The United States Democratic Party has criticized the Trump Administration on Thursday for imposing conditions on the 16,000 million dollars delivered to Puerto Rico to try to solve the problems caused by Hurricane ‘Maria’ two years ago after passing through this state associated.
The White House Government has justified its decision to impose a series of conditions on the grounds that it will be possible to avoid better cases of corruption, such as that of the former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who was arrested in September 2019 accused of having accepted bribes from a company in exchange for public contracts valued at $ 1.8 billion to repair the Puerto Rico power grid.
However, the Democratic representative for the state of Arizona, Raul Grijalva, has accused Trump of using the excuse of corruption as part of “his petty political revenge against black people.”
Grijalva, a Democrat responsible for overseeing this issue within the Senate, has further assured that if Trump “neglects recovery efforts on the continent as badly as Puerto Rico” the situation would be similar to that of Hurricane Katrina, he said.
For his part, the declaration signed by Trump has been applauded by the governor of Puerto Rico, Wanda Vázquez Garced, who has thanked the tycoon “his commitment to help and alleviate the suffering” of the Puerto Rican population after the hurricane.
The emergency plan referred to by Vázquez Garced authorizes federal aid in Puerto Rican territory, in which items will be allocated to the reconstruction of infrastructure, prevention plans for future environmental disasters, as well as public security services in up to six municipalities, including some of the most affected, such as Ponce, Guánica and Yauco.
Among the conditions imposed on Puerto Rico are the creation of a new system with which to register properties and deeds, as well as the prohibition of not spending the funds in the permeable electrical network of the island, which took months to be rebuilt after the passage of hurricane ‘María’.
In that same order, federal contractors in charge of reconstruction tasks will be able to benefit from these measures of the Trump Administration, as they will be able to pay salaries below $ 15 per hour, although in 2018, the one who was governor of the island, Ricardo Rosselló approved an edict for which workers could not charge less than that amount per hour.
The Government of Puerto Rico raised in August last year to 2,975 the number of people who lost their lives as a result of the ravages caused by Hurricane ‘María’ as it passed through the island in September 2017, a figure well above those 64 deceased who were initially announced.
The disaster, which caused a pulse between the Government of Puerto Rico and that of Donald Trump on account of blame and responsibilities, was especially primed with the poorest areas, where the probability of losing one’s life was 60 percent higher, and with the elderly, among which the risk also skyrocketed 35 percent.
