Before the dawn of the celebration of the Day of the Three Kings, Puerto Ricans woke up shaken by a very intense seismic movement in the south of the island. The earthquakes of January 6 and 7, measuring 5.8 and 6.4 magnitude respectively, not only shook the foundations of the buildings, many of which collapsed, but they also triggered vivid memories of Hurricane Maria that swept the island in September 2017.
As on that occasion, the earthquake revealed the lack of government preparedness to deal with these catastrophic crises, and how citizens have once again been forced to take recovery efforts into their own hands. Furthermore, on this occasion the impact of the earthquake on the southwest region has reinforced the existing inequality between the north and south of the island, which the citizens themselves are trying to erase.
After Hurricane Maria in 2017, the fragility of the electrical infrastructure and the lack of effective plans for emergency management on the island was exposed. With the recent earthquakes we have realized that the problems are still there and have even worsened. Poverty continues to plague the population, and the lack of planning alongside government negligence takes on scandalous dimensions given the difficulty of properly assisting the thousands of Puerto Ricans affected by the earthquakes, the most violent on the island in more than a century.
