by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo
Four thousand delegates at Puerto Rico’s Popular Democratic Party’s convention have endorsed by acclamation Governor Anibal Acevedo Vilá’s bid for a second four-year term.
“Cuatro años más,” Four more years, chanted some 4,000 delegates, plus other supporters, who packed a the baseball stadium in the U.S. commonwealth’s capital of San Juan two weeks ago. (April 27) That could happen, or Acevedo Vilá could be preparing to serve as many as 20 years in federal prison.
The worst thing that happened recently to the governor was his March 27 indictment on 19 charges of corruption by a federal prosecutor. The best thing that happened to him was that the same day, Governor Dan Siegelman of Alabama was set free from prison after an appeals judge all but dismissed his conviction on similar charges.
Why the connection?
In both cases, a Republican Party-nominated prosecutor has pressed the case against a sitting governor who belongs to the “wrong” party. This is the unfortunate legacy of the long-gone Attorney General Alberto Gonzáles, who resigned in disgrace over the apparent politicizing of his office to favor Republican Party interests.
Siegelman was convicted on a list of financial irregularities with campaign funds and of listening to lobbyists who had supported him with campaign funds. They call this “pay-to-play” and it was taken to its zenith as an art form by Republicans in Washington who disguised it as the “K Street Project.”
The mixing of personal expenditures with campaign spending or of accepting money that is tainted is often more a matter of faulty accounting than malice. In the case of Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis of California, we will never know because the Republican White House just shut down the investigation of one of their own.
These factors affect Puerto Rico. Acevedo Vilá was indicted for unreported funds when filing his income tax forms some seven years ago. But as a resident of Puerto Rico, he does not pay federal income taxes. As is well known by people who live in New Jersey but work in New York, you pay taxes on the money you make in the state where you work but that place has no claim on money you make where you reside. The federal indictment claims that the governor failed to include income made in Puerto Rico on the taxes he filed when working in Washington, D.C., as Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico. The prosecutor, a favorite of island Republicans, says that the federal courts gained jurisdiction because the governor used the internet, which crosses state lines.
Clearly, campaign fund bundlers in Philadelphia gathered money in questionable ways from the pay-to-play culture that existed in the City of Brotherly Love. But Mayor John Street, who sat on top of this pyramid, was never found guilty of any wrongdoing, so it is hard to see how Acevedo Vilá can be blamed for anything more than sloppy accounting. The same goes for other charges to campaign used in Puerto Rico for family expenses or clothing purchases. The prosecutor wants to make a federal case out of all this – because the governor sent an email.
The governor claims that the charges have been formulated in an election year to force him off the ticket and open the way for a Republican statehooder, Louis Fortuño, who has served as the island’s non-voting representative in the U.S. Congress since 2005, to waltz into the governor’s mansion.
Acevedo Vilá, who thanked his supporters in an hour-long speech, points to his vigorous protest against the FBI’s high-handed arrest of a radical Puerto Rican leader that resulted in the man bleeding to death a few hundred feet from the agents who refused to save the life of the helpless target.
That case, as this one, concerns jurisdiction. The United States maintains that federal laws and law enforcement supersede the laws of its Puerto Rican colony even though – unlike the states – Puerto Rico has no role in making the federal laws. Acevedo Vilá has challenged that federal control and says the indictment is the price to pay.
Of course, the Puerto Rico governor could be guilty of corruption AND the United States of imperial interference. In the tangle that is Puerto Rican status politics, both sides are often wrong. Hispanic Link News Service.
(Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo is Professor Emeritus of Puerto Rican & Latino Studies at Brooklyn College. Author and scholar, he serves as a member of the Pennsylvania State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights. Email him at stevensarroyo@ptd.net). ©2008
