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<h1 id="reader-title">Students of Puerto Rico Lead Resistance
Against PROMESA</h1>
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<p><span class="timestamp__date--published">04/09/2017
- Juan D</span><span
class="timestamp__date--published"><span
class="author-card__details__name">á</span>vila<br>
</span></p>
<p><span class="timestamp__date--published"></span>Last
Wednesday, April 5th, thousands of students from the
University of Puerto Rico (UPR) gathered at the
Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan to discuss
solutions to the austerity measures threatening the
higher education system of the country. Back on
March 9th, the Fiscal Control Board of Puerto Rico
that constitutes the Puerto Rico Oversight
Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) sent
a letter to Governor Ricardo Rosselló requesting the
government to come up with a plan that progressively
reduces the annual “subsidies” to the UPR by a
minimum of 450 million dollars by the year 2021 in
order to pay Wall Street bondholders. This
represents one-third of the university’s
consolidated budget.</p>
<p>One of the chants of the ongoing student movement
is: <em>“Si en vez de vino, bebieran malta, estos
recortes no harían falta”</em> (If instead of
wine, they drank malt, these cuts would not be
necessary). Although the fraud inside the
university’s administration is evident, the students
are aware that a reduction of 450 million dollars to
the university’s budget can only represent the
imminent destruction of the UPR as we know it. In
this sense, a real solution to the mismanagement of
funds in the university is the redistribution of
funds, but not its reduction. Among other items,
students are demanding the resignation of several
officials and bureaucrats including UPR’s Interim
President, Dr. Nivia Fernández.</p>
<p>Like baseball player Roberto Clemente, UPR students
decided to represent their country with dignity.
Continuing his humanist legacy, they batted the
austerity pitch voting in favor of a system-wide
strike involving all 11 campuses of the UPR starting
on April 6th and not ending until they are sure that
not a penny gets taken away from the university’s
budget.</p>
<p>After 12 hours of sitting in the stiff chairs of
the coliseum with empty bellies, debates, technical
difficulties and <em>batucada</em>, the student
assembly vowed to continue striking until the
following conditions are met:</p>
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<ol>
<li>No penalties for students participating in
striking activities.</li>
<li>A university reform that represents all
sectors from the university community.</li>
<li>The restitution of a civic commission that
audits Puerto Rico’s debt, and a moratorium on
debt payments before and during the auditing
process.</li>
<li>Zero tuition hikes and/or elimination of
enrollment exemptions.</li>
<li>Zero budget cuts to the University of Puerto
Rico.</li>
</ol>
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<p>These demands continue the same path of the ones
approved earlier by the Río Piedras campus, where
students have been striking since March 28th.
Veronica Figueroa Huertas, spokesperson of the
student movement in Río Piedras said, “If we need to
lose the semester […] we lose it, and retake it. I
think that to be able to come up with solutions that
change and transform the values of our society, and
that transform the system, we need to invest in
tools such as education. And we are the ones who
need to put pressure and organize politically to
make that happen.”</p>
<p>Figueroa Huertas is a senior student of psychology.
She is expected to graduate in May and already has
an offer to a Master’s Program. However, Figueroa
Huertas is willing to adjourn her professional and
academic future in order to ensure the existence of
a public university for the generations after her.
As Figueroa Huertas demonstrates, a selfless
interest is one of the motivations driving many
students to be at the gates closing the entire
institution.</p>
<p>Yet, what makes this strike different from others
is its “multi-sectoral struggle”, as the leaders of
the movement refer to it. The students’ claims go
beyond the spectrum of the university, and as their
demand #3 shows, they are asking for a complete
audit of Puerto Rico’s debt before the country
continues signing checks to bondholders without even
having a clue of what are they paying for. The type
of pressure that the students are employing for an
audit and a moratorium of the debt, establishes them
as the leading opposition against PROMESA and its
neoliberal agenda.</p>
<p>But Governor Ricardo Rosselló prefers to cover his
eyes before seeing an audit, and has recently said
that auditing the debt is not going to produce any
positive result. Aside from the pressure he should
be getting from the Fiscal Control Board not to
advocate for an independent audit, Ricardo Rosselló
might also be motivated to hold such a perspective
for personal reasons. His father’s administration
(Pedro Rosselló, 1992-2000) was arguably the most
corrupt in the short history of Puerto Rico, and is
almost certain to have many ties to an illegal debt.
Pedro Rosselló also privatized many assets of the
country, including the telephone company and the
health system.</p>
<p>Pedro Rosselló’s administration was also repressive
to protestors, and the <em>Partido Nuevo
Progresista </em>(PNP), the conservative
pro-statehood party of the Rossellos, has a
reputation of attacking university students. From
its beginnings, the PNP set this tone. The first
time the PNP was in power, the police of Puerto Rico
murdered twenty-one-year-old student Antonia
Martínez Lagares during a protest against militarism
and police repression in Río Piedras. And the latest
example was Luis Fourtuño’s administration, which
supported the police of Puerto Rico in constantly
beating and arresting students participating in the
2010 UPR strike against tuition hikes.</p>
<p>As of today, the police of Puerto Rico is keeping
its distance from the gates of the university,
except in Utuado’s campus where police entered the
night of April 5th trying to identify a leader, to
which students responded “We are all leaders.” The
students <em>picaron a‘lante</em> and it seems that
the government and the Fiscal Control Board
underestimated their capacity to organize and resist
so rapidly before the austerity measures began to be
implemented. But it might be just a matter of time
before police intervenes and the government tries to
break the student strike.</p>
<p>Additionally, the Fiscal Control Board has the
capacity to enforce law, which criminalizes protests
and free expression. A report released on June 3,
2016 by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
states, “The board could enforce laws of Puerto Rico
that prohibit employees of the territorial
government and its instrumentalities from
participating in a strike or lockout and, if
necessary, effectively nullify any new laws or
policies adopted by Puerto Rico that did not conform
to requirements specified in the bill.” In a recent
forum at the UPR in Río Piedras organized by the
group <em>Se acabaron las promesas</em>, lawyer
Ariadna Godreau Aubert emphasized the immunity that
PROMESA grants to members of the Fiscal Control
Board. Godreau Aubert stated, “You cannot sue the
Fiscal Control Board and, at the same time, besides
that lack of power to hold them accountable, there
are policies being made here to the service of the
board to repress the right to protest. This is also
part of PROMESA’s apparatus.”</p>
<p>In the meantime students are getting prepared and
their barricades hold the first line of defense.
Right now the campuses of the UPR are the bastions
of struggle against PROMESA, and their resistance
camps have been transformed into the new classrooms.</p>
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