AN JUAN - Voters, angry over corruption in Puerto Rico, shocked politicians and pundits when they gave the opposition Popular Democratic Party a clean sweep at the polls Tuesday and elected the island's first woman governor.
San Juan's mayor, Sila Maria Calderon, 58, ended up with 49 percent of the vote over pro-statehood New Progressive Party candidate Carlos Pesquera's 46 percent. She also helped the Popular Democratic Party gain a majority of the island's city halls and take back the House and Senate.
The sweep was a surprise. Polls before the election had shown Pesquera, 44, with a slight lead in the governor's race.
But on Tuesday, voters said the election had little to do with the island's uncertain political status and a lot to do with New Progressive Party corruption. To drive home the point, they booted out several mayors facing charges for fraud and handed control over to Popular Democratic Party candidates who, like Calderon, promised a ''clean government.''
''We always knew that corruption was an issue,'' said Irving Faccio, a Calderon strategist.
Governor Pedro Rossello almost certainly got votes from people not affiliated with his New Progressive Party in 1996. Pesquera, an engineer in charge of many of the Rossello administration's infrastructure projects, saw a drop of approximately 200,000 votes this time around.
That led many to conclude that cross-over voters went back to the Popular Democratic Party and that some of the New Progressive Party faithful, unhappy with their leaders, stayed home. The 82 percent voter turnout - just shy of 2 million votes - was not as high as election officials expected.
Rossello insisted his administration had done more than any other to root out corruption. As the Popular Democratic Party harped on the issue, Pesquera often downplayed the scandals as isolated incidents.
But New Progressive Party legislators still spent lots of time and public money investigating Calderon's work as mayor of San Juan and as a former gubernatorial chief of staff, while looking the other way when it came to their own colleagues' transgressions.
