Word: rico
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Cidra, high in the mountains of central Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marin was taking it easy. The island's first elected governor had shut himself off from the well-wishers who had turned his town house into a public place. Only for leathery jibaros (farmers) like Eustachio Pérez Guzman was the door still open. Eustachio had vowed that if victory came to the Popular Democratic Party, he would go and kneel before Don Luis. To finance the journey, he had sold two of his six chickens, set out from his remote western hamlet of Isabela...
Politician Muñoz tells his jibaros that the island's troubles are a problem in multiplication. Since 1899, Puerto Rico's population (now 2,200,000) has more than doubled. At present rates, it will rise another 36% by 1965. The island's sugar-based economy gives it an increasingly unfavorable trade balance with the U.S. (last year's: $140 million). U.S. expenditures for relief and public works have made Puerto Rico a vast and continuing WPA project...
...built the world's largest tax-financed project of individual houses (TIME, Aug. 23), started an $11 million hospital program, raised the percentage of the island's children in school from 49 to 58. But his chief tool for improvement is the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Co. Under the driving management of 38-year-old, Barcelona-born Teodoro ("Teddy") Moscoso Jr., PRIDC is plugging the island's advantages in openhanded tax concessions, cheap (as low as 15?-an-hour minimum) labor, and plentiful, government-owned electric power. Moscoso's salesmanship has already brought 42 new industries...
...Move. Muñoz hopes that PRIDC's program will make some 300,000 new industrial jobs by 1960. He also hopes to double the number of Puerto Ricans (5,000 in 1948) who go to the U.S. as migratory farm workers. Even that will not eliminate Puerto Rico's chronic labor surplus. For that, Muñoz has only one remedy: orderly but large-scale emigration. One movement he wants to discourage at all costs is the sort of undirected emigration that last year added 28,000 unwanted Puerto Ricans to the slums of Manhattan, Chicago, Gary...
Most important problem of Muñoz' administration would be relations with the new U.S. Congress (the Republican-controlled 80th had passed the law which made his election possible). Washington thought that U.S. legislators might balk at authorizing Puerto Rico to write its own constitution, as Muñoz has recommended. But there was a good chance that Congress would give Puerto Rico a healthy economic boost by extending the Social Security Act to the overpopulated island. That would fit right into Muñoz' plans for a more prosperous Puerto Rico...