The Woman Next in Line To Be Puerto Rico's Governor Doesn't Want The Job Either
Following the resignation Ricardo Rosselló after island-wide protests, the question of who will lead Puerto Rico remains unanswered. Normally, the secretary of state would succeed the governor, but Luis G. Rivera Marín resigned hours after the homophobic and misogynistic chats were made public. That leaves Justice Secretary Wanda Vázquez Garced.
But as she tweeted on Sunday, Vázquez Garced doesn’t want the job either. “To repeat myself, I have no interest in taking the role of governor,” Vázquez Garced wrote in a tweet in Spanish. She said that her succession is a constitutional directive, but instead has urged Rosselló to appoint another Secretary of State before August 2, the date Rosselló’s resignation goes into effect.
Vázquez Garced’s resistance to taking the governorship is pretty logical considering protesters turned their sights on her as soon as Rosselló announced he would step down. Graffiti and hashtags alike changed from #RickyRenuncia to #WandaRenuncia.
The Puerto Rican government has been embattled since the publication of the messages that included offensive chats about hurricane victims and political enemies of Rosselló and a corruption scandal that involved multiple members of Roselló’s administration.
The FBI arrested two former administration officials in early July as a part of a corruption probe, according to NPR. Former education secretary Julia Keleher and former leader of Puerto Rico’s Health Insurance Administration Ángela Ávila-Marrero are accused of directing millions in contracts to businesses supposedly unqualified to do the work. The Justice Department announced the indictment of four others when announcing that of Keleher and Ávila-Marrero.