“We’ve heard a lot of the discourse around the economic crisis as being just that: that … this is just a narrow debtor and creditor issue, when what we’re really talking about is a much larger humanitarian crisis,” said Natasha Lycia Ora-Bannan, associate counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF. “You can’t divorce economic policies from social policies.”
The island has more than $70 billion in debt, a poverty rate of 45 percent, and a shrinking population. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans are estimated to be leaving the island each year in what is known as the Puerto Rican Diaspora. The declining economic situation and lack of jobs are pushing many Puerto Ricans to seek better opportunities in states like Florida, Ohio, and Maryland, all of which have growing Puerto Rican populations.
Unlike Detroit, Michigan, Puerto Rico is unable to restructure its debt via bankruptcy due to technicalities in legislation. Its ability to resolve the debt crisis is therefore limited, and its fate increasingly appears to be in the hands of the U.S. Congress and the president.
Republicans in Congress recently released a draft bill for the island that involved putting Puerto Rico’s finances under the governance of a “presidentially appointed oversight board.”
That plan has met criticism from Puerto Rican politicians. Eduardo Bhatia, president of the Puerto Rican Senate, told Caribbean Business in March that “people who hand over democracy in exchange for economic security end up losing both things. I don’t have a problem with a board that advises, that supervises, one with which we can have a discussion. But we will never accept a board that has control over Puerto Rico’s affairs.”
Until the debt crisis is resolved, funding for essential services will be constrained.
