SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—The head of Puerto Rico’s largest public university announced on Tuesday that she has resigned just hours before she faced arrest for failing to reopen an institution that has been shut down by a student strike for nearly two months.
Interim President Nivia Fernandez stepped down along with three members of the board of governors of the University of Puerto Rico, including the board’s president and vice...
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Interim head, three members of board of governors step down amid student strike, budget cuts
The gates of the University of Puerto Rico are chained shut and festooned with protest signs and students’ desks.
Facing jail time for failing to reopen a school that students have shut down for nearly two months, the university president quit on Tuesday — the second to do so this year. So many members of the board of trustees resigned that the board no longer has the quorum required to hire a new boss.
The accreditation of eight of the school’s 11 campuses was put on probation late last week, and next year’s admissions at the main Rio Piedras campus dropped 25 percent.
The University of Puerto Rico has been a consistent source of pride, a place that educates many of the island’s doctors, lawyers and engineers at a cost that makes it attainable even for people from the humblest backgrounds.
Now, the cascading financial crisis that forced Puerto Rico to declare a form of bankruptcy earlier this month also threatens to decimate its public university. The school receives 90 percent of its funding from a central government that cannot pay $123 billion in bond debt and pension obligations. A financial oversight board that runs Puerto Rico’s affairs has said the university’s budget needs to be sliced by about half. The crisis is both imperiling its future and pitting students against one another — those keeping the institution closed versus those eager to resume their studies.
University supporters say the cuts are jeopardizing an institution that helped Puerto Rico transform from an agrarian society dependent on sugar and tobacco into a modern middle-class society and whose graduates are essential to rescuing the island from its fiscal quagmire.
“The University of Puerto Rico was the most important cultural and social project that Puerto Rico had in the 20th century, and it was going to continue being so in the 21st century,” said Silvia Álvarez Curbelo, a historian who published an anthology about the history of the university. “I have been at the university for 30 years — I will retire next year — and I have seen many of these movements. This is the worst.
“Because in previous events like this, there wasn’t this feeling that everything is collapsing, and there’s no light at the end of any tunnel at all.”
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Students protesting outside the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan earlier this month. The financial crisis that forced Puerto Rico to declare a form of bankruptcy also threatens to decimate the university.CreditErika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
The University of Puerto Rico was founded in 1903, mostly as a place to educate teachers. It now has nearly 60,000 students across 11 campuses, and is considered the cradle of Puerto Rico’s leftist thought. Known affectionately as “La Yupi,” U.P.R. offers 452 degree-based programs, including 40 at the doctorate level, a medical school and a law school.
The 114-year-old university, with some 60,000 students across 11 campuses, is seen as Puerto Rico’s crown jewel.CreditErika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
But tuition is just $56 a credit, so a full course load costs less than $1,700 a year. At least half the students are dependent on federal Pell grants, meaning they pay no tuition at all, and even get a subsidy for living expenses.
In a desperate mission to raise revenue and cut costs, the administration drafted a plan to increase tuition based on a family’s ability to pay. Half the student body would see no increase, but the highest-earning parents, about a quarter of the student body, would see tuition more than double.
For some students, that was too much. “Zero cuts” and “zero tuition increases” became the mantra of the student body.
“The problem isn’t raising the tuition, it’s raising the tuition to pay bondholders,” said Loderay Bracero Marrero, an environmental science major who is a spokeswoman for the student committee. “If you tell me you are going to raise tuition so you can offer more courses, that’s different. These cuts are not to improve, they are to impoverish.”
The school’s chief financial officer, Norberto González, noted that many students pay far less for college than they did for high school.
He said the government had not been clear on how much the university would have to cut from its $900 million budget, but the figures bandied about in internal government documents — anywhere from $241 million to $512 million by 2026 — would be impossible to accomplish without gutting the university. Officials have already spent years cutting back on bonuses, raises and other academic expenses like books and conferences. The university proposed a plan that phases in more modest cuts, but the board of trustees rejected it.
“We are willing to right-size or downsize or whatever you want to call it,” Mr. González said. “The students’ requests are noble and all, but the university does not have the control over the majority of the things they are requesting.”
Dr. Carlos Pérez Díaz, an alumnus who was president of the board of trustees until his resignation Tuesday, said students should be protesting somewhere else, like maybe the governor’s mansion.
“I feel sad, frustrated,” Dr. Pérez said in an interview last week, before he stepped down. “It doesn’t matter what you try to do. You can offer something, but it’s not enough.”
The governor’s office has said that it agrees that the proposed cuts are too severe and that it hopes to reach a compromise with the fiscal board in New York.
Some campuses had already voted to lift the student strike. On Thursday night, the main campus voted to lift it when the university board of governors ratifies a compromise that would delay tuition increases for a year. But the board still has eight of 14 seats vacant, so ratification will not happen immediately.
A group of six law students had taken the university to court to force it to reopen. A judge sided with them, and began fining the university $1,000 a day. The school asked the police to help, but authorities have been unwilling to engage in a potentially violent clash with students.
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From left, Carlos Villegas, Rosaima Rivera, Anamar Menéndez, Astrid Burgos and Gabriela Firpi at the San Juan Judicial Center. They are University of Puerto Rico law students suing to stop the strike and resume classes.CreditErika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
Students stormed a board of trustees meeting, and a May 1 protest turned violent, so already lawmakers have submitted several new bills that would increase penalties on acts of disobedience.
“We see it as a kidnapping of a public institution,” said Anamar Menéndez, 36, one of the law students who sued to get classes to resume. “If the students want to strike, fine, let them strike, but the university has to offer its services.”
Carlos V. Villegas, 25, another plaintiff, said the students conflated the right to free speech with the right to take over a public building.
“People are confusing freedom of speech and vandalism,” he said.
But even some of the creditors are taken aback by the proposed cuts.
“I think there is little question that the cutbacks that are being proposed relative to the University of Puerto Rico are draconian,” said Nader Tavakoli, the former chief executive of Ambac Assurance, an insurer of Puerto Rican bonds.
Mr. Tavakoli said although students had a right to be upset, there had been too much emphasis on despair, which, like the deep university cuts and the strike itself could wind up having unintended consequences.
“That lack of aspiration, lack of hope, is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “The numbers we are seeing — $280 million, $450 million — those are just too big. People need to sit in a room and have a dialogue to do this in a way that’s sensible and doesn’t completely change the nature of a public institution that has done a lot of good.”
AT&T, Coca-Cola, JetBlue Airways and the New York Yankees announced Tuesday that they would not participate in the 60th annual parade.The companies and baseball team join Goya Foods, which cited a “business decision,” and several New York City police organizations in parting ways with the annual event. This year’s parade is set to take place on June 11 in Manhattan.
“While we are saddened and disappointed by certain sponsors pulling out of our Parade, we respect their views and decision to do so,” the National Puerto Rican Day Parade’s board of directors said in a statement Tuesday. “Equally, we respect our Parade’s mission and commitment to inclusiveness, and the responsibility of representing the broadest possible blend of voices that make up the Puerto Rican community.”
Despite publicly pulling out of the parade, Coca-Cola, the Yankees and JetBlue have all vowed to continue their financial support of the scholarships given by the Puerto Rican Day Parade organization.
“The New York Yankees are not participating in this year’s Puerto Rican Day parade,” the Yankees organization told USA Today on Tuesday. “However, for many years, the Yankees have supported a scholarship program that recognizes students selected by the parade organizers. To best protect the interests of those students, and avoid any undue harm to them, the Yankees will continue to provide financial support for the scholarships, and will give to the students directly.”
SCOTT OLSON VIA GETTY IMAGES
U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), right, and Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera, center, attend a rally on May 18 in Chicago.
In a statement to HuffPost, the parade’s board of directors applauded the sponsors who intended to continue funding the scholarship program and expressed hope that any future companies would follow suit if they chose not to participate in this year’s parade.
“While we cannot predict whether other sponsors and/or organizations might choose not to join us on Fifth Avenue this year, we expect they will do so with the same level of responsibility and professionalism as JetBlue and the Yankees,” the statement said. “This community deserves no less.”
The parade is expected to honor López Rivera as its first “National Freedom Hero.” He was a member of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (known by its Spanish initials as FALN) and served more than 35 years in prison until former President Barack Obama commuted his sentence in January.
López Rivera was released last week and received a hero’s welcome at a Chicago rally that recognized him for his controversial actions fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence in the 1970s and 1980s.
The FALN was linked to over 100 bombings in five cities across the United States, including Chicago and New York, during that period. López Rivera was sentenced in 1981 for his involvement with the militant group but was never linked to specific bombings. He was instead convicted on multiple charges that included seditious conspiracy and plotting to overthrow the U.S. government.
The NYPD Hispanic Society and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association also issued statements boycotting the parade. The PBA pointed to the four officers and detectives injured by the FALN attack at Fraunces Tavern in 1974, which killed four people.
“The annual Puerto Rican Day Parade is a magnificent celebration of a proud heritage shared by New Yorkers and police officers alike,” PBA President Patrick J. Lynch said in a statement on their website Thursday. “Honoring a remorseless terrorist who refuses to condemn acts of violence effectively steals the parade from the good and honorable people who are proud of their Puerto Rican heritage.”
That same day, the board of directors doubled downed on their decision to honor López Rivera:
The history of Oscar López Rivera is complicated, some call him a terrorist and others call him a freedom fighter, but Oscar López Rivera, as the New York Times recently wrote, was never charged with carrying out acts of violence. After 35 years in prison, 12 years of which were spent in solitary confinement, President Obama concluded, that at the age of 74, Oscar should be free.
It has been disappointing and unfortunate to see the progress of this Parade undermined by the circulation of false information, and the targeting of loyal sponsors by people who disagree with the Parade’s decision to recognize the freedom of Oscar López Rivera.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took a similar stance when he announced he’d be marching in the parade during a Tuesday news conference in the Bronx.
“I believe this parade is a very, very important part of the life of our city,” de Blasio said, according to The New York Times. “The parade committee made a choice this year on someone to honor. That does not change the basic nature of the parade. Whether you agree with that choice or not, it’s still the Puerto Rican parade and my point is, I will be there to honor the Puerto Rican people. I intend on marching. It’s as simple as that.”
In 2014, the Puerto Rican Day Parade honored Calle 13 rapper René Pérez without any controversy despite the artist’s vocal anti-imperialist stance. That same year, the parade also launched an awareness and solidarity campaign for the liberation of López Rivera.
The head of Puerto Rico's largest public university announced on Tuesday that she has resigned just hours before she faced arrest for failing to reopen an institution that has been shut down by a student strike for nearly two months.
Interim president Nivia Fernandez stepped down along with three members of the board of governors of the University of Puerto Rico, including the board's president and vice president.
"Unfortunately, the university is being targeted by a disproportionate ... and unfair funding cut that not only places the university's physical integrity at great risk, but also the capacity it still has to attract top-quality teachers," the board members who resigned said in a letter to Gov. Ricardo Rossello.
The University of Puerto Rico serves more than 50,000 students across 11 campuses. The system already has been hit with nearly $350 million in cuts in recent years, and professors have been denied sabbaticals and salary increases.
The proposed cuts are among several measures the federal control board is pursuing to reduce government spending as the U.S. territory prepares to restructure a portion of its $73 billion public debt load.
A judge had threatened to arrest Fernandez if she did not present a plan to end the strike by Tuesday afternoon. Fernandez had asked police and justice officials for help in reopening the school, but they refused to intervene.
Fernandez said she met with board members until late Monday night but said they chose not to proceed with possible strategies to reopen the university. She provided no further details.
"I have full confidence in a prompt and fair conclusion to the current and unusual situation that we find ourselves in," she said in her resignation letter.
Fernandez served for 13 weeks after the previous president resigned along with several top-ranking university officials in late February, also in protest of the looming cuts.
The university has been fined $1,000 daily ever since a judge ordered it be opened by May 11. Students voted earlier this month to indefinitely extend the strike, and they are scheduled to hold another meeting on the issue on Thursday.
Late last week, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education placed eight of 11 University of Puerto Rico campuses on probation in part because of the strike. The island's university system remains accredited.
FILE- The University of Puerto Rico's main gate is barricaded during a protest against a tuition increase in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Wednesday, April 23, 2014. AP
The university's gates have remained locked and blocked by piles of desks and tires since late March as students protest $450 million in budget cuts sought by a federal control board overseeing the island's finances. The island's governor has proposed the cuts be reduced to $241 million, but no deal has been reached.
Last week, events in Puerto Rico continued to reach new levels of tension and emotion as the island’s bankruptcy proceedings began, the university’s month-long strike was threatened by court maneuverings, and the long-held political prisoner Oscar López Rivera emerged from house arrest to assertively spread an anti-colonial message to a people long denied sovereignty.
López Rivera, whose sentence was commuted in January by Barack Obama, had been in prison since 1981, convicted of seditious conspiracy and other offenses as a member of the FALN, a radical Puerto Rican independence group that carried out bombings in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, in the 1970s and early ’80s. Because of Puerto Ricans’ universal yearning for national pride, the still-defiant 74-year-old appeals to a broad swath of islanders regardless of political affiliation.
Even though López Rivera was not convicted of any of the FALN’s bombings, he has been branded by some as a terrorist, and several corporate sponsors of this year’s Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York—including AT&T, the New York Yankees, and JetBlue—have withdrawn their sponsorship to protest the parade organizers’ decision to honor López Rivera.
Yet even as López Rivera denied he was a terrorist, pacifically aligning himself with Puerto Rico’s resistance movements as well as Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ solidarity, his return home was almost overshadowed by the dizzying pace of events. Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood government, in conjunction with the US-imposed Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB, or La Junta, as it is commonly known on the island), invoked Title III of the PROMESA act to launch bankruptcy-like proceedings and moved to stifle dissent as the looming reality of austerity cuts hung over the island’s 3.4 million residents.
The tension-filled month began with protest on May Day in San Juan, when several streams of demonstrators—worker and student groups, faculty members, a feminist contingent, street artists, and an increasingly politicized middle class—coming from different points around the city converged at the Milla de Oro (Golden Mile) in the Hato Rey business district. The crowd, numbering tens of thousands, came to hear a mix of speeches and musical acts on a stage set up in front of the World Plaza building, which once housed the failed Westernbank and which in April had acquired a new tenant: the FOMB, which had been put into place by Congress’s PROMESA act last year.
The protest was massive and peaceful; there was an almost festive atmosphere. Street-theater actor Israel Lugo, a University of Puerto Rico alumnus whose group The Tactical Operations Unit of Police Clowns participated in the hope of cooling tensions and underlining the sadness of repression, felt that “despite the indignation we shared, we were having a day where there was some hope.”
Yet just as the event was coming to an end, a sudden surge of unsanctioned vandalism and police violence left clouds of tear gas choking protesters, media members, and march observers and mediators alike. By week’s end, the governor and the FOMB invoked Title III of PROMESA, beginning a legal process leading to a form of bankruptcy—and intensifying the air of uncertainty over the island’s future.
The Milla de Oro represents the triumph of modernity that US colonialism intended to bring to Puerto Rico in the 1950s and ’60s. A palm-tree-lined boulevard called Luis Muñoz Rivera Avenue, festooned with glass-box buildings housing banks and corporate offices, signaled a level of prosperity that didn’t exist in the rest of the Caribbean. Fifty years later, the island territory is deep in the throes of a fiscal crisis driven by a $70-plus billion bond debt, as well as an additional $49 billion pension obligation to government employees.
The PROMESA board’s original model was the one created in the wake of New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis, whose financier-driven management solutions greatly aided the rise of Donald Trump as a major real estate player. The one that intervened in the recent Detroit bankruptcy produced debt-cutting settlements, but that debt was only $18-20 billion, and, like the one in New York, it was imposed by elected officials who were elected by local residents. In Puerto Rico, PROMESA, imposed to tame an exponentially larger debt, is viewed as an external force that is symptomatic of the lack of democracy on the island and emblematic of Puerto Rico’s second-class status.
The crowd gathered around the stage on Muñoz Rivera Avenue was unaware that just around the corner on Bolivar Street, masked rogue demonstrators were throwing stones at the main headquarters of Banco Popular, the island’s largest bank, shattering some of its largest windows. Police—including regular forces and the riot squad—reacted slowly, moving into the area and marching en masse toward the main stage down the block. They launched tear-gas canisters and pushed into the crowd as stage announcer Millie Gil, a local media personality, was desperately calling for calm. “Don’t be provoked.… We don’t want the headlines of tomorrow’s newspapers to say that we lost control of a peaceful demonstration!” she pleaded.
But the police, after a negotiated standoff, engaged in continual confrontations with protesters, pushing, striking, and gassing peaceful demonstrators and masked provocateurs alike. Images of vandals, tear gas, and students running under late-day thunderstorms dominated the evening news. It was a tailor-made media op for the rightist statehood party (PNP) government. Governor Ricardo Rosselló held a press conference denouncing the vandalism, but he recklessly lumped the vandals together with the marchers. His tone of moral opprobrium was underscored the next morning in another staged media tableau that showed him helping workers sweep up shattered glass in front of the Banco Popular tower.
The mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, as well as Representative Manuel Natal Albelo, who was one of the first elected officials to champion the idea of an independent debt audit, quickly denounced the governor’s equation of peaceful protesters with vandals. The ACLU, led by William Ramírez, held a lengthy press conference in which Ramírez, who was still recovering from the effects of tear gas he was exposed to while acting as a negotiator and observer, displayed tear-gas canisters and even rubber bullets that had been used by the police. His statement directly contradicted one made earlier by police Superintendent Michelle Hernández, who denied their use. Ramírez also criticized violations of protocol (including no warnings, and plainclothes officers not wearing badges) and excessive use of force.
In addition, eyebrows were raised when a lawsuit was filed by Banco Popular on the afternoon of the protests and disturbances, naming 42 plaintiffs, including community organizations, labor unions, and “unknown demonstrators.” Ariadna Godreau-Aubert, a human-rights lawyer who is part of a Legal Action Committee that is trying to draw attention to SLAPP lawsuits, or frivolous suits brought to intimidate people who take part in demonstrations, found the suit to be highly irregular and part of a disturbing pattern.
“This suit came out just an hour after the events, and even the president of the Banco Popular said that the lawsuit was made in a preventive way, that they had it ready in case something happened. You can’t have a demand ready in case something happens—lawsuits exist to remedy real damages and include people that caused real damages, not something prepared or speculative,” said Godreau-Aubert. She pointed out that a previous suit against demonstrators engaging in another protest in late April was dismissed because of lack of evidence.
This past Friday, Governor Rosselló signed into law revisions in the penal code that will increase criminal penalties against demonstrators who wear masks, seemingly aimed against students and young protesters; will make it a crime to obstruct construction sites (up to three years in prison), aimed at union protests; will impose a fine of up to $30,000 for interfering with tourist activities, spurred perhaps by the closure of an access road to the airport on May Day, and for obstructing access to or functions in health or government offices or learning institutions.
This last element was particularly relevant because, just days after the governor and the PROMESA board invoked the Title III clause and its modified bankruptcy provision, the education secretary announced that 179 public schools around the island would be closed. While the continued population exodus from the island has pushed down the number of enrolled students, the closures will still heavily affect poor and working-class areas and place on many families an increased burden of extra commuting time to more distant schools. Some schools and parents are already announcing plans to protest.
TITLE III AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Governor Rosselló’s decision to request the invocation of Title III was met by derision from many political observers, who noted his previous insistence that the island could pay its debt in a restructuring process that would not require bankruptcy proceedings. He has also been harassed by the centrist Commonwealth Party Senator Eduardo Bhatia, who filed an injunction to force the release of a copy of the proposed budget the governor sent to José Carrión, the head of the FOMB, arguing that the island’s citizens are entitled to full transparency. Yet most observers seemed unsure of what to expect—for the moment, the 22 known litigation proceedings against the government to collect debt, which had been frozen, will be absorbed into the framework of Title III. The Puerto Rican government and several financial-sector observers have given reassurances that Puerto Rico will now engage in an “orderly” process of resolving its debts, but no one is quite sure what that will mean.
The pseudo-bankruptcy proceedings, which could take from six months to several years, began on May 17 and are presided over by New York District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain, an African American appointed by Bill Clinton in 1996. Swain, who spent most of the session establishing rules for arguments—and quirkily banning the use of all colognes and fragrances among those in the courtroom because of her allergies—is faced with a process that has no legal precedent.
The primary order of business for her will be to focus on the fate of the general obligation bonds ($12.7 billion), which are backed by a constitutional provision, and the COFINA bonds ($17.3 billion), which are tied to an 11.5 percent sales tax imposed several years ago. While the matters will be considered “jointly,” creditors from the two sides are warring against each other, each claiming priority.
For Rolando Emmanuelli Jiménez, a bankruptcy lawyer who has become well-known on the island for his explainer lectures and book about PROMESA, the move to Title III was “badly needed, but you don’t celebrate what is badly needed.”
There are many troublesome aspects about the debt-restructuring negotiations: Pensioners remain a potent force and are attempting to claim a higher priority on a debt that adds $49 billion to the already contested $70-plus billion bond debt; the government may be forced to sell off a substantial amount of its properties to lessen the blow of the apparent “haircuts,” or downward negotiation of payouts to creditors; collective-bargaining agreements with unions representing government workers may be suspended to renegotiate contracts; and the “absolute priority” rule in PROMESA for the general-obligation debt may mean it must be paid in full.
Emmanuelli Jiménez sees some silver linings in the process. He thinks the audit report that will be done under PROMESA—even though it will not be anywhere near as thorough as an independent audit—may find that billions of dollars of COFINA debt could be declared “non-priority debt,” which could further postpone payment of it or even result in some of its being eliminated. He also thinks that Swain may be sympathetic to ordinary Puerto Ricans in some of her rulings, since, “as an African American, she knows about marginalization and discrimination.”
“But let’s face it, she’s an imperial judge,” continued Emmanuelli Jiménez, albeit one, “like the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández says, with garras suaves [soft claws].” The problem remains a political one, in which Governor Rosselló, he says, will be limited to “carrying water for the Junta and the judge. The governor has practically ceded control of the immense majority of the issues that have to do with the development of public policy. When the Junta approves the budget the legislature can’t do much because it’s already been certified. The whole democratic process breaks down.”
Another political problem emerged for the Junta last week with the release of a new report, “The Looting of Puerto Rico’s Infrastructure Fund,” by the Hedge Clippers, a watchdog group that, according to its website, is “working to expose the mechanisms hedge funds and billionaires use to influence government and politics.” The report systematically details how FOMB member Carlos García, in his previous roles as a Banco Santander executive and later president of Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank, diverted $1 billion intended for infrastructure improvement and maintenance to “a series of financial transactions that were intended to bolster the island’s credit rating, but which became tied up in the issuance of billions in new debt.” The same day, Puerto Rico AFL-CIO president José Rodríguez Báez called for García’s resignation.
THE ROAD AHEAD: MORE AUSTERITY CUTS, MORE PROTESTS
Despite the appearance of an orderly debt-restructuring process, the situation in Puerto Rico remains dire. The problem is that making sustainable payments on the debt requires austerity measures that will undercut any stability that the Title III process promises. The balanced-budget requirement for the next four years, for example, is likely to provoke severe crises, with looming battles over which services—the university, the police, health care—will be deemed “essential.”
“The requirement of a balanced budget could be achieved hypothetically, but only under conditions that will have catastrophic effects,” said Ian Seda-Irizarry, an economist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, especially given “the explicit vision of the FOMB regarding the need to cut government spending in an economy that is in free-fall and in areas that will not affect everybody equally, with the working class and small businesses bearing the brunt of the adjustment.”
“The new budget goes into effect on July 1,” said Emmanuelli Jiménez. “Most municipalities will be affected, budgets will be slashed, [including] the [proposed $450 million] cuts to the university; the new series of taxes and fines; health care. It’s going to be very difficult for the middle class. Who’s going to be able to pay both the car and the mortgage?”
This past weekend student assemblies in seven out of the 11 campuses, including the main branch in Rio Piedras, rejected a preliminary agreement with government officials to reopen the university gates, prolonging the strike. The proposed university budget cuts still loom—Junta president José Carrión announced on May 12 that the cuts, estimated at $450-512 million over the next eight years, were “non-negotiable”—but the FOMB board has since agreed to meet with students on May 24. Meanwhile, on May 22, Judge Lauracelis Roques Arroyo—who had earlier ruled that the university must reopen to comply with a suit brought by some students who argued that their right to go to classes has been impeded by the strike—threatened interim university president Nivia Fernández with arrest if she didn’t come up with a concrete plan for reopening. The next day, Fernández resigned, along with three members of the university’s governing board.
Another general strike is rumored for June 11, the day a plebiscite to vote on the island’s status is to be held. The plebiscite remains mired in controversy, with commonwealth and independence parties urging a boycott, and zero buzz coming from Washington, where Congress would consider the results.
“The general feeling is always going to be uncertainty, fear,” says first-year law student Carlos Sosa. “We are facing something that could affect all the sectors of the population, not just the students. And that same uncertainty about how it will happen, how fast it will happen, the fear that can be reflected, is a little overwhelming, oppressive. But you can see that there’s a multi-sectoral population united to confront this.”
A woman holds a sign up to police that reads in Spanish “The people are awake. Today we’ll make history” during a May Day protest against austerity
