How Hedge and Vulture Funds Have Exploited Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis
by Ed Morales
For this island teetering on bankruptcy, debt renegotiation is imminent—but on whose terms?
New York–born Puerto Rican activist David Galarza spent a recent sultry summer Monday picketing a meeting of bondholders by day and meeting with professionals, students, and working people in the evening concerned about the increasingly scary crisis over the island’s $72 billion debt. “I picked up a Freddy Krueger mask on the way down there—a little bit of theater, you know?” Galarza told me. He had come to get a look at Anne Krueger, the former IMF official behind a recent report suggesting solutions to the crisis—solutions that imposed draconian neoliberal “adjustment” burdens on the island’s distressed population—and didn’t hesitate to read her body language as she entered the building. “She looked a little mystified, like she was bewildered that we were even there. She seemed to have an ‘I’m trying to help you people’ attitude.”