Puerto Rico’s Recovery Depends on Getting Back Its Government
The island’s exit from bankruptcy won’t deliver it from hard economic decisions — the kind that are best made by elected officials whom voters can hold to account.
A step in the right direction.
Photographer: Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images
Last week, Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the Southern District Court of New York certified the plan that will sharply reduce Puerto Rico’s tax-supported debt and allow the island to emerge from bankruptcy.
Thus ends a five-year chapter in the largest and most complex municipal restructuring in U.S. history, a saga that unfolded as the commonwealth coped with devastating hurricanes and earthquakes, a U.S. president who held up $20 billion in aid, popular protests that toppled the island’s government and, finally, the onslaught of Covid-19.