Aurora Muriente Pastrana, who is both a law-school student and adjunct professor in the humanities department at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), had come to the steps of Puerto Rico’s capitol building on April 18 with a group of university students, professors, workers, and activists to raise their voices against the passage of a bill that would eliminate the government-funded Debt Audit Commission, which was created in 2015 to audit the island territory’s $70-plus billion in debt. In solidarity with a group called the Citizen Front for Auditing the Debt, the growing crowd began to stir when representatives of the Citizen Front were not allowed access to the building to observe the bill’s hearings, as is their constitutional right.

Throughout the 1960s, it used to be the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico was touted as the Showcase of Progress and Democracy in the Caribbean as a result of its accelerated industrialization, the development of its infrastructure, education and health systems and a constitutional system of government.

Puerto Rico has never been more than a profit center for the US. Now an unelected board governs the island as a de facto collection agency for hedge funds and Wall Street speculators.

“The economic situation was already pretty difficult before the government’s most recent measures,” Iván Vargas, a worker at Puerto Rico’s Water and Sewage Authority, said in a phone interview from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, Feb. 13.