López Rivera, convicto principalmente por conspiración sediciosa tras ser vinculado a las Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), cumplió 35 años y ocho meses en cárceles estadounidenses.

Pero, tras el entonces presidente Barack Obama conmutarle su sentencia el 17 de enero, efectivo cuatro meses después, quedará plenamente libre el próximo miércoles a las 8:00 a.m. 

Desde el 9 de febrero, López Rivera termina su condena bajo arresto domiciliario en la residencia de su hija Clarisa, en San Juan. A partir de las 3:30 p.m. del miércoles, se llevará a cabo la 'fiesta de pueblo' para darle el recibimiento formal en la plaza de Río Piedras. 

LAST WEEK Puerto Rico officially became the largest bankruptcy case in the history of the American public bond market. On May 3, a fiscal control board imposed on the island's government by Washington less than a year ago suddenly announced that Puerto Rico's economic crisis had " reached a breaking point." The board asked for the immediate appointment of a federal judge to decide how to deal with a staggering $123 billion debt the commonwealth government and its public corporations owe to both bondholders and public employee pension systems.

The announcement sparked renewed press attention to a Caribbean territory that many have dubbed America's Greece. The island's total debt, according to the control board, is unprecedented for any government insolvency in the U.S., and it is certain to mushroom quickly if no action is taken. Detroit's bankruptcy, by comparison, involved just $18 billion - one-ninth the size of Puerto Rico's.

Within days, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, acting under a provision of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (known as PROMESA), which was enacted last June, appointed federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain from the Southern District of New York to take over the Puerto Rico case. A former bankruptcy court judge who was appointed to the federal court by President Clinton, Swain famously presided over the long criminal trial of employees of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Few press reports on Puerto Rico's troubles, however, have bothered to examine the deeper issues behind this crisis.

The endgame for Puerto Rico's debilitating fiscal crisis has begun. Unable to manage a $74 billion debt that has accompanied a decade of recession, spikes in poverty, and a mass exodus of citizens, the island will now  turn to federal courts to approve a resolution with its creditors.

But in many ways nothing has changed for Puerto Rico. The congressionally-imposed fiscal oversight board, known locally as the junta, remains in control as lead negotiator in restructuring talks. Whether Puerto Rico's three million citizens get a fair deal or a continuation of harsh austerity depends almost entirely on seven unelected, unaccountable technocrats.

Frustrating journalists everywhere, what Puerto Rico did on Wednesday cannot be called "bankruptcy," because Congressional Republicans who  passed last year's PROMESA law didn't want to be saddled with such language. But the process under Title III of that law uses the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure to allow a court to administer and sanction restructured compensation for Puerto Rico's creditors. Like a Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the judge can force bondholders to take a haircut, even if they don't consent to the agreement. The result will amount to the largest-ever municipal not-bankruptcy bankruptcy in the United States.

But there are some key differences between Title III and a normal bankruptcy process. First of all, under Section 308(a) of PROMESA, the decision for who hears this case, bizarrely, is up to  Chief Justice John Roberts. He selected U.S. District Court Judge  Laura Taylor Swain to preside. While Swain has some experience in financial cases, including the prosecution of five former employees of Bernie Madoff, she's not a bankruptcy judge. And this puts the case in the heart of New York City, the nation's financial center, rather than Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico is neither a nation nor a state: it is a colony where 3.5m American citizens without federal representation languish while local politicians prefer to debate the island's political status - whether we should be a commonwealth, a state or an independent country - rather than address a starker reality: the island is  poor, its population is  ageing and its young people are  leaving.

And now those poor, ageing people are going to be asked to pay off an enormous debt incurred by their political leaders too lazy or too incompetent to have made forward-thinking political decisions for more than a generation.

For local politicians to directly blame the island's  $72bn "unpayable" - and yet coming-due - debt solely on US economic policy is not a good enough explanation: every colonial master needs an accomplice, and  Puerto Rico's political class has served their masters well.

Jay Fonseca, a noted Puerto Rican political commentator,  posted a chart from Caribbean Business which shows that from 1949-2014 - the period during which Puerto Rico was afforded a measure of self-rule through their governors - the island's accumulated debt grew from $910m to $78bn. (It's now  slightly greater than the island's total GNP.)

Spending and borrowing were always part of the island's political culture, and Wall Street banks  were always more than happy to lend. But having borrowed too much for decades, having spent just as much, having American companies leave after tax incentives expired in 2006, getting hit by the Great Recession and still borrowing more money from Wall Street, no one should be surprised that Puerto Rico is teetering on the brink of financial ruin and draconian austerity measures.

As Puerto Rico filed last week for the largest municipal bond bankruptcy in U.S. history, many believe that all Congress needs to do is take a step back and let the process work itself out. Others are also under the false impression that merely allowing the Financial Control Board set-up under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act ( PROMESA) federal law, will provide the necessary independence and structural reforms for the economy to magically bounce back after more than a decade of negative growth. Unfortunately, nothing could be farther from the truth.

The reality is that unlike other major debt restructuring cases in the U.S. and worldwide, Puerto Rico's 10-year plus economic depression is directly correlated to congressional policies that harmed the Commonwealth's economy. It was Congress and the ruling political party in Puerto Rico at the time that decided to phase out Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, a decision that provoked the loss of 75,000 manufacturing jobs over the following decade. The phase out ended in 2006 - the year the recession started in Puerto Rico. The inability to foster alternative economic strategies to mitigate the loss of federal tax incentives, and ill-advised spending decisions by the Island's politicians, aggravated the situation. Therefore, reasonable, and responsible remedies need to be put in place to correct this damage.

This syllabus provides a list of resources for teaching and learning about the current economic crisis in Puerto Rico. Our goal is to contribute to the ongoing public dialogue and rising social activism regarding the debt crisis by providing historical and sociological tools with which to assess its roots and its repercussions. The materials gathered help place the current moment within the larger political, social, and economic history of this U.S. territory and illuminate how both the crisis and its proposed solutions are impacting the daily lives of millions of Puerto Ricans both within the territory and across its growing diaspora.

Each topic has a few key texts along with some primary documents and multimedia and at times suggestions for further reading. We realize that the topic of debt is intimidating for many, so we we have sought to provide a carefully curated portal with various points of entry, along with a longer extended bibliography that will continue to grow with your suggestions.  We hope these materials can help make sense of a context that is still unfolding and which is yet to be fully historicized and analyzed. As events continue to unfold, we expect this syllabus to continue evolving and welcome suggestions emailed to us at  [email protected]  or by using the hashtag #PRSyllabus on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.

This project emerges from synergies between the  Unpayable Debt working group at Columbia University convened by Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Sarah Muir, and syllabus project leaders Yarimar Bonilla, Marisol Lebrón and Sarah Molinari. The goal of the working group is to raise critical questions about the role of debt in contemporary capitalism; the relationship between debt, migration, and violence; and the emergence of new political and cultural identities. #PRSyllabus is the first in a series of three syllabi on the theme of debt that Unpayable Debt will release between 2017 to 2018 in response to the crippling effect on debt on various regions of the world, including Detroit, the Caribbean, Argentina, and Greece.