By The Star Staff
Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón submitted the documents for her candidacy for governor for the New Progressive Party (NPP) on Sunday.
With the filing of the papers, which took place at the José Celso Barbosa Home Museum in Bayamón, González Colón said she was officially launching her primary campaign against Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia.
“Now I have officially filed my candidacy. The next steps will be to present my team to you, my platform plan, the ideas we want for Puerto Rico,” González Colón said. “Something you’re going to see when I present my campaign team, is that it’s not a traditional campaign. The groups that are going to be running this are representative of our communities and the people. Today we take a step forward. We complied with the process of filing candidacies, so for all those who were saying that I couldn’t run because I was a woman, because I was young, because I was pregnant, because I was going to take it away [from the incumbent governor], because of this, because of that, because of the other … today I tell you that today I am six months pregnant, I am standing, I am facing you and I am going to work with Puerto Rico.”
She was accompanied at the activity by Elmer Román González, who will submit the documents in his bid to become the NPP candidate for resident commissioner on Sunday, Dec. 17 in Yauco.
González Colón’s campaign director, Aníbal Vega Borges, said her team will carry out a mass event in which they intend to collect the necessary endorsements for González Colón’s candidacy in one day.
“The first stage that comes now is the certification, specifically by Jenniffer González’s committee, by a committee that is appointed by Pedro Pierluisi and validated by the (NPP) board of directors. That committee has already evaluated other candidates,” Vega Borges said. “We hope that this committee will immediately evaluate our next governor, Jenniffer González, because we have an activity already planned, that they know about, this coming Saturday. There are approximately 1,200 collectors. Those people are going to be collecting in a single day approximately 18,000 endorsements that are already there and we have the names. Only 8,000 are required, but we are prepared to have 18,000.”
In addition, Vega Borges strongly defended Román González despite a controversy over the candidate-to-be’s permanent residence.
“The Jones Act clearly lays out the three requirements to be a resident commissioner,” he said. “First, number one is to be a U.S. citizen. The second requirement, be over 27 years old. And the other requirement, reading and writing English. It’s established that there’s no controversy about that.”
“The other requirement is Law 58 of 2020, the Electoral Law, which says that you have to be a voter,” he added. “Our [would-be resident] commissioner was qualified. There are more than 200-odd thousand people who have registered in the last three years since the elections, and none of them have been challenged. So, do they want to recuse an American citizen, who went to the army, a veteran? Well, look, I’m telling you, they’re going to fight that recusal. It is a capricious, false, slanderous recusal and they will not prevail.”