Caribbean Matters: US media ignores Puerto Rico’s June gubernatorial primary

While U.S. media continues to focus on all things Donald Trump and the upcoming presidential election, the politics of our Puerto Rican colony continue to take a backseat. 

There was some coverage of the presidential primaries that Puerto Ricans hold every four years, despite not being able to vote for president (which we covered here in early May). But it’s far more important to pay attention to the battle for governor of the island, as well as the primary for resident commissioner, who serves as the nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives.

Politics on the island are changing, given the rise of new coalitions and new political parties. Massive 2019 protests against former Gov. Ricardo Rossello led to his resignation. Then Gov. Wanda Vázquez, who endorsed Trump, wound up being dumped from her own party’s ticket when Pedro Pierluisi won the primary against her in August 2020, signaling growing discontent with the political status quo. But the two main parties on the island are still dominant—and the primary for the governor’s race in the current ruling party pits incumbent Gov. Pierluisi against the current nonvoting delegate in Congress, Jenniffer González-Colón.  

RELATED STORY: Caribbean Matters: The winds of political change are blowing in Puerto Rico

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I’m not saying there is no coverage of this important race. Spanish-language media have produced a host of both print and television stories. But that doesn’t help readers who don’t read or speak Spanish, including many stateside Puerto Ricans. Politico did a story in November 2023 which set the stage, profiling the two candidates who are both members of the New Progressive Party or Partido Nuevo Progresista, known as PNP. As I often point out when discussing Puerto Rican politics, do not be fooled by the word “progressive” in the party’s moniker. It ain’t.   

Politico’s Gloria Gonzalez wrote an article titled, “The fierce fight to lead Puerto Rico.”

The candidates are campaigning for a job that’s complicated by Puerto Rico’s territory status and the fact that primary control of its finances is outside the purview of the governor. Instead, that power rests with an unelected oversight board after the territory’s historic, multibillion-dollar bankruptcy filing in 2016. And Puerto Ricans are angry and frustrated by the state of their battered infrastructure, particularly the territory’s notoriously unreliable and incredibly expensive power system.

Though they are both members of NPP in Puerto Rico, the two politicians have forged separate alliances in Congress: González-Colón is a Republican who supported former President Donald Trump — even earning his praise. Meanwhile, Pierluisi caucused with Democrats during his eight years as Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner.

The New Progressive Party or Partido Nuevo Progresista has been one of the major political parties in the territory, alongside the pro-commonwealth status Popular Democratic Party or Partido Popular Democrático. But the NPP has lost members amid the emergence of the Citizens’ Victory Movement or Movimento Victoria Ciudadana party, which supports a constitutional assembly to determine Puerto Rico’s status, and the Project Dignity or Proyecto Dignidad party, which does not advocate for any particular status.

WBUR’s “On Point” featured an in-depth English-language discussion on the upcoming primaries hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti. Her guests were Susanne Ramirez de Arellano, political reporter and former news director for Univision Puerto Rico, and Jorell Melendez Badillo, who is an assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Puerto Rico: A National History.”

Runtime for the podcast is about 47 minutes, and I hope you will take the time to listen to it.

I introduced Juan Dalmau, the gubernatorial candidate for the Puerto Rican Independence Party or PIP here in March, and the Citizens Victory Movement or MVC candidate for resident commissioner, state Sen. Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, in a story about her battle against Black hair discrimination. The two parties have formed an alliance.

In the podcast, Melendez Badillo also cautions people to be aware of the rise of the new right-wing party on the island, Proyecto Dignidad, or Project Dignity. Its members are ultra-conservative Christian and virulently anti-abortion, and have introduced anti-trans legislation.

Melendez Badillo recently wrote “Puerto Rico Is Voting for Its Future” for Time magazine:

The traditional parties have overlooked their differences to challenge the MVC-PIP alliance, taking legal action to seek to delegitimize and exclude the alliance’s candidates from the electoral process. They succeeded in decertifying some key MVC candidates like Senator Ana Irma Rivera Lassen, who is running for the position of Resident Commissioner in Washington, D.C.

Yet the MVC-PIP’s messages have enduring appeal. In recent years Puerto Ricans have faced a fiscal crisis that affected salaries and the price of goods, and stagnated the economy. There are electrical outages on an almost daily basis. Soaring poverty—particularly affecting children—makes life in Puerto Rico difficult, triggering the migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States and abroad.

[…]

One of MVC’s most important platform points involves the creation of a new constitutional assembly, which could redefine the future of Puerto Rico’s political status and bring an end to more than five centuries of colonialism. Such an assembly would provide Puerto Ricans with the opportunity to decide for themselves what the future of Puerto Rico looks like, freed from the constraints of the visions advanced by the traditional political parties.

If the MVC-PIP alliance increases its vote share in the 2024 elections, changes may be on the horizon. Perhaps they are already here; as these electoral processes take place, Puerto Ricans are not passively standing by. There are countless grassroots groups that are already enacting, imagining, and living the future they so desire in the present. They are also working towards the decolonization of the country. Many groups, such as La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, Urbe a Pie, and La Sombrilla Cuir predate the protest movement and do not focus on electoral politics. They have instead concentrated on transforming the conditions and everyday lives of Puerto Ricans. It was grassroots organizing that amplified the 2019 protests and that have provided the energy for the creation of these new political parties.

Note: the disqualification of candidates mentioned above was reversed by the Puerto Rico Court of Appeals.

The Puerto Rico Court of Appeals on Tuesday reversed a Court of San Juan ruling that in March disqualified a number of candidates from the Citizen Victory Movement (MVC by its Spanish initials) and the Dignity Project (PD) political parties for failing to collect endorsements.

The Appeals Court noted that the plaintiffs who filed the suit to disqualify the MVC and the Dignity Project candidates did not have legal standing nor did they demonstrate to the court that they had a sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged.

Rafael Bernabe: When you look at what has happened in the past fifteen years in Puerto Rico, it’s not too hard to see the reason La Alianza came about. The economy of Puerto Rico went into a very deep depression in 2005. If you look at the numbers, the economy of Puerto Rico has been in a depression. We have had fifteen years of economic stagnation, no growth whatsoever. About two hundred thousand jobs have vanished; thousands of people have had to leave the island because they can’t find them. They can’t live here. And at the same time, you have all of these terrible corruption cases in the government. The result of that crisis (which people feel very deeply), the fact that the two major parties have not been able to offer any alternative to that crisis, and that they are increasingly corrupt machines has meant that the support for these two political parties is decreasing sharply.

These parties combined used to get around 97 percent of the votes between them. The PIP got 3 percent, and they got the rest. And now that’s down to like 64 percent: the PNP gets 33 percent; the PPD got 31 percent. These political parties have basically collapsed over the past ten years. In 2016, [ousted former governor] Ricky Rosselló won the governorship with 42 percent of the vote, which was already low enough, and then he was not even able to complete his term because the people got so fed up with his government that they mobilized and they overthrew him. It’s the closest thing we’ve had to a revolution in Puerto Rico. People were in the street mobilizing for twenty days nonstop and forced the governor to resign. In the election in 2017, the PIP jumped from 3 percent to 14 percent. And the MVC, which was participating for the first time, gets 14 percent, which is an indication that people are very much open to new alternatives. So the rise of the vote for the MVC and for the people is very much part of the same process, because many of the people who were on the streets trying to get rid of him were seeking new alternatives. Now that we are in an alliance, we have come together in one single force.

He discussed the politics of the alliance:

Ed Morales: You’ve said that the degree of leftism and progressivism between the two parties is very similar. That is to say one party is not necessarily more about socialism or workers’ rights than the other?

Rafael Bernabe: I would say neither party is a socialist party. They are both pro-labor, pro–women’s rights, and pro–LGBTQ rights. They both defend that public services should be essential, that services should be publicly owned, and the guarantee that includes electricity, water, education, and health. Both parties support the creation of public health system. These are by any account left-wing parties, progressive parties, whichever term you want to use.

In the MVC, there are people who are socialists, myself included, and everybody knows that we are socialists and it’s no secret, but there are many people who are not socialists. And we agree to struggle for certain immediate reforms and things that working people need to defend the environment, that we need to defend women’s rights and so on and so forth. As a socialist, when I have the opportunity and the occasion, I explain why I am against capitalism. I think in the end we have to abolish capitalism in order to solve our fundamental problems. But I always make it clear that I’m speaking for myself. The MVC as such is not a socialist movement. It includes people who are and people who aren’t socialists. If you look at the program of these two parties, they’re very similar.

We are getting a chance to watch coalition-building in real time. Now if only we could get more coverage. 

Join me in the comments section below for more on the upcoming primary, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.

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