Estado de excepción interno en Puerto Rico: análisis socio-jurídico de la crisis económica y fiscal puertorriqueña

This paper analyses the legal-political strategies employed by the Puerto Rican and US government so as to address the economic and fiscal crisis that has been affecting Puerto Rico since 2006. This socio-legal analysis is developed from the perspective of the state of exception, which was proposed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. However, this paper proposes a new dimension to this paradigm, one that can be described as the internal state of exception. This paradigm addresses three dimensions of analysis that have not been developed by Agamben, and which can be defined by the correlation between colonialism, neoliberal economy and exceptionality. Thus, the paper examines the efficacy of the legal-political strategies implemented by the governments so as to address the economic and fiscal crisis. In addition, it also proposes a reinterpretation of the legal-political history of colonial-economic development. In this way, the paper proposes the abandonment of the legal and a-historical form of economic analysis and proposes the repoliticization of the solution to the crisis. Therefore, the paper aims to establish a dialogue regarding the necessity of the decolonization of the Puerto Rican political imagination and of the alternatives to the aforementioned crisis.