After the popularity of my first rec. diary, I´m gonna try and give you a small summary of all news published in PR´s papers, radio and TV every day and translate them to you.
First off, there is a very good AP wire piece about how passional campaigning on the island is, and how presidential campaigns have adapted. For example, the Obama campaign did not buy a single yard sign. Instead they bough "banderas".
Here is how 15,000 political banderas in action look. (From a general assembly by one of the main parties in the island).
PPD General Assembly, April 29th.
There is also an excellent article in the NY times today.
Now let´s read some newspapers.
The primary got the front page on El Nuevo Día (just a small square on the front page though), PR's main newspaper.
The main article is called "Al rojo vivo la batalla primarista" which translates into "Primary battle turns red hot". The article has some quotes from Hillary surrogates on the island, and an exclusive interview with Gov. Bill Richardson who arrived last night. He revealed that Obama will be on the island tomorrow, until Sunday according to their "sources". Hillary will do her campaigning from Saturday through Monday. The article also has some comments from Obama surrogates, like Pedro Pierluisi, who is the NPP (Statehood party) candidate for Congress. It ends up with some commentaries from Mr. Eduardo Villanueva, a prominent "independentista" criticizing the fact that PR gets to vote on a "beauty pageant" on June the 1st.
The other article in El Nuevo Día is "Lejos de un acuerdo por los delegados", which translates to Far from any delegate deals. It outlines and explains the current battle for FL and MI, and the rules meeting on May 31st.
There is an interesting article on the Politics section of the paper. "Se ponen las pilas para la primaria demócrata" which literally means, "They put the batteries on for the democratic primary". Before I discuss the article, let me give you a brief outline on how the election process works in the island. There is a State Electoral Commission, but the parties are the one responsible for recruiting vote counters, observers, precinct captains, etc. This system counterbalances itself, since each party has the incentive to find a "funcionario" for every voting unit, because if they don´t, the other party member is gonna run up the score when no one is watching. So it's dog eat dog.
But since none of the local parties are running for anything here, they are not moving a finger to recruit anyone. The electoral map in PR is divided in 110 voting precints, each with a top down organization of a Precinct President, and two vice-president of the other parties. Then each school (we vote in schools) has it's own president and vice presidents, who report to the Precint captain, and who oversee the actual vote counters, who are in each individual voting booth. All in all, each party needs to recruit, train and feed 15,000 funcionarios for each election. A tall order, specially for the presidential campaigns who have no idea how to do this.
So to help them out, the State Electoral Commission (SEC) reduced the number of precints for the primary, from 110 to 95. It wasn't until last week that, according to the article, the BO and HC actually furnished the SEC with its 95 precint captains. Now they only have to recruit 7,000 funcionarios each! I frankly do not know if they are capable of doing this. All in all, this article tells me that they expect a low turnout. They are reducing the number of funcionarios needed by half, from 15,000 to 7,000, and they have reduced the number of available polling places. They reduced the number of precints, but they cut the number of polling places by half! There is also some infighting between the local parties and the recruiting process complicating matters. This primary is forcing 70 year old enemies to work together...yikes.
This is a piece of news that I will be following and updating during the last few weeks, for it could affect the whole flow of the vote. If the polling places are not fully manned, well, I don't want to think about it.
On the ENDI recent news page there is a brief AP note on Richardson campaigning through Ponce, PR´s second city, with ex Governor Hernández Colón, a "staunch" ponceño, and the mayor Francisco Zayas Seijo. This is important! Mayor Zayas Seijo was with HRC, and now he says in the note that "The next president of the US will be a democrat, and with all probability it will be Barack Obama". Has he switched sides? I´ll keep you posted.
El Vocero, Puerto Rico's second major daily, has a single article on their online edition. "Obama, el primero en llegar a Puerto Rico", or "Obama, the first to arrive in Puerto Rico". It is just a brief summary of what the campaigns are expected to do during the weekend.
Primera Hora, (who has the worst website in the history of websites, don't go if you don't want your browser to crash) has a couple of stories about the race, and the surrogate visits. Nothing in depth. You can see them here.
The last major daily is the San Juan Star, who publishes in English. It seems you have to pay a fee to read it online. (thanks to Terrier Mix for the link!)
I'll update this post as the day goes on, hopefully we get more news from Richardson's visit, and I can post some videos from the midday and afternoon news.