The External Affairs office handles FEMA’s dealings with federal and local government agencies, municipalities, non profit organizations that have claimed recovery funds, requests for data from US Congressional leaders, and requests for information and interviews from the media and journalists. But even though FEMA has all that information, it hasn’t done anything,” the source said. “It’s like when a woman is a victim of gender violence and has to continue living with her attacker, despite the bruises.
Meanwhile, Donald Caetano, FEMA director of External Affairs for Region 2 - to which the Puerto Rico office reports - said, “As a general practice, FEMA cannot confirm or deny the existence or the status of any personnel investigations.”īut one of the sources said this pattern has been denounced “for more than two years and they haven’t done anything.” José Baquero Tirado, Federal Disaster Recovery Coordinator at FEMA for Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, did not respond either to a request from the CPI to comment on this matter. The CPI sought to learn the status of these complaints, whether they were dismissed or there were sanctions, but neither Muñoz Torres nor Agosto Castro responded to a request for an interview or reaction. However, almost two years after some of these complaints were submitted, the federal agency maintains both officials in their positions without penalizing them and has not offered a solution or protection to the people who have reported these behaviors, the two sources confirmed to the CPI, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “I have the obligation to report that my co-workers and I have been persecuted, pressured, harassed, degraded as professionals for being isolated and without access to information and for being fully assigned to irrelevant tasks and treated in an insulting way,” one of the complainants of that office told a superior at FEMA in a document to which the CPI had access. The CPI learned that at least four of those employees submitted formal claims before FEMA’s Office of Equal Rights, under the “ Notification and Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002” (known as the No Fear Act), the Equal Opportunity Employment protections (EEO) and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office for Civil Rights and the Freedom Policy Statement Against Discrimination, which covers FEMA.
The Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, in Spanish) learned of the situation through two separate sources who identify Juan Andrés Muñoz Torres and Ricardo Agosto Castro, director and deputy director of External Affairs, respectively, as the ones allegedly responsible for these harassment situations that have led to the resignation of employees, transfer of duties, assignment of unrelated tasks, and the roadblock to getting the work done in FEMA. An environment of hostility, pressure, workplace harassment, persecution, intimidation and discrimination based on age and gender seems to reign in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Office of External Affairs in Puerto Rico, according to documented incidents since 2019 by at least 10 employees, most of them women.
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