Section:GDN 1N PaGe:25 Edition Date:190724 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 23/7/2019 17:45 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Wednesday 24 July 2019 The Guardian •World^25
Puerto RicoStreet standoff ‘ We are going to keep
on fi ghting until the governor resigns’
Oliver Laughland New York
Norbert Figueroa San JuanI
n the worst unrest Puerto
Rico has seen in almost two
decades, police in San Juan
fi red tear gas to disperse
thousands of protesters
demanding the resignation
of the island’s governor. He is
embroiled in a scandal involving
off ensive chat messages – the latest
calamity to hit the bankrupt US
territory, which is still struggling to
recover from hurricanes in 2017.
Ricardo Rosselló ’s response was
immediate. Resign ing, he said, was
out of the question. The result is
likely to be continuing turbulence.
He has been clinging to power
despite resigning as president of the
ruling New Progressive party and
announcing that he would not run
for re-election next year.
In a general strike staged across
the island on Monday morning ,
protesters waving fl ags and banging
drums chant ed: “Ricky resign!”▼ Police clash with protesters at
a barrier in a street leading to the
governor’s mansion in San Juan
PHOTOGRAPH: JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGESDemonstrations have gripped
the island since “RickyLeaks” – the
publication on 13 July of hundreds
of pages of text messages between
the governor and 11 members of his
inner circle. The texts contained
homophobic and sexist slurs against
political rivals and cultural fi gures ,
and a joke about dead bodies during
Hurricane Maria , which devastated
the island in September 2017.
Carmen Portela, 40, the founder
of a local travel fi rm, was among the
protesters. She said Rosselló had popular mandate. In an interview
on Fox News, Rosselló struggled to
show evidence of support, fi nally
citing one mayor when asked for the
name s of any prominent supporters.
A number of Puerto Rico’s biggest
recording artists appeared at
Monday’s demonstrations. Singers
such as Ricky Martin, who is a
subject of homophobic attack in the
messages, the rappers Residente and
Bad Bunny, and the singer iLe have
become unoffi cial fi gureheads in the
movement to oust Rosselló.
“They mocked our dead, they
mocked women, they mocked theLGBT community, they made fun
of people with physical and mental
disabilities, they made fun of
obesity. It’s enough,” Martin said in a
video posted on Twitter.
iLe told the Guardian: “We’re
going to keep fi ghting, we’re going
to keep being on the streets until he
resigns. He knows he has to go in his
heart. I know he knows it.”
Power 4 Puerto Rico, a Puerto
Rican diaspora group created after
Maria, called for his impeachment
and said: “Governor Ricardo
Rosselló has made further mockery
of the Puerto Rican people .”
Rosselló and the 11 others
implicated in the message scandal
have been summonsed by the
island’s justice department. While a
number of those in the chat group,
including the former secretary
of state Luís Rivera Mar ín , have
resigned over the aff air, Rosselló
has maintained that the messages
contained nothing illegal.
“I have made mistakes and I have
apologi sed for them,” he said during
his address on Facebook Live on
Sunday evening. “I am a good man
who loves his island and everyone. ”
The administration has also been
plagued by corruption scandals.
Shortly before the text message
scandal erupted, the FBI arrested a
number of administration offi cials
and contractors over allegations of
corruption and misappropriation of
$15.5m (£12.5m) in federal funds.A protester
aff ected by
the teargas▲ Ricardo Rosselló has said he will
not stand for re-election next yearshown that he was not fi t to govern.
“ It’s time to have a new Puerto Rico
... This chat gave light to what we
all already knew: that this is a very
corrupt government,” she said.
Donald Trump once again laid
into Rosselló and the mayor of
San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz , a
vocal critic of the governor and the
president. “He’s a terrible governor,”
the US president said. “You have an
even worse mayor of San Juan. We
did a great job in Puerto Rico. They
don’t want to give us credit .”
Trump has often infl ated the
amount of aid Washington has given
to Puerto Rico since Maria. Although
Puerto Ricans are US citizens and
pay federal taxes, those living on the
island cannot vote in presidential
elections and have no voting
member of Congress.
Several senior Republicans and
Democrats have called on Rosselló
to resign but the White House has
not formally called for him to go.
Protest organi sers have rejected
the governor’s suggestion that the
reason he is not resigning is hisРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS