Puerto Rico's Bankruptcy Leaves US Island Facing Hard Times
San Juan (AFP) - In San Juan, chants of "the debt is illegal" and "colonial dictatorship" fill the morning air, as students from the University of Puerto Rico block a palm-lined avenue.
Across the street, a board of overseers imposed by Washington is meeting with student representatives to hear their demands as they mull ever deeper cuts to pull this "Greece of the Caribbean" out of bankruptcy.
To some, it's a necessary corrective to get a stumbling Puerto Rico back on its feet.
But to others like Mariana de Alba, a 27-year-old law student at the protest, it all smacks of colonial subjugation.
"What they've come to do is to cut back the public budget and the island's public services to give it to the big bond holders, to pay off a debt that we don't even know whether it is legitimate," she says.
The Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico – made up of seven members appointed by the US president and one by the island's governor – is tasked with getting a handle on the territory's crushing $74 billion debt.
But in an island proud of a cultural identity expressed in its language, food and music, the board is widely seen as having an intolerable stranglehold on Puerto Rican life.
As in Greece, where the arrival of the European "troika" repulsed much of the population, Puerto Rico had long shrugged off the dangers of unrestrained borrowing – until the crash.
But unlike its Mediterranean counterpart, Puerto Rico is not independent.
A former Spanish colony that became an American territory at the end of the 19th century, the island of 3.5 million has had its own government since 1952 when it became a "free associated state," or commonwealth, of the United States.
On Sunday, its inhabitants will vote on its relationship with the United States, in a non-binding referendum.
They can choose from three options – statehood, independence or another form of so-called "free association" or the status quo.
yahoo.com
Puerto Rico’s government is banking on a push for statehood to solve the structural issues that led to its financial crisis.
Puerto Ricans will vote Sunday to decide the territory’s status.
If statehood wins, as expected, the island will enact what’s known as the Tennessee Plan, an avenue to accession by which U.S. territories send a congressional delegation to demand to be seated in Washington.
Puerto Rico will send two senators and five representatives, chosen by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló (D), later this year, once the plan is put into action.
Statehood remains a long shot as many Republicans are wary of adding a 51st state that could add two Democratic senators and seven Democratic electors to the Electoral College.
Others, noting the examples of Alaska and Hawaii, both added to the union in 1959, say it can be difficult to predict how territories will vote as states.
“Those are the same people that 60 years ago said that Hawaii was going to be a super Republican state and Alaska was going to be super Democratic, and that’s why we brought them in together,” said José Fuentes Agostini, the head of Puerto Rican Republicans in the states.
The Puerto Rican Republican Party is adamantly pro-statehood. And the national Republican Party has supported statehood since the 1940s, most clearly in its 2016 platform.
thehill.com