Puerto Rico archbishop pleads with US for help

The leader of the Catholic Church in Puerto Rica has met with US congressional leaders and the White House to plea for help with the country’s debt crisis.

The Caribbean island is struggling under $72bn worth of debt to the US and the government has said it is rapidly running out of funds.

Schools have been closed, there have been dramatic cuts in social services and health care and unemployment has risen along with reductions in employee benefits for those still with jobs.

The Puerto Rican government has said that it will run out of money by the end of the year, despite posing an emergency 4 per cent tax on business transactions this week.

"We want to create more awareness of the urgency of the situation in Puerto Rico and the dangers that more austerity measures would create. In terms affecting human lives, especially the poor, we already have approximately 50 percent of our people living under the poverty level and obviously the impact of the current situation is creating unemployment and a new exodus of people," Archbishop Robert Gonzalez Nieves of San Juan told the Catholic News Service after meeting with congressional leaders.

The archbishop and the Rev. Heriberto Martinez Rivera, general secretary of the Puerto Rico Bible Society, met with congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House minority leader; Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren; the chief of staff for Republican senator Orrin Hatch; and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.

"They listened. They asked many questions," the archbishop said on the way to White House. "They promised to do more research and to become better informed. I sensed a desire to help."

The religious leaders reiterated their pleas during an afternoon briefing in the Rayburn House Office Building. Their message was marked with pastoral as well as political overtones as they explained how a handful of "predatory hedge funds" had purchased debt from investors at pennies on the dollar and are demanding payment in full on the public bonds they hold.

Businesses in Puerto Rico are suffering because of the debt crisis (PA)

They called such actions immoral and a prime example of the "profit-at-any-cost" form of capitalism decried by Pope Francis.

In recent months, Archbishop Gonzalez has become increasingly vocal in calling for debt relief. He wrote a column on the issue that appeared in a July issue of Time magazine and has spoken out numerous times since. He also was among 18 religious leaders in Puerto Rico, including four other Catholic bishops, who signed a widely distributed letter calling for the biblical concept of jubilee, or debt forgiveness, for the territory.

In the Washington meetings, Archbishop Gonzales said he called for legislation that would allow Puerto Rico to enter bankruptcy or to secure low-interest loans or emergency financing from the International Monetary Fund.

As a US territory, Puerto Rico is in a unique situation. It is not governed by the same US bankruptcy laws that pertain to state and local governments, and because it is not an independent nation, it cannot approach the IMF.

The two faith leaders also called upon the US government to look into avenues the Federal Reserve can take to restructure the debt without congressional action.

Austerity measures have taken their toll on Puerto Ricans, causing tens of thousands of people to leave the island for the mainland US since 2010. US Census data show that Puerto Rico's population declined by more than 177,000 to 3,548,397. Meanwhile, 41 percent of Puerto Ricans lives in poverty in 2014, according to the data.

Archbishop Gonzalez said the migration of Puerto Ricans northward affects the quality of family life because members are split between two locations.

"The father may be working in the States and the mother is working in some place in Puerto Rico," he explained. "It creates unnecessary hardships on marriage, the quality of family life, the relationship between parents and their children. In that sense, it affects the morale, it affects the spirit of the people."