Debt-choked Puerto Rico on Tuesday “narrowly avoided” economic default by scrounging together an 11th-hour payment toward its $354 million debt to Wall Street vulture funds, an unexpected move likely resulting from the island’s submission to austerity cuts and other drastic government measures.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), speaking after a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday morning with Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla, said the commonwealth had “narrowly avoided a complete default” on its total $72 billion debt through “unsustainable financial gymnastics.”
Hedge funds have recommended closing schools and laying off teachers to close the debt, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said Puerto Rico should raise taxes and lower the minimum wage. Meanwhile, Wall Street institutions like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and UBS, which bought up huge chunks of Puerto Rico’s debt at a discount and have been forcing the commonwealth into an ever-deepening deficit to meet payments, have rejected Garcia Padilla’s attempts to reduce or restructure the debt.
A default could trigger further government austerity and lawsuits by bondholders—destructive prospects on an island where 45 percent of its 3.5 million residents lives in poverty. Puerto Rico previously defaulted on its debt in August.
“It’s not that Puerto Ricans are lazy people who don’t want to pay their debt,” former New York state assemblyman Nelson Denis told the Guardian on Tuesday. “It’s extremely rich corporations that are socking it to both the very poor in Puerto Rico and to middle-class Americans.”
However, according to Denis, some of the blame also lies with the Garcia Padilla administration, which he said willingly allowed private institutions to take over Puerto Rico’s deteriorating infrastructure. “These motherfuckers are in league with their Wall Street captors and there’s no other way to put it,” Denis told the Guardian. “It’s sickening.”
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