Aylsa Torres sighed in relief when she received a letter from her bank two weeks after Hurricane Maria hit. She was among the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans awarded a three-month moratorium on their mortgage payments as the U.S. territory reeled from the storm’s destruction.
Believing she was temporarily freed from those financial obligations, the 46-year-old government worker drained her savings to pay for a $750 generator and $786 worth of repairs for storm damage. But when Torres visited her bank in December, she says, she was shocked to hear that she was behind on payments and that officials threatened to foreclose on her apartment and ruin her credit rating.
Confusion and panic is spreading across this U.S. territory as the majority of moratorium agreements expire this month, with many people discovering they never qualified for the moratorium in the first place or struggling to obtain extensions because they
