Carlos Romero Barcelo was a Governor of Puerto Rico for the period 1976-1984, he was also one of the most dynamic of the young political leaders to emerge after the end of the Muñoz Marinera in the 1960s. He was one of the strongest advocates of Puerto Rico’s admission to U.S. statehood.
Background
Carlos Romero Barcelo was born on 4 September 1932 in San Juan into a prominent political family. His father was a judge of the insular Supreme Court and his mother a president of the now defunct Liberal Party, a position she inherited from her father, Antonio R. Barceló. the party’s founder, and first president of the Puerto Rican Senate in 1917.
Education
Romero was educated in private schools in San Juan, at Philips-Exeter Academy, and at Yale, where he graduated in 1953. He got a law degree from the University of Puerto Rico in 1956.
Career
Since 1956 for over the following decade he practiced law.
Romero entered politics in the mid-1960s. He joined those who called for statehood and soon became a prominent member of the Statehood Republican Party, then the principal opposition to the Popular Democrats. When the Statehood Republicans refused to participate in a referendum on the status question in 1967, Romero bolted from the party to join with Luis Antonio Ferré Aguayo in organizing the United Statehooders, forerunner of the New Progressive Party.
As a vice president of the New Progressives, Romero supported Ferre’s successful gubernatorial race in 1968. while simultaneously running for mayor of San Juan. He campaigned in the American “shirt-sleeve” style and was elected in a landslide.
Following Ferré’s defeat by the Popular Democrats in 1972, Romero assumed leadership of the party and was its candidate for governor in 1976. He traveled widely throughout the island, emphasizing the need to restructure the island’s economy, hard hit by unemployment, inflation, and dislocation caused by the flight of American-owned enterprises. He relegated the statehood question to the future when the economic situation had substantially improved.
Despite Romero’s efforts and the New Progessives’ influence with both U.S. parties, the Puerto Rican economy continued to suffer. In 1980 the electorate failed to give the party a majority in the legislature, although Romero Barceló narrowly won reelection. In 1984 in the wake of a police scandal, he was decisively defeated by the Popular Democratic former Governor Rafael Hernández Colón.