Internal State of Exception and the Puerto Rican Economic and Financial Crisis

This paper analyzes the legal and political policies employed by the Puerto Rican government to address the economic and financial crisis that has been affecting Puerto Rico since 2005. This analysis is built upon the concept of the internal state of exception; a concept that aims to provide a better understanding of the correlation between neoliberalism, colonialism, economy, and law. This paper proposes: 1) a depiction of the state of exception and its uses as an economic and financial crisis management dispositive; 2) an exposition of the Puerto Rican government’s uses of the internal state of exception as a dispositive to tackle the economic and financial crisis between 2005 and 2016; and 3) an analysis of the uses of the internal state of exception by the Puerto Rican government in 2017. Thus, this paper reinterprets the uses of the state of exception as a strategy to manage economic and fiscal crises from a colonial and global south experience and proposes a new understanding of this legal and political paradigm.