Sweet
and a possibility before election day
Celebration Day
2017 September ish
People in a southern Puerto Rico city discovered a warehouse filled with water, cots and other unused emergency supplies, then set off a social media uproar Saturday when they broke in to retrieve goods as the area struggles to recover from a strong earthquake.
The warehouse was discovered on Saturday, and police were called in to remove people taking supplies.
The shocking discovery comes after Democrats pushed for the release of Congress-approved emergency funds, following President Trump's statement that Puerto Rico was holding up its own disaster relief.
The finding of the warehouse appears to be a vindication for Trump, who has long blasted island leadership for their poor planning in the aftermath of the 2017 hurricane. He tweeted in April: 'So many wonderful people, but with such bad Island leadership and with so much money wasted.'
June 2024
Puerto Rico’s Justice Department had long been accused of not cracking down sufficiently on widespread government corruption on the island, with federal authorities taking the reins in recent years.
“For the first time on the island, the Puerto Rican Justice Department sued more than 30 convicts for corruption with the purpose of recovering public funds and demanding reparation for the damages they caused to the Puerto Rican people,” Emanuelli said.
The department also sued two companies, J.R. Asphalt Inc. and Waste Collection Corp. Federal authorities have previously accused them of being linked to government corruption cases.
The Department of Justice stated that according to the civil procedural rules of the U.S. territory, it could implement provisional measures to recover assets and restrict the defendants’ ability to sell property.
Cidra is the cradle of WC and Santamaría Torres' career as a solid waste contractor in the municipalities. As a lawyer, in 2012 Santamaría Torres was a member of the incoming transition committee of former mayor Javier Carrasquillo Cruz. There he received information about the municipality's finances and about the solid waste agreement that was in force. As an advisor to Carrasquillo Cruz, he advocated for that contract to be canceled, created WC, presented a proposal to be a new supplier of the garbage collection service and negotiated with the municipality the first contract of many that WC had. In addition, he managed to get the city council to give WC a decree of municipal tax exemption.
The WC contract would run from 2014 to 2021, but in 2020, an election year, Carrasquillo Cruz personally lobbied the municipal legislature to extend it until 2031 and thus take away the discretion that the next mayor would have had to renew it or not. That next mayor was the popular Ángel David Concepción González, who in June 2021 canceled the contract referring to the federal investigation against Santamaría Torres. At the time, the investigation was just comments, but then the lawyer pleaded guilty, but not before WC sued the municipality claiming $24.7 million equivalent to the payment it would receive in the remainder of the contract, $6.7 million for "performance damages" and $1 million for defamation.