After pursuing the above strategy for nearly a decade, the government’s debt reached $72 billion. In 2015, this outcome prompted then Governor Alejandro García Padilla to declare, in an unprecedented public address, that the debt was “unpayable” (Economist 2015; Cotto-Quijano 2018). Although some assumed that García Padilla’s declaration would elicit sympathy from the federal government, it instead alarmed political and finance capital interests, as it implied that Puerto Rico would not service its public debt, a possibility that had already been foreclosed by federal legislation in 1984 and Puerto Rico’s own 1952 constitution, which states that the island cannot declare bankruptcy, and requires it “to service its debt above all else” (Cintrón Arbasetti et al. 2017). As a result, on June 30, 2016—one day before the island failed to make a bond payment—Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). This federal law appointed a seven-member fiscal control board composed of individuals with deep ties to the banking and investment world—including some involved in producing the debt crisis—and granted them broad powers over Puerto Rico’s elected government to assure that creditors will be paid (Guadalupe 2016).