Aliyya Swaby Photo
Zruzmilda Maldonado’s brother is having trouble running his cabinet shop in Puerto Rico, struggling with the effects of the territory’s economic crisis and $73 billion debt.
Maldonado joined Connecticut’s Puerto Rican activists and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal Friday afternoon at City Hall in calling on the federal government to enact policies to pull Puerto Rico out of its crisis and restructure its debt. The conference was one of several held across the nation to push President Barack Obama and Congress to action.
More than 250,000 Puerto Ricans live in Connecticut, according to the Hispanic Federation, which organized Friday’s conference.
Blumenthal called on his peers in Congress to allow Puerto Rico’s government agencies the option to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, which allows a municipality to restructure its debt and protects it from creditors. He and U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York are co-sponsoring that bill in Congress.
“Puerto Rico is treated unfairly and unlike any other single entity in the United States of America,” he said Friday. And the crisis will have a “ripple effect” on the mainland, he said.
Ingrid Alvarez, Connecticut State Director of the Hispanic Federation, said Obama should be held accountable to “infuse significant resources into the island’s economy,” in part by investing in clean energy development on the island and ordering the U.S. Navy to clean up Vieques and Culebra, used as military training ranges for years.
The island’s economic crisis is a direct result of policies made in Washington D.C., not San Juan, said Hartford State Rep. Edwin Vargas. “In many ways, Puerto Rico is a ward of the United States of America,” he said.
He said the economic “disaster doesn’t punish leadership,” but rather innocent citizens. “Some of those loans had a 20 percent interest rate. To me that’s usury,” Vargas said.
Luz Martinez is planning to return to Puerto Rico at the end of the month. She was born and raised there and came to Connecticut as an adult. Martinez will join her husband, who retired recently and has been living in Puerto Rico.
But she said many people she knows are making a reverse trip. Her niece, who has a college degree, can’t find a job in Puerto Rico and is planning to move to the mainland United States. Her friend recently moved to Puerto Rico and is now planning a move to Florida because she couldn’t “stand the water turned on and off every day,” Martinez said.
Are the residents of Puerto Rico open to statehood yet? Seems that claiming independence and demanding a bailout is incongruous.