Puerto Rico heads to the polls today in elections that could prove to be historic for the Caribbean island. On November 5, nearly two million Puerto Ricans will have the opportunity to elect their governor, resident commissioner, the island’s 78 mayors, as well as representatives to the Senate and the House of Representatives. In its status as an associated state, the people of Puerto Rico do not vote for president or have elected representatives in the US Congress.
Whatever the outcome of the elections, they will mark a turning point in the island’s politics as new and old political forces have come together to challenge the two-party duopoly of the New Progressive Party (PNP) and the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), and put independence back on the political agenda.
In the governor’s race, Juan Dalmau, representing Alianza de País, an alliance of the historic Puerto Rican Independence Party and the Citizen Victory Movement, will face off against Jenniffer González, running with the PNP, and Jesús Manuel Ortiz, running with PPD. According to different pollsters, like Gaither, Dalmau and González are separated merely by points, at 29% and 31% respectively, and Ortiz trailing behind with 18%.
Until 2016, the traditional parties PNP and PPD shared at least 90% of the valid votes.
Puerto Rican journalist and analyst Luis de Jesús told Peoples Dispatch, that the PNP and PPD, while claiming to be fundamentally different from each other, both fundamentally defend the status of Puerto Rico as dependent and colonially subjugated to the United States.
“One party, the PNP, aspires for the annexation of Puerto Rico to the United States…to turn Puerto Rico into the 51st State of the United States and the PPD prefers the status quo, that is to say, the current status that Puerto Rico has,” he said. De Jesús adds that both of these policies mean keeping Puerto Rico as a colony.
These two parties also, “collaborated during all of these decades to persecute Puerto Rican independence movements or minority movements precisely so that they could remain in power, in the two-party system and silence anything that would mean a change in the political system, any social changes,” De Jesús explains.
Now, Dalmau and his anti-corruption and pro-independence coalition have threatened to unseat that status quo, proposing to establish a concrete way forward for the decolonization of Puerto Rico and eliminating the numerous privileges such as tax exemptions that US citizens enjoy on the island.
The rise in popularity of Dalmau and the rejuvenation of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, which for decades did not score more than a few percent points, did not emerge from nowhere, but is part of a process of political upheaval and awakening on the island.
Puerto Rico rises up
In 2016, the US Congress passed the PROMESA Law (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act) which calls for the imposition of a Fiscal Control Board to supervise (or control) the finances of the Caribbean country after it declared it was unable to pay a debt of more than USD 70 billion. A year later, this debt would lead Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy, after decades of corruption from the island’s rulers, accumulated debts, etc.
Since 2016, this Washington-imposed junta has imposed drastic austerity measures including closing hundreds of schools, reducing pensions, and undermining the state power company. These measures which have been implemented over the last several years, have contributed to the growing unrest and discontent among Puerto Ricans.
A year later, Hurricane María hit the island and caused massive devastation. 80% of the island lost power and hundreds of thousands endured months with no electricity. Puerto Rico’s “special relationship” with the US meant that offers of aid and technical help for recovery efforts from Caribbean nations like Cuba were prohibited.
Then, in the summer of 2019, thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the streets to protest against the government of Ricardo Rosselló after his Telegram conversations were leaked which included offensive messages mocking victims of natural disasters, among other things that sparked mass outrage. After several days of protests, Rosselló resigned from office on July 24, becoming the first governor to resign from office in Puerto Rico’s history.
Just two years later, in October 2021, historic mobilizations were held in response to the power outages that have plagued the country for months, the authority’s inability to manage public funds, and the slow and cumbersome reconstruction of the island after Hurricane Maria’s passage.
Read: Puerto Ricans resist austerity measures and corporate corruption
This accumulation of uprisings and struggles, according to De Jesús, was “a moment of convulsion in the political history of Puerto Rico… it was the clearest sign that a change was taking place in the consciousness of the population and that the new generations, especially young people, were no longer beginning to agree with the same discourse that for decades, from the 50’s to the present, had reigned in the political bipartisanship.”
Then came the 2020 elections, and the young Juan Dalmau ran on the ticket of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, representing, as Luis De Jesús put it, “a fresh face for the independence party…a change of vision in the midst of all that was happening, this political turmoil in Puerto Rico.” And these elections changed the political landscape, the party managed to triple what it had been getting during the last four elections, scoring 14% of the votes.
The Country Alliance
After the advances achieved in 2020 and the emergence of new political forces in that process, Dalmau and the Independence Party decided to “create what is now called Alianza de País (the Country Alliance), which is nothing more than the Puerto Rican Independence Party creating an alliance with the Victoria Ciudadana movement, which was the other movement that was born in the 2020 elections and which had also achieved a very similar percentage to the Independence Party with a candidate named Alexandra Lúgaro,” explains Luis De Jesús.
Their broad alliance contains differing visions of a future for Puerto Rico, from full independence to more moderate positions of even annexation. Yet all share the fundamental belief that the two parties that have ruled the country and maintained a colonial status quo have fundamentally made life worse for the people on the island through corruption, neoliberalism, and perpetuating colonialism.
As this alliance was being built, the FBI-led corruption investigations implicating members of the ruling parties continued, as well as the infrastructure failures, which sharpened the contradictions on the island and as De Jesús put it, “undermined the trust that the population has historically had in these two parties.”
In this context, De Jesús says, “The message of Juan Dalmau and the Alliance has been filtering through. They arrive at these elections leading the polls, and it is something unthinkable.”
In short, Washington’s economic imposition, the inability of Puerto Rican political elites, recent mobilizations, the energy crisis, and the inability of the US government to listen to Puerto Ricans have created a political context where a candidate who has declared himself to be a pro-independence, has a chance to become governor of the island.
The pro-independence candidate has also received the support of prominent political and cultural leaders including US Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) and Nydia Velázquez, reggaeton star Bad Bunny, and singer Ricky Martin.
“In fact, in Puerto Rico, and within the Independence Party, this itself represents a victory, even if these elections could not be won, it represents a victory that the Independence Party, together with this alliance, could be in second place, competing head to head in an election, because that definitely means that there is a progressive change that is taking place in the political conscience of Puerto Ricans,” De Jesús told Peoples Dispatch.
Dalmau’s message of hope
In a historic campaign closing event on Sunday November 3, dubbed the “Festival of Hope: Alliance on the Road to Victory”, nearly 50,000 people gathered to show their support for Dalmau.
Artist Bad Bunny performed at the festival and addressed the crowd stating, “My first vote was for one of the biggest culprits of the debt that the people have to pay for today, a traitor who left more than 30,000 families without jobs, including my family.” This year he stated, “This November 5, I am going to vote with my conscience, my brain, and most importantly, I am going to vote with my heart…Long live the Alliance! Which more than being the alliance of two parties, is the alliance of the people, and when the people unite, [we] are unstoppable!”
POR SI TE LO PERDISTE ▶️ 🇵🇷 Discurso en el Festival de la Esperanza. #EsperanzaFest #VOTATE #LaAlianzaVa #PatriaNueva pic.twitter.com/oklGvyRq1p
— Juan Dalmau (@juandalmauPR) November 4, 2024
For his part, the pro-independence candidate asked his supporters to go out and vote and asked for the support of other political forces that are betting on a pro-sovereignty path for Puerto Rico, including many voters from the country’s traditional parties who are looking for real change: “At every moment we have shown that when we have each other, this is an invincible people. That is why I want to take this opportunity today to speak to my brothers and sisters who have voted for the [PPD] in the past. The only political force that can stop the PNP government is a vote for the Alliance.”
Dalmau told his supporters to remind them that to transform Puerto Rico it is first necessary to reclaim the country’s sovereignty. “We have had the enormous privilege—it is a unique privilege—of living together in the same house that is Puerto Rico,” Dalmau said.
“That is an enormous privilege, but equally enormous as the privilege, is our responsibility. They have tried to tear our house to pieces, and we have the responsibility to reclaim it as ours to clean it up. An honest government to move forward, so that hope triumphs to make a new homeland,” asserted Dalmau before thousands of Puerto Rican flags.
Whatever the results may be today, for De Jesús, the political shifts are a “clear message that a profound change is taking place from below among the Puerto Rican people.”
