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SAN JUAN, P.R. — The rumors wash up against the gray
walls of La Fortaleza, the governor's palace in this
city's colonial quarter, with the regularity of the
ocean's waves. Every few weeks they seem to gather
momentum, like a tidal surge, and threaten to overwhelm
the place and its occupant, Gov. Aníbal S. Acevedo Vilá.
At one moment, the word on the street is that the
governor will be arrested before the weekend. At the
next, he will be spared, though several of his close
associates will fall.
And so it has gone for more than two years while
federal investigators have looked into accusations of
campaign finance violations relating to Mr. Acevedo, a
Democrat, who is up for re-election this year.
The case has captured the imagination of Puerto
Rico's political class and news media, which have
tracked every microscopic development in the
investigation with the intensity befitting a place where
politics infuses the culture and goes to the heart of
Puerto Rican identity.
No movement of the federal grand jury reviewing the
evidence has gone undetected, the comings and goings of
witnesses have been recorded by the media and analyzed
ad nauseam, and leaks abound.
"You can't spend half an hour in a meeting of
politically minded people without someone saying, 'O.K.,
who's going to be indicted, when is he going to be
indicted?' " said Juan Manuel García Passalacqua, a well-known
political analyst and lawyer here. "It's incredible.
Every day, man. One gets sick of it. Ugh!"
Yet Mr. García is one of the engines of the gossip
mill. The subject frequently crops up on his radio talk
show, as it did during a broadcast earlier this month,
when he mentioned an article from that morning in El
Vocero. The newspaper had reported that Mary Butler, a
Justice Department lawyer who had successfully
prosecuted other high-profile public corruption cases on
the island, had gotten involved in the Acevedo
investigation.
"This is a total surprise for everyone in this
country," Mr. García said after the broadcast, in an
interview at the radio station, WKAQ, 580 AM. "Everyone
knows she is eminently capable. This is big!"
The governor's endorsement of Senator Barack Obama,
Democrat of Illinois, earlier this month also generated
a whirlwind of theories about how it might affect both
men's campaigns.
Some people speculated that the Obama campaign,
mindful of the cloud hanging over Mr. Acevedo's head,
might distance itself from the governor. Others
contended that the governor, betting on an Obama victory
in the primaries and in the general election, was laying
the groundwork for help from the White House should he
be indicted.
Residents of the commonwealth do not vote in general
elections, but the final Democratic caucus is in Puerto
Rico, on June 7, with 63 delegates at stake.
Luis Russi, a public defender and law professor here,
said that deep down most people did not really care what
happened to the governor. They simply enjoyed throwing a
few punches in this political brawl.
"Politics is like sport here," Mr. Russi said. "Here
everyone has something to say. Everyone knows. Everyone
wants to participate. Everyone has an opinion."
"We're Latino," he continued. "We have a lot of
passion. We love! We hate! A lot!"
The federal authorities have refused to make any
statements about the case; what is known publicly about
the investigation has been gleaned through leaks and the
scant information provided by witnesses who have
testified before the grand jury. According to those
witnesses, investigators have asked about the finances
of Mr. Acevedo's 2004 race for governor and about his
successful campaign in 2000 to become the resident
commissioner, Puerto Rico's nonvoting delegate to
Congress. (Mr. Acevedo has said that if there were
improprieties in his campaigns, he was not aware of them.)
According to news reports in Puerto Rico and
Philadelphia, investigators are examining whether major
donors laundered contributions by listing them under
other people's names in order to circumvent contribution
limits. In addition, they are looking into accusations
that some companies were given government contracts in
exchange for campaign contributions. The Philadelphia
Inquirer has reported that investigators have focused
some of their inquiry in Pennsylvania and southern New
Jersey, where Mr. Acevedo received large contributions.
The island's political parties and politicians have
exuberantly used the fact of the investigation to
further their ambitions.
The governor and his supporters, particularly in his
pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party, have decried
the inquiry as nothing more than a political vendetta
designed to torpedo his administration and his bid for
re-election. They contend that the United States
attorney in San Juan, Rosa Emilia Rodriguez-Vélez, is an
ally of Mr. Acevedo's opponents.
Since giving a lengthy news conference in San Juan in
November, much of which he spent answering questions
about the investigation, the governor has remained
largely silent on the matter. (He turned down a request
for an interview.) He most recently broke his silence on
Feb. 8 with an angry news release decrying federal
investigators for subpoenaing his sister to testify
before the grand jury, the first time they had called a
family member.
"The country already knows the political motivations
of this prolonged investigation and its aim to do me
harm," Mr. Acevedo said. But, he added, "to involve the
family is the lowest of all the low things that they
have done to me up until now."
But his opponents, including some in the
commonwealth's other leading political parties — the New
Progressive Party, which favors statehood, and the
Puerto Rican Independence Party, which advocates
independence from the United States — are holding out
hope for indictments that, they say, would underscore
their opinions that the governor and his administration
are unfit to lead.
Everyone who has been paying attention to the
unfolding drama seems to have a prediction about how the
grand jury might act. There appears to be consensus
among politicos and close observers of the political
scene, even among members of the governor's party, that
there will eventually be indictments, though not against
the governor.
Meanwhile, at La Fortaleza, the governor has
persisted with his agenda, his press secretary said in
an interview here earlier this month. "We have had so
many leaks, we have had front-page stories,
speculation," the aide, Juanita Colombani, said with a
sigh. "But we keep our schedule."
"It's a challenge," Ms. Colombani continued. "But he
has always been in pretty big challenges and he has
always won." |
