Fomento and PRIDCO

PRIDCO, the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company, is published as the island's industrial promotion agency. The lineage is older than the current site. Law 18 of May 1, 1942 created the Industrial Development Company (Compañía de Fomento Industrial). In 1950, a reorganization produced the Economic Development Administration, the body people called Fomento. The popular name stuck to buildings, ads, and job rumors long after the letterheads changed.

Fomento is the common name. PRIDCO is the company that still owns plants and offers sites. Same family of agencies, not a mysterious rebrand from nothing.

Moscoso's workshop did not only print brochures. It built factory shells, leased them, and walked mainland managers through the exemption. Bootstrap's physical plant is partly a real-estate record: industrial buildings on sites that had been cane or pasture, a road, a substation, a shift change. When a later generation inherited empty shells, it inherited Fomento's map.

PRIDCO today still lists properties and talks about incentives. That continuity matters because critics of tax policy sometimes write as if the island had only had a slogan. It had an agency with the keys to buildings. Whether those buildings were a good deal is a fiscal question for 936 and the later laws. The agency question is narrower: who recruited, who leased, who kept the inventory.

Fomento was not PREPA. It did not run the grid. It did not count hurricane dead. It did not draw flood zones. Those confusions happen when one word, development, is asked to mean the whole mid-century state. This essay keeps the word at industrial promotion. Energy, land, and storms have other pages.

Section 936 is federal fuel for the same plants. PRIDCO is the landlord and the local seller.

If you want a visit, you want a building, not a metaphor. The industrial parks that survive are the archive. The website is a catalog. Together they are enough to say: Fomento had an address. Bootstrap was not only a speech. A later tax law can change the tone. It cannot erase the shells already emptied, or the shift changes those shells once organized.

Sources: Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO). Freeze 2026-08-22.