Paying Up

Abstract

This article describes the mechanisms by which the Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority (PRHTA), a state agency created “para dar al pueblo las mejores carreteras” (to give the people the best highways), has exacerbated uneven resource distribution in Puerto Rico. The PRHTA has functioned as a conduit for regressive restructuring—the work of building financial and physical infrastructures that transfer public wealth to elites. The function of the PRHTA is emblematic of how this politics of regressive social transfer is enabled by colonial capture—the articulation of colonial structures of governance to insulate political-economic power and public institutions from grass-roots and electoral mandates. This paper’s first section offers a brief historical background of the refashioning of Puerto Rico’s colonial politics since the 2016 debt crisis and the longer durée infrastructures to which these political changes pertain. The second section argues that, prior to 2016, political officials refashioned Puerto Rico’s public highways as revenue corridors for global capital in ways that anticipated and fostered the crisis. Contracts between the PRHTA, financial institutions, and private toll road operators reshaped key transportation infrastructures as avenues for the continuing capture of public resources through service fees and payments to bondholders. The final section discusses the material resources that these “public” services effectively transfer to private interests. Compared to median income from 2012 to 2021, the data on tolling rates begin to suggest, although hardly describe in full, the inequitable economic effects of these politics.