Multiple protests call for fiscal board’s exit on its 10th anniversaryv
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 49 minutes ago
- 2 min read
By THE STAR STAFF
A number of political groups demonstrated Monday morning in 14 locations across 11 municipalities to demand the immediate withdrawal of the Financial Oversight and Management Board from Puerto Rico on the entity’s 10th anniversary.
The main protest was held on highway PR-52 northbound near exit 177, where the group Se Acabaron las Promesas obstructed two lanes, causing considerable traffic congestion.
“Ten years is too much and we are fed up with the board at every corner. A decade later the people pay more for light, more for water, more for everything -- but for the worst service because all of the money goes to the bondholders,” said Emilio Nieves, spokesman for the Puerto Rican Workers Central, in a
written statement. “We have fewer schools, fewer pensions, less opportunities for development and
worse working conditions. They deny us even our constitutional rights of collective bargaining. Meanwhile, the government functions worse every day because it doesn’t have a sufficient budget or the capacity to decide about its own budget. The Board was supposed to allegedly resolve a crisis and what they did was aggravated it more while they and their friends get rich. We are in the street as a call to unite ourselves and find a way out.”
Julio López Varona, of the Citizen Commission for the Audit of Public Debt, said “[n]o one in Puerto Rico can say that we are better off than when the board arrived.”
“The data show the opposite; the Board was a colonial experiment that in these 10 years only promoted massive cuts to the public budget without measuring the damage to the population that it caused, and increased the cost of living and essential services, leaving the country in worse economic condition without addressing the real roots of the crisis,” he added. “The Board does not save us, it costs us.”
Other groups staging protests included the Union Solidarity Movement, Let’s Build Another Agreement, the Hostosian National Movement, Friends of the M.A.R. and the Citizens’ Victory Movement. In the San Juan metropolitan area they rallied at various bridges in Miramar, Baldorioty de Castro, Barbosa Avenue, Américo Miranda Avenue and the intersection of Roosevelt Avenue and Muñoz Rivera. Additional protests were planned throughout the morning and afternoon in Aguas Buenas, Dorado, Caguas, Juana Díaz, Isabela, Ponce, Yauco, Humacao, Cidra, Corozal and Mayagüez, among other places.
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