Luis Fortuño Pushes Puerto Rico’s GOP Primary and Mitt Romney on Facebook

Mar 18, 2012
12:23 PM

Maybe the governor of Puerto Rico finally realized that he should take control of his official Facebook page and not let his admins run the page for him. Today, as Puerto Ricans go to the polls for the GOP presidential primary, Fortuño has been posting status updates on his site, urging his fans to go out and vote for Mitt Romney. It might have been all the Spanish spelling errors his admins were posting that could have spurned the pro-statehood and Republican governor to take over his page again.

Case in point: Earlier this week, Fortuño's page was displaying a Facebook banner that contained a very obvious typographical error in Spanish. Here is what the page used to display: a quote that was missing an accent on the "Tú," basically making his quote grammatically wrong.

Now the page shows the Fortuños with the Romneys. And without his Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi, a Democrat who is also a member of the island's New Progressive Party (PNP), which supports a statehood solution for Puerto Rico. Pierluisi has been very public about his opposition to the GOP candidates, especially about their opinions about Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

In addition, after the following post was made earlier this morning (spelling errors and all), Fortuño took over his page and started posting with the initials LGF:

The last posts now show LGF being the king of his Facebook page:

The strange week in Puerto Rico's politics is coming to an end. It started with Fortuño having a private meeting with Rick Santorum, even though the governor had publicly endorsed Romney. Santorum also caused a ruckus with his English Only comments, and then the Romneys stepped in with Open Letters to Puerto Rico and making strange comments about how Puerto Ricans are all about "hugging and kissing." This is what the WSJ wrote about on Ann Romney's Puerto Rican experience on Thursday night:

“We have already warned them that people in Puerto Rico are very enthusiastic about politics, so I think they’re getting ready for hugging and kissing,” said Lucé Vela, Mr. Fortuño’s wife.

Mrs. Romney confirmed as much based on her meeting a night before with many of Puerto Rico’s delegates.“We had a very wonderful private dinner,” Mrs. Romney said. “Again, a lot of hugging and kissing.”

In the meantime, the mainland media got a dose of the crazy world of Puerto Rican politics:

Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día reports that the American press seemed a bit surprised by the festivities surrounding the recent political campaign events in Puerto Rico. American journalists, who were in Puerto Rico this week covering Mitt Romney's campaign ahead of Sunday's primaries, described their experiences on Twitter and other social media sites with irony, and apparently found the experience "surreal," El Nuevo Día reports.

But El Nuevo Día notes that the campaign event where Romney spoke was "a typical party for a Puerto Rican campaign: music, fireworks and long speeches. All in Spanish. These speeches were surprising for journalists who are used to shorter, more restrained events."