Meet The Women Who Toppled Puerto Rico's Governor

By Yarimar Bonilla


Sandra Rodriguez Cotto views her job journalist and also a radio host in Puerto Rico as that of being a spark. “I find out about things and pass them on so others can disseminate them,” she told MTV News. She doesn’t imagine herself a influencer, yet more of a provocateur. However for ladies, that task can lead to erasure down the line: even if they are the opening to put out a message, it is often others who are recognized for the work of moving that message forward.


However there’s no chance of that happening this time: On Saturday, July 13, a number of journalists, including Rodriguez Cotto, leaked 11 pages of a governmental Telegram chat to the public. They were just several of the several powerful girls who helped bring down Puerto Rico’s governor and hold the island accountable to change that actually advantages its people.


For her coverage of the leak, Rodriguez Cotto, who runs the site En Blanco Y Negro, focused her reporting on officials' use of misogynistic language and the threat of violence against females in the cat. As she and others announced, Rosselló repeatedly referred to girls in the opposition as “putas” (the Spanish slur for prostitute) and one of his advisors made crude comments about gunning down Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan.


The public responded by protesting for nearly two weeks and, on July 25, Puerto Rico’s Governor Ricardo Rosselló resigned from public office by way of the Facebook Live. His unprecedented resignation was the result of massive public pressure from broad sectors of civil society, including international celebrities like Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny, iLe, and Residente.


All of those had their reasons to protest: Among other outrages, the chats mocked the victims and survivors of Hurricane Maria. In one exchange, then-governor Rosselló joked about the cadavers that had been piling up at the public morgue throughout and right following the storm, prompting one of his aids to joke about using the morgues as bait for the administration’s enemies, writing: “Don’t we have some cadavers to feed our crows?” To this day, neither the U.S. Government nor the government of Puerto Rico have publicly acknowledged that over 3,000 people died as a result of the storm and the subsequent systemic failure to help Puerto Ricans in need.


The Puerto Rican government had been failing its citizens long before the hurricane. The released chat, with its misogynistic and homophobic language, pointed to some of these trends: According to a ACLU report, Puerto Rico has the highest per capita rate in the world of femicides, specifically of ladies killed by their partners. While Rossello's administration makes light of gender violence in back of closed doors, local feminists groups have long been calling for greater governmental attention to these issues. One sort, Colectiva Feminista en Construcción has been particularly mobile in the battle against gender violence both before and right after Hurricane Maria; as a result, they were directly targeted in the governor’s chat for their efforts to hold the government responsible for the gender-based violence crisis.


It was La Colectiva who first called for protests against the governor, including the massive march contained in response to the chat on Wednesday, July 17, which was later joined by international celebrities. They were also the opening to stage cacerolazos (protests with pots and pans); in November 2018, they camped out outdoors the governor’s mansion, in what they called a plantón, to demand that he declare a state of emergency around gender violence, thus turning this space into a site of resistance long before the current protests.


The administration’s blatant don't think about for the livelihoods of the members of her community inspired journalists like Rodriguez Cotto to fight for Puerto Rico: Soon after Hurricane Maria, she served as one of the main sources of statistics on the island for WAPA radio as soon as residents noticed themselves without electricity or cell phone service. She used her platform to tell the stories of ladies in particular who were deeply affected by the storm, particularly those who were victims of domestic violence and who noticed themselves doubly vulnerable in the midst of the disaster.


Because of her reporting, Rodriguez Cotto became a target: Her residence was damaged into, and she feared for her safety and that of her daughter. Despite it all, she has continued to report on government corruption and gender violence on En Blanco y Negro, and while in her radio show on Red Informativa.


However fear of retaliation isn’t stopping the women-led independent journalists who have continued to push their stories to the next level. Soon following the original 11 pages of chats circulated in the press, the Center for Investigative Journalism published nearly a thousand added pages of damning messages. “The choice to publish it was made collectively,” Omaya Sosa Pascual, one of the CPI’s founding directors, told MTV News, adding that the CPI had gotten the opening chat leaks although contained back from publishing up until they could visualize the whole context. “We knew there was much more than what was originally unveiled, and our interest was routinely in the possible illegalities and unethical activity that the chat might reveal.” While they procured the entire chat, CPI executive director Carla Minet determined that they would not just publish snippets, however release the complete chat online for all to read as well as their own investigation into government corruption.


It wasn’t the CPI’s first time breaking stories. The women-led corporation has earned an essential reputation in Puerto Rico for its in-depth reporting and unveiling of government mismanagement, notably leading the charge in the wake of Hurricane Maria to counter the official cover-up that claimed a death toll of 16 for months, while several could tell from their own personalized experience that the truth was exponentially larger. (To this day, the local government refuses to do a full accounting of these that were lost to the storm. All that exists are statistical analyses which recommend that thousands more died the year of Hurricane Maria than would have died in a typical year.) The categorize eventually created an interactive website designed to sustain individual stories of hurricane victims; the names and individual stories of these who were lost have primarily been honored by means of the individual efforts of the CPI and other independent journalists.


the complete chats came full-circle for Lourdes Muriente, a practicing attorney in San Juan, if she learned that the governor had made light of her former hubby, Carlos Gallisá, a famed activist and political leader on the island who died of cancer in 2018. In response, she and two other ladies marched into government buildings and started taking the official portrait of the governor off the wall. Videos of their actions soon went viral, inspiring cartoons and copycat actions.


One of the girls who joined her was 70-year-old Abigail Ramos, who says that the statistics drop had a deep impact on her: “I suddenly felt this pain that was not just emotional yet also physical. It hurt me physically, I was nauseated. It was just also much,” she told MTV News. She had flashbacks of these she had met who'd struggled caring for sick loved ones without electricity or running water for months on end and of companions who were struggling with reduced pensions because of the island’s long-standing financial crisis. “I have a crowd of companions who are government retirees, who have limited pensions and so they have already have had their pensions cut by the government… And for what? To steal? To take cash away from schools and the university?” The idea of the governor laughing from the safety of his mansion while several Puerto Ricans struggled with the impact of Maria, compounded by the larger economic crisis, was also much for her to bear.


The persistent silence around the people who were lost in the wake of Hurricane Maria, the insurmountable challenge of mourning them flawlessly, and the blatant disrespect from their governmental officials has been a sore point for local residents in particular. At the rallies, several carried pictures of these they had lost and also personalized stories of companions and family member who did not survive the storm. The indignation was key to mobilizing the protestors and ignited a fire inside of the younger generation of Puerto Ricans, several of whom were not even able to vote in the last election.


Among that order was Aliana Bigio Alcoba, a 21-year-old student at the University of Puerto Rico, who runs a Facebook and Instagram site called Con-Sentimiento (a double entendre in Spanish which means consent nevertheless also “with sentiment”). She started the site to launch conversations about feminism, gender binaries, and hot-button issues like abortion. Right following the initial leak, she gathered a group of young girls outdoors the governor’s mansion to protest immediately following the initial leak. The categorize, which took on the name Mujeres en Resistencia, placed duct tape on their mouths as symbols of repression and staged a silent protest to demand the governor’s removal. They also brought published copies of the governor’s chat with them so that guests to Old San Juan, several of whom were unaware of the particular content of the conversations, could read the messages for themselves.


Another order of young ladies turned to make-up and body paint to express their discontent and used their bodies as political canvases. They drew international attention for their work and soon became referred to as las hijas de la crisis (the daughters of the crisis), a name that captures how the current movement spans in back of the governor’s chats and even the crisis of Maria. It tunnels through to a deeper nerve among young Puerto Ricans who are struggling to prepare the island a place where they can live, dream, and design a new future.


Makeup artist Melanie Rodriguez Rosado started by painting protestor Anamar Pérez-Green, who became the canvas for a Puerto Rican flag lit up in flames. Rodriguez Rosado placed tape covered in drawings of barbed wire across Pérez-Green’s mouth and paired it with smeared black eye makeup streaming down her face. Pérez-Green also wrote the word “puta” across her buttocks, and used her back as a message board so that protestors could write their own messages to the governor. Participants filled her back with choice words borrowed from the chat and messages like “No more abuse!” And “Resign!” The final look served as a symbol for the pain and emotion felt by protesting, and Puerto Ricans at large; images and videos of Pérez-Green taken by photographer Valeria Martínez-Marrero rapidly went viral.


Days later, an iconic image started to circulate of eight girls who with each other symbolized various characteristic of the protests. One was dressed as a white and black Puerto Rican flag, the symbol of resistance; another was painted as a rainbow flag to represent inclusivity. A girl painted as a skeleton represented those lost throughout Maria, who were ever-present in the protest. Other ladies bore insults from the infamous leaked chat. With each other, they looked like a new musical group of superheroes for Puerto Rico’s future.


As Bigio explained in a podcast interview, this new generation of ladies are a product of Puerto Rico’s current political climate: “I don’t remember, ever since I was a kid, living in a period not characterized by crisis.”


“We have inherited a debt that we did not create and we live carrying a weight that should not be our responsibility,” she added in a post for the feminist website Todas. “We don't rest due to the anxiety of what will or will not be our ‘future.’"


“It is critical that my generation become informed and express themselves politically beginning now,” mentioned 14-year-old Lorena Isabel Torres Negrón. The accomplished ballet dancer attended the protests with her parents and two brothers because she felt that it was essential to be involved in whichever way she can be. “We are the future, nevertheless we have to begin becoming informed right now. If we wait up until we are old enough vote they plan to deceive us and everything will be worse,” she added.


“We are not only here for ourselves although also for our parents, who pay taxes,” Lorena mentioned, adding, “It's not just about us yet about defending our country.”


Bigio agrees that Puerto Rico’s future is in the hands of this new generation. She worries that young folks are being forced into greater and greater debt because the university becomes much less obtainable due to financial range cuts and decreased financial aid to athletes and others in the wake of the financial crisis. Yet she insists that given all these hardships, Puerto Rican young people have nothing to lose.


“We have to go out and take back the nation they attempted to destroy, routinely remembering that the resignation of former Governor Ricardo Rosselló isn't the end of this fight, yet only the beginning,” she wrote for Todas. “We have a lot that needs cleaning up and the young people of this nation are ready with broom and dustpan in hand. In the streets, at the polls, in the university, in our homes, and on social media, we'll continue to hacer patria and demand a higher class of Puerto Rico for us all.”