Partisan Politics, Neo-Liberalism, and Struggle for Democracy and Public Education in Puerto Rico http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/04/partisan-politics-neo-liberalism-and-struggle-for-democracy-and-public-education-in-puerto-rico/

The epicenter of the struggle for the public university in Latin America is Puerto Rico.– José Carlos Luque Brazán, professor and researcher of political science and urban planning at the Autonomous University, Mexico City1  Puerto Rico has historically been a laboratory for social, economic, political and scientific experiments. After the 1898 Spanish American War, the U.S. extended to Puerto Rico a newly crafted colonial system which had never been implemented in the mainland, eugenic programs were tested in the island, sterilization of women and the use of the contraceptive pill also used the island as a laboratory. Later, an export-based developmental model was crafted, euphemistically called “Manos A la Obra” translated as “Operation Bootstrap” (in Mexico called Maquiladora Program), which was later touted as a developmental model for the “Third World.” The use of emigration as an escape valve led 500,000 to migrate to the United States and other parts of the Americas.

one interesting datum provided by economist Francisco Catalá is that profits to foreign companies in Puerto Rico rose from 7.4 per cent of gross national income in 1970 to 56.5 per cent in 2009.6 Obviously, the colonial model had become a hemorrhage of resources away from the island.In 2009, according to the Puerto Rico Planning Board report to the governor, $35, 443 billion dollars were profits transferred out of Puerto Rico.