As reported by Reuters, more than 180,000 people in San Juan and surrounding areas must face 48 hours without running water for every 48 hours with it. Although many officials in the U.S.’s colonial administration may want to refer to this crisis as an “act of God,” in reality, it is anything but. While the drought preceding this crisis had San Juan facing its driest July on record in 2026, it is not an isolated incident. It is simply the newest trigger-point for a much larger issue facing Puerto Rico that has gone on since the United States first began administering the island in 1898.

Just as water does not boil spontaneously, these conditions have not arrived as an “act of God.” They are the product of years of infrastructural neglect and an administration that is unaccountable to the people it serves. The “Superaqueduct” that supplies water to 15 municipalities in Puerto Rico was built in 2000, and as engineer Carlos Pesquera told El País, “it has no redundancy; if the pipe breaks, it broke.” Furthermore, millions of gallons of water have been lost to leaks— totaling $98 million worth, also per El País. These are not the signs of a well-funded or well-maintained system. Like a body without food, the water system has been starved of the critical resources necessary for functionality.

Notably, the people of Puerto Rico do not have control over how their resources are allocated. In 2016, the United States Congress established the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (colloquially known as La Junta), an unelected, U.S.-based board with veto power over Puerto Rico’s entire budget. La Junta has consistently barred local authorities from shifting public funds to pay for multi-million dollar infrastructure projects like renovating the Superaqueduct.

As a U.S. colony, Puerto Rico is not able to negotiate on anything even approaching an “equal footing” with federal agencies – with the Supreme Court ruling in 1901 that it was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” Rather than being a part of the United States, they asserted that it was “owned by” the United States.

As the people of Puerto Rico have gone months without access to reliable water, the U.S. administration has carried on with locking any chances at a financial “lifeline” behind colonial red tape. Meanwhile, what has been approved are multi-billion dollar development projects that will only put more strain on the water infrastructure. As Marcos Quinones Otero reported in Claridad, “The Esencia Project in Cabo Rojo, with an estimated investment of over $2.6 billion, proposes intensive development precisely in a region that has faced drought conditions and water stress for years.” It is clear that the colonial overseers of Puerto Rico have their priorities entirely backwards.

These issues are not simply confined to the “ivory towers” of government and legal code. They have an actual human cost that has affected the lives of millions. As San Juan native and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) member, Dani López, stated, “Before this rationing, San Juan had zero water for months.” They recalled that various areas of the city had vastly different experiences of the water crisis, saying, “We were in a somewhat middle-class area, and we were fine for most of the summer, meanwhile in other neighborhoods, they had water trucks coming every few days to bring the only ‘fresh’ water they had.”

It must be said, however, that the people of Puerto Rico are not giving in without a fight. On August 15, a protest took place at Puerto Rican Governor Jenniffer González-Colón’s 50th birthday fundraiser, and on August 23, hundreds marched in Cabo Rojo to demand the cancellation of the Esencia “mega-project.” At both protests, protesters demonstrated that they are fed up with the bureaucratic mishandling of their resources.

It bears repeating, then, that this was never an “act of God.” This summer’s water crisis is simply the newest weight that the U.S. empire has placed on the people of Puerto Rico— a people who are 128 years into a relationship that none of them chose. While U.S.-based developers are approved for projects like the Esencia with all deliberate speed, the island’s imperial oppressors move at a snail’s pace when it comes time to give the people who power Puerto Rico water to drink. And when local officials refuse to fight this oppression — when Puerto Ricans are under attack, they are certain to stand up and fight back!

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