What Do You Want to Know About the Puerto Rico Crisis?

Reporter AJ Vicens is covering the aftermath of Hurricane Maria from San Juan.

Guaynabo, Puerto Rico AJ Vicens/Mother Jones

What does a one-day food ration look like in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria?

It’s a small fruit cup, a 7.5-ounce can of corned beef hash, four cookies, and a pack of peanut butter and cheddar crackers. That’s what some residents are expected to survive on each day as the island struggles to recover from the hurricane’s devastating effects

AJ Vicens / Mother Jones

Since Friday, one of Mother Jones reporters, AJ Vicens, has been on the ground there, documenting how residents are coping with the disaster, as well as the excruciatingly slow—or, in some places, non-existent—recovery efforts. Two weeks after Maria, 95 percent of the island’s 3.4 million residents still don’t have electricity. Fifty-five percent don’t have access to drinking water. People wait in line for hours just to get gas. Electricity poles litter the street like matchboxes. “Green,” decomposing bodies flow into a funeral home. And in small towns like Ciales, AJ reports, “many homes were either wiped from the earth or rendered uninhabitable, gutted of everything the families had inside.” 

In one dispatch, AJ follows the mayor of Cabo Rojo, Bobby Ramírez Kurtz, as he’s conducting a meeting entirely by flashlight. Kurtz says he’s determined to help not only residents of his city, but also Puerto Ricans elsewhere on the island. “I don’t care what I have to do to get the things for my people,” he says.

AJ will continue to report from Puerto Rico and help shed light on the situation for our readers. What questions do you have for him while he’s there? Let’s see what he can investigate for you. 





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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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