakes. Also, these droughts could last longer, bring even less rain. So, we need to fix the infrastructure problem now to prepare for future crisis and literally help save lives.

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: It seems calm here in Lake La Plata, a reservoir that supplies rural towns and other cities around the metropolitan area with water. But Domingo Nevárrez, who fishes at this lake, says the water levels are dropping noticeably every day.

DOMINGO NEVÁRREZ: [translated] As you can see, the reservoir levels have dropped dramatically. Where those trees are and that white border where the cabins are, the water used to reach all the way there. And I’ve seen it steadily decreasing. Now I’ve noticed it dropping again in recent days, because this area is damp, very damp.

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: If water levels in reservoirs like La Plata continue to drop, Puerto Rico’s water crisis could get far worse, engulfing even more of the island.

AMY GOODMAN: Thanks so much to Juan Carlos Dávila, with help from Camila Rodríguez and Rogelio Marzán, for that report. We are joined now from Puerto Rico by Juan Carlos Dávila, filmmaker, journalist, finalist for the eighth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.

Congratulations for that, Juan Carlos!

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we move on to the 10th anniversary, are you concerned that the problems and the water shortage will be used as an argument for privatization?

JUAN CARLOS DÁVILA: Yeah. Thanks, Amy.

Yeah, definitely. I think that it has been a strategy that has been put forth before by the Puerto Rican government and those in the Puerto Rican government that respond to private interests and to corporations, that they use the crisis, in a form, to justify privatization. They use climate change, and they use a very intentional form of not maintaining the infrastructure of the country, in order for it to fail and, again, justify the privatization. We have seen this with the privatization of the electrical system, where the government, alongside the local corporate media, started putting out a narrative that the system, the electrical system, was not working properly because the government basically could not handle it. And what they did is that they started to put forward that the solution was the privatization. And LUMA started administrating the Electrical Power Authority of Puerto Rico since 2021, and nothing has improved. We continue having constant, constant blackouts. We’re continuing having power interruptions. So, a privatization of the water system is not going to solve a problem, either, if we look at the precedents.

AMY GOODMAN: Also on Monday, Puerto Ricans marked 10 years since President Obama appointed the first members of the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board to oversee the restructuring of debt of the island’s finances. The board of overseers was created by the 2016 PROMESA law passed by the U.S. Congress. For many Puerto Ricans, the anti-democratic structure of the board, imposed by the U.S. president and Congress, highlights the quasi-colonial status of Puerto Rico, a territory where residents have no voting representation in Congress and can’t vote for president. Puerto Ricans protested the continued existence of the board in San Juan Monday.

PROTESTER: [translated] From the beginning, we told the people this law wouldn’t bring anything good or positive; exactly the opposite, that they would charge an illegal debt at the cost of our suffering, that they would abandon the people to pay the debt. Sadly, 10 years later, here we are. The essential services — water, power, education, public health, safety — every day, they are worse.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on what 10 years of the fiscal control board has meant for Puerto Rico, we’re joined by Luis Valentín, an investigative reporter with the award-winning Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico, joining us also from San Juan. Luis, talk about the significance of this decade anniversary and what’s happened.

LUIS VALENTÍN: So, I would say that it’s been 10 years ever since the passage of PROMESA, and even if La Junta, as we call it, has restructured some of Puerto Rico’s debt and has implemented a fiscal discipline, the reality is that we still have no fully balanced budgets, and Puerto Rico has not regained access to credit markets as PROMESA states. So, what has happened is that when it was supposed to be temporary — La Junta was supposed to be a temporary entity in Puerto Rico — it has become deeply embedded in the government and in the day-to-day operations of the government.

At Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, we released a report last year that found that La Junta has identified at least 50 different actions that the government must undertake before they leave the island or they cease to exist. And this is a very expansive interpretation of what PROMESA states. It calls for four consecutive balanced budgets under modified accrual and the return to credit markets at affordable rates. But the board has decided to interpret this into a long list of actions, some of which could take a long time. So, in the end, what we found is that even if La Junta says that they are trying to finish their mandate here in Puerto Rico and leave, their actions speak otherwise.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Luis, I wanted to ask you — we were talking with Juan Carlos Dávila earlier about the water situation. Could you talk about what the oversight board has been doing in terms of the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority? Because most people don’t realize that PRASA, which is what it’s known as, was actually privatized years ago, in the ’90s. And that was such a failure by the French water company that took it over, that it was then brought back under government control, and then it went bankrupt with all the other agencies of the government in the debt crisis. What is the position of the PROMESA board right now in terms of the water authority?

LUIS VALENTÍN: So, yes, the water crisis predates PROMESA, right? Like, it’s been years in the making, of underinvestment by the Puerto Rico government in terms of infrastructure and maintenance. But the reality is that PRASA is under the board’s oversight. They require them to submit budgets, a fiscal plan, that they can require implementation plans on the infrastructure work being conducted by PRASA. So, in the end, this water crisis taking place right now in Puerto Rico, also La Junta bears some responsibility on it. It has restructured part of the PRASA’s debt, but it was not done so in a full restructuring mode. It did not reduce the debt, and that pretty much crowds out resources that could be used to for infrastructure work.

On the question on the privatization side of it, we have to remember what La Junta did with PREPA, the island’s power utility.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds, Luis.

LUIS VALENTÍN: They moved for full privatization. With respect to PRASA, they have not done so yet, but you could argue that within the fiscal plan, they have introduced suggestions of privatization of services within PRASA.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to do Part 2 of our discussion, also in Spanish, and post it at democracynow.org. Luis Valentín, investigative reporter at the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.