Puerto Rico demonstrators battled police on San Juan’s streets as they marched against proposed cuts to retirement benefits and looser labor laws as the bankrupt island seeks to reduce $74 billion of debt, Bloomberg News reported. Thousands of protesters came out to contest retirement-plan changes that a federal board overseeing the bankrupt commonwealth’s finances says would help end years of overspending as it also seeks concessions from bondholders. Tension broke out as young protesters tried to enter the Hato Rey neighborhood, San Juan’s banking center, where helmeted police officers wearing gas masks formed lines to block them from advancing. The group called itself Se Acabaron Las Promesas, or the Promises are Finished, a play on the law called Promesa that Congress passed in 2016 to resolve Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. The Promesa law established the oversight board, which wants Governor Ricardo Rosselló to begin reducing pension benefits in 2020 by an average 10 percent for some retirees as the island’s largest retirement system has run out of cash. Rosselló and island lawmakers have rejected the proposed changes and workers are vowing to fight for the benefits that they’ve been promised.
