The “Drunk Arsonist” needs to be tried for hate crime, or else it will set a dangerous precedent.
In any other context, it’d be racial terror, but in this case they want us to say “sh*t happens in Puerto Rico.”
By now, every Puerto Rican has heard about the lady from Missouri who started the year by burning down a bunch of businesses in Cabo Rojo1. Many have seen the footage of her arguing with other diners at a popular bar, assaulting a waitress, and eventually carrying a canister of gasoline and torching the bar and surrounding businesses. She went back down the street to her Airbnb, flew back to Missouri later that day, and the tragedy went viral. Business owners that were affected got together and immediately identified her, and the ATF have since carried out a search warrant on her home in Missouri, but she has yet to be arrested, despite the abundant evidence. Police here are investigating the matter and plan to announce charges by the end of the week or early next week, but it is highly unlikely that it will be rightfully processed as it is, a hate crime, and that will have an alarming impact within the settler colonial project ongoing in Puerto Rico.
Media double standards based on geography
Today, nearly a full week after the fire, national outlets are finally beginning to cover the tragedy, yet refraining from naming the suspect, who was identified immediately by the business owners as Danielle Bertothy. Instead, they describe her by some variant of “a tourist”, “an American tourist”, or a “woman visiting Puerto Rico.”
This is important because the concept of tourism activates an inherent historical power dynamic, it suggests Puerto Rico is not part of the US and that people of Missouri and Puerto Rico are not of equal citizenry. Tourism also evokes a temporal condition outside of normal circumstances, where people permit themselves, and are permitted by their peers, to act differently that they usually would. By labeling her specifically as a tourist instead of a traveler, it acknowledges that she was from a metropole and was temporarily visiting a colony. Contrary to what people may post online for friends back home, tourists are often rude, impatient, and aggressive, not to mention they routinely break our laws with impunity and behave in ways they would never consider back home.
When NBC runs the headline “ATF executes search warrant in Missouri in connection with tourist accused of setting businesses on fire in Puerto Rico,“ they mask the severity of committing aggravated assault and arson. It omits that one of those businesses was a hotel with 50 guests asleep at the time of the fire. When they report that she “left Puerto Rico and was back in the mainland,” it sounds like she just finished up her vacation and got home in time for the winter storm. In fact, she fled the scene, booking a new flight immediately and leaving her Airbnb more than a week early.
The result is the imagery of a vacation gone awry, her inebriation an unfortunate catalyst that comes with vacationing. The story is translated for social media as:
The Drunk Arsonist #puertorico #tourism #travel.
If this happened in the states however, within a geography people recognize, and a white person from Missouri took I-95 down to a booming Puerto Rican district in Florida, assaulted people and burned down half the block before fleeing, it would be reported as such. Because it happened in Puerto Rico, the question of racial hatred and intent are unconsidered, despite the well known rise in hate speech towards Puerto Ricans, even emanating out from the very stage of Trump rallies.
Hate crimes are about intention, and fire is used to annihilate
The most well known hate crimes involve race-based massacres and destruction of religious centers, but even a threat is enough to be considered a hate crime. Last summer a Massachusetts man was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for threatening an interracial couple over social media and then intimidating the couple to stop them from reporting him to the police.2 When an old Chicago man was filmed harassing a young Puerto Rican woman for wearing a shirt with a Puerto Rican flag, he faced five years for the hate crime, but was only given two years of probation and 200 hours of community service at the young woman’s request.3
When the intention to harm a certain group is present, the crime is treated differently. The use of fire, because of its power to completely eliminate, is a tool commonly used by hate crime offenders, and the courts usually recognize this. In 2004, a group of young white men carried out the most expensive hate crime in Maryland history when they torched $10 million worth of property in a new Washington suburb development that was still under construction.4 It was treated as a hate crime after it was revealed a number of black people had planned to move into the neighborhood upon its completion. Nobody was around for the fires, which raged all night before neighbors even realized, yet the motive, using fire to cause fear, was enough for it to be considered a hate crime.
Last year David Crawford, a former Police Chief in Maryland, was sentenced to life in prison after targeting 6 houses with fire, even though none of the fires caused personal injury to anyone (except himself). After sentencing, the State’s Attorney Richard Gibson said, "The horror and nature of arson is so deeply powerful in its impact and complete in its destruction in the victim's peace of mind that it is only fitting the defendant spend the rest of his natural life behind bars."5
In Seattle, a man received 5 years of prison/probation after he started a fire in a dumpster behind the nightclub Queer/Bar, even though he was arrested only minutes after starting the fire and nothing else was damaged.6
The fires were used to push people out, when those people are identified as a protected group, the arson is tried as a hate crime. If the Cabo Rojo case were viewed as a hate crime, the discourse would not be about tourism, but rather about how white people are abusing their power anew before Trump even starts his second term, testing the waters of domestic terrorism.
Unfortunately, if this were to be tried as a race-related hate crime, it would be the first of its kind in Puerto Rico. While Puerto Rico actually has a relatively robust hate crime statue, even including protections for crimes committed against houseless people, the only implementation has ever been regarding gender identity. Despite the many anti-Black crimes, including ones I wrote about here, none have been tried as a hate crime, if they are tried at all. Crucially, the egregious gender-based attacks, including the murder of Alexa Negrón Luciano were all picked up by the FBI to be tried as hate crimes. In the case of this American tourist, however, there have been crickets.
There’s a trend amongst the white people that come here
Here are a few more points of context. Keep in mind that there are majority white areas that Danielle could have stayed in. There would have been no language barrier and less culture shock, maybe she would not have let her anger reach annihilation. Just 30 miles north of where she stayed there’s Rincón, which our friends have called Little America because it’s long been a white haven with gated communities and public signs in English instead of Spanish. We’ve personally experienced how businesses there will even prejudice against Spanish speakers while bowing to English speakers, likely what Danielle was after.
There are three types of white people who move here. For generations there have been rich white people moving here to pay less in labor and taxes in a place they call paradise. Mixed with them are the white people who imbue the aesthetics of hippies with the politics of libertarians, seeing Puerto Rico as the last vestige of the “wild west” where they can do whatever they want if they keep a low profile. Both groups have come in larger numbers since the start of the pandemic, finding that they can keep a stateside income while living on a beach in Aguadilla, and they’ve brought a new group of white people: preppers who are buying up tracts of family farmland, arming themselves to the teeth, and building off-grid bunkers.
There are two big troubles that all three of these groups have in common: None came because they particularly love Puerto Ricans, and all of them have much in common with the MAGA right. The American settler project has only expedited in the last two decades, as Puerto Ricans move out and white foreigners move in. Many have made the connection to what Israel does to Palestinians in the West Bank.7 The comparison isn’t perfect, as the extreme violence of Israel’s apartheid apparatus is unmatched, but on the eve of Trump’s retaking of the White House, American settlers are showing once more the level of violence they are willing to employ when they don’t get what they want.
We cannot continue to view this issue through the lens of tourism, because that frames the incident as a random occurrence, a crazy vacation, when the facts are that she came to a Puerto Rican neighborhood and tried to incinerate it. And the only reason it didn’t spread and cause further destruction is because our neighborhoods are constructed out of cement instead of wood. If authorities don’t denounce it as a targeted hate crime, I seriously worry about what the next four years will bring us.
https://www.latinxproject.nyu.edu/intervenxions/the-shadow-of-palestine-in-puerto-rico