As Predicted

Election Day went according to form in Puerto Rico. Governor Luis Munoz Marin won his third four-year term handily, polling almost twice as many votes as his two opponents combined. By giving Munoz Marin's Popular Democratic Party a landslide-proportioned 62.5% of the total vote, Puerto Ricans proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they prefer the governor's personally designed status as a U.S.-associated commonwealth to either national independence or U.S. statehood.

The vote polled by the opposition had a special significance of its own. In the 1952 elections, the Independence Party pulled 125,403 votes, the Statehood Party only 84,056. This time the roles were reversed; the Independentists got only 86,101 votes while the Statehood Party more than doubled its 1952 vote, receiving 171,910. It was clear that even among those Puerto Ricans who are opposed to Munoz Marin. a whacking majority want U.S. ties.

At his first news conference after the election, Munoz Marin declared the entire matter of the island's relationship with the U.S. a closed question for at least the next four years. "There are more important objectives in Puerto Rican life to be attained, and it would be a waste of time to discuss the political status," he said. Then he gave an ambitious example of the kind of objectives he had in mind: "The Cabinet and I have engineered a plan of effective work for the next four years--including rehabilitation of our agriculture to bring it up to the level of industrialization."

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