After being hammered by hurricane Maria, the residents of the rural
Puerto Rican mountain town of Mariana got tired of waiting for the
bumbling, privatized, cash-starved power authority to reconnect them to
the grid, so the anarchist organizer Christine Nieves founded Proyecto
de Apoyo Mutuo, one of a dozen-odd cooperatives across the island to
create their own solar grid; by the time the The Puerto Rico Electric
Power Authority finally put in appearance, Mariana had had power for two
whole months.
After Maria, Puerto Rico suffered the second-longest blackout in world
history, ignored by both the federal government and the gutted, heavily
privatized local government. So community organizers like Nieves took
matters into their own hands.
Nieves’s group formed an alliance with the Katrina-inspired Mutual Aid
Disaster Relief, which fundraised to send gear to Puerto Rico.
The island-wide efforts are rare bright spots in a year-long crisis with
no end in sight. Naturally, they’ve faced police harassment and raids
looking for “antifa.”
