PROMESA and the rise of "La Junta"

In 2016, Congress passed PROMESA — the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act — and with it created the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans quickly gave it a nickname that stuck: "La Junta." President Obama appointed its seven members on August 31, 2016, giving an unelected federal body real authority over the elected government's budgets and debt restructuring.

PROMESA's power came from two directions at once. The board reviews and must approve the budgets of Puerto Rico's own government, effectively overriding elected officials on central fiscal decisions. And the law created a Title III legal process — operating much like a bankruptcy — that gave Puerto Rico the restructuring tool Congress had denied it for decades. In March 2017, Natalie Jaresko, formerly Ukraine's finance minister, became the board's executive director, overseeing that process from outside in.

The board's unpopularity was not subtle. A single protest against La Junta in San Juan, in the summer of 2019, drew an estimated 100,000 people: a scale of public anger rarely directed at an appointed financial oversight body anywhere in the United States. For many Puerto Ricans, the board came to symbolize the debt crisis itself: a body with real power over their government's budget that no one on the island had voted for.

That arrangement remains unsettled nearly a decade later. In August 2025, President Trump removed five of the board's seven members — chair Arthur J. Gonzalez, Cameron McKenzie, Betty Rosa, Juan Sabater, and Luis Ubinas — citing concerns about the board's efficiency and effectiveness. As of this writing, what comes next for Puerto Rico's federal oversight arrangement remains an open question, nearly a decade after PROMESA created it.

Few institutions created in this era carry as much symbolic weight as La Junta. For its supporters, it forced a fiscal discipline that Puerto Rico's elected governments had failed again and again to impose on themselves. For the hundreds of thousands who marched against it, it represented an unelected body making decisions that reshaped daily life on the island, with no vote by which residents could hold it to account.

Sources: Junta de Supervision y Administracion Financiera de Puerto Rico. Freeze 2026-08-22.