Puerto Rico Is Now Rationing Water For A Drought That Didn't Create This Crisis, But Exposed It.

As of today, San Juan and six surrounding municipalities are three days into a mandatory water rationing. More than 180,000 households are on a rotating schedule: 48 hours with water, then 48 to 72 hours without, and no one, including the government, can say how long it will last. Reservoirs have dropped to some of their lowest levels in years after San Juan just recorded its driest July in over 120 years. The National Guard is now helping distribute water by truck, with priority going to hospitals and elderly residents. Governor Jenniffer González has called the situation "out of our hands," pointing to the weather.

As indigenous people, we're not going to pretend the drought isn't real, but the drought didn't build the crisis, it just pulled back the curtain on one that was already there. San Juan communities had already logged well over 100 days of water outages this year before the rationing even started. Puerto Rico's water authority itself admits that roughly two-thirds of the water it produces never reaches a paying customer, lost to leaks in pipes that have gone unmaintained for decades because of budget crises and, as officials themselves have acknowledged, a long history of mismanagement. A dry summer didn't create that. Years of neglect did, and it just happened to run out of runway at the same time the rain did.

So when the reservoirs refill and the rationing schedule eventually ends, remember what happens next: business as usual, until the next drought, the next pipe failure, the next emergency that gets blamed on the weather instead of on the decades of decisions that left the system with no cushion left to absorb one. People in San Juan are out in the streets right now, and they're not just angry about the water being off. They're angry that it took a drought to make the rest of the world pay attention to what they've been living with for years.

And while this crisis rightfully has our attention, we can't let it pull our eyes away from Cabo Rojo. While the island fights for water, Esencia's $2 billion resort just got approved to build directly on top of the highest concentration of Taíno archaeological sites in Puerto Rico. Both stories are about the same thing: who controls our island's resources, and who pays the price when that control sits somewhere else. We're watching both.