On the mainland, the case is a warning sign for many American states and municipalities — such as Illinois and Philadelphia — that are facing some of the same strains, including rising pension costs, crumbling infrastructure, departing taxpayers and credit downgrades that make it more expensive to raise money.Puerto Rico’s case could show public workers and retirees that seemingly inviolate pension systems can be changed, too.

The small Caribbean island — home to some 3.5 million people, many of whom still feel the sting of the annexation of their ancestors’ lands in 1898 — owes approximately $34,000 in debt per man, woman and child. Public school budgets and other services are all being cut as part of the austerity planning.

Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. This is a distinction that, for years, has carried many of the advantages of being part of the United States and few of the downsides. Most notably, Puerto Rico receives many types of federal assistance, but its residents do not pay federal personal-income tax, at least not on the income they earn on the island.But territorial status is now hurting the island at its time of greatest need. Health care is a large and growing part of its economy, but the federal government reimburses its doctors and hospitals at lower rates than if it were a state, for example. That prompts its doctors to leave for the mainland. And unlike cities or counties on the mainland, Puerto Rico cannot file for bankruptcy.

In 1917, Congress passed a law making Puerto Ricans United States citizens. That same law, still on the books today, empowered the island to raise money by issuing tax-exempt bonds, but with a special twist — the interest paid by the bonds cannot be taxed by any body of government, regardless of the state or city in which the bondholder lives. This has inspired people with eyes on easy profits to dive in for decades.

Since 2006, Puerto Rico has been in a painful recession. Successive governments dug it deeper into debt by borrowing from Wall Street hedge funds and other institutions — even from mom-and-pop investors — to pay operating expenses. In 2016, the island effectively ran out of cash and stopped paying its debt.

Mr. Andrés said in an interview. “Everybody needs to understand that the death toll was a massive failure by federal government and the White House. Not recognizing how many people died in the aftermath meant the resources and full power of the government was taken away from the American people of Puerto Rico.”

“The death toll issue has been one of the biggest cover-ups in American history,”

“I actually think it is one of the best jobs that’s ever been done with respect to what this is all about,” Mr. Trump said of the federal government’s response. He also falsely stated that the island’s electric grid and generating plant “was dead”

He boasted that the federal government got excellent grades for its disaster response in Texas and Florida, but he complained that the even better job done in Puerto Rico had been ignored. “I think that Puerto Rico was an incredible, unsung success,” Mr. Trump said.

“incredibly successful” job done in Puerto Rico, where the government estimates that nearly 3,000 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria last year.

—see for example Fig. 3 on this EPA Climate Indicators site. PDI is an aggregate measure of Atlantic hurricane activity, combining frequency, intensity, and duration of hurricanes in a single index. Both Atlantic SSTs and PDI have risen sharply since the 1970s, and there is some evidence that PDI levels in recent years are higher than in the previous active Atlantic hurricane era in the 1950s and 60s.