is a date that will live in infamy. The memory of the Puerto Rican community was abruptly and deliberately attacked by the insensitivity and ignorance of the President of the United States, Donald Trump. The leader of the world’s top power denied the existence of nearly 3,000 fatalities caused by Hurricanes Maria and Irma last year.
At the beginning of September 2017, the island of enchantment
was hit by category 5 Hurricane Irma, which left approximately 80,000 people without electricity. However, the worst would come two weeks later with the arrival of another powerful storm, Hurricane Maria, which brought total devastation. The island’s power system collapsed, drinking water stopped flowing in many places, and numerous towns were cut off due to roads that were blocked by debris. As the weeks and months passed, the lack of supplies and medicine worsened the situation of the survivors, and ultimately led to hunger, sickness, and death.
Despite this, the federal government offered an apathetic response. Restrictions were maintained on cargo shipments that could supply the island, deliveries of provisionswere stalled, and there was not enough technical or economic support to promptly restore the power system.
Hurricane Maria is considered the worst natural disaster to affect Puerto Rico in the modern era. However, Trump and his government began to pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves on their work, announcing that there were only
about 60 fatalities. Puerto Ricans looked at these figures with deep skepticism, so the Puerto Rican government commissioned a prestigious academic organization to conduct a thorough investigation. The purpose of the investigation was to collect evidence and details about the actual number of victims.
A comprehensive study by The George Washington University concluded that the number of deaths due to Hurricanes Maria and Irma was not 64 (as the White House proudly proclaimed in the beginning), but 2,975.
What did Trump do when faced with the facts? The same thing he does every time he cannot stand up to the irrefutable weight of evidence: create a parallel reality,
a fantasy world, and fabricate a cruel lie.
Commemorating a year after these devastating storms, instead of making up for his mistakes, instead of offering words of encouragement to families who lost a loved one in Puerto Rico, Trump wrote on his Twitter account that the victims were created
for political purposes.
The figure of roughly 3,000 deaths was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico,
the President said bitingly. Without clear evidence, he asserted that the independently conducted study added people who died from old age
to the list of fatalities, and he described this practice as bad politics.
You cannot cruelly play with the memory of thousands of families. You cannot minimize a natural disaster that affected an American territory and that brought as many victims as the terrorist attacks of . This is one of the lowest points to which our megalomaniac president has stooped. He prefers to hurt a whole community rather than accept that he could have done things better.