On a warm January evening, mayoral candidate Wanda Arzuaga López makes her way through Juncos, Puerto Rico, visiting a neighborhood of 1940s-style casitas and breadfruit trees sitting behind chain-link fences. Joined by her campaign director and four turquoise-shirted volunteers, Arzuaga López, an evangelical lay chaplain, goes door to door, warmly exclaiming, “¡Dios la bendiga! ¡Buenas tardes!” offering God’s blessings to residents.
The neighborhood, nestled within the lush greenery of Puerto Rico’s southeast, is plagued by acrid fumes from a nearby waste-disposal facility. Residents, most of them over 60, peer through their windows before coming outside. Questions like “Who are you?” quickly turn into another kind of dump, as people seize the opportunity to unload about Arzuaga López’s opponent, the government in San Juan, and the abandonment they felt after a succession of devastating natural disasters.
Arzuaga López is part of Proyecto Dignidad (PD), a booming new political party in Puerto Rico that plays up its alliance with both Catholic and evangelical churches, which have earned renewed goodwill by outpacing official emergency services in the wake of the island’s environmental, economic, and political crises. “I’ve always gotten involved with my ecclesiastical church,” she says. “We did it after the hurricanes and after the earthquakes.”
Churchgoers like her make up many of the 400-plus candidates Proyecto Dignidad will field in this November’s elections, up from 29 during the party’s debut just four years ago. In local plazas across the island, PD candidates discuss plans to end Puerto Rico’s financial distress and high crime, while also promising to criminalize abortion, remove public school vaccination requirements, and defend the legality of conversion therapy targeting LGBTQ people. This conservative Christian agenda is consistent with the party’s Declaration of Principles, with its invocation of “trust in the Almighty God who is the source of dignity,” and promises to protect “the family” and “life from fertilization to its natural termination.”
The party’s rise shows how Puerto Rico’s churches, which in recent decades were mostly confined to private life, are now reshaping political dynamics. Proyecto Dignidad is a reflection of a broader populist global trend, and it draws inspiration from the Trump playbook and other domestic right-wing currents that helped him win over significant numbers of Latino voters in 2020. Puerto Ricans living on the mainland overwhelmingly supported Joe Biden that year, even as polling showed that roughly a third of them identified as conservatives. But as the populist Christian politics the party has tapped into continue to intermingle with nationalist and anti-establishment forces, the brew could result in more right-leaning mainland Puerto Rican voters turning out for Trump.
The party reflects a growing desire of many Puerto Ricans to set aside the endless debate over their relationship to the United States.”
“Proyecto Dignidad is the result of a historical evolution,” says Juan Caraballo-Resto, of “religious leaders, their interests, and conservative Christians on the island.” Caraballo-Resto, a University of Puerto Rico anthropologist who studies the intersection of religion and politics, says PD’s rise has been supercharged by the territory’s “economic erosion”—more than 40 percent of the island’s 3 million inhabitants live in poverty—“as well as the weakening of traditional political parties.”
“The island’s corrupt bipartisan party system is mostly responsible for the island’s colossal bankruptcy and for the pervasive stagnation of its economy,” says Rafael Cox Alomar, a former island politician who is now a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia. That debt crisis—preceding the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history—led President Barack Obama to sign a 2016 bill imposing an unelected fiscal control board, eroding local politicians’ authority and autonomy. Hurricane Maria made landfall a year later, and recovery has been hampered by repeated disasters, a fragile power grid, the pandemic, and fiscal austerity measures—developments that spurred emigration and led to a population decrease of 12 percent since 2010.
The reputations of the traditional major parties—the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), which favors statehood, and the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), which backs the territorial status quo—have not been helped by their leaders: At least eight mayors have been arrested by the FBI over alleged corruption in recent years. Others face local allegations.
In 2020, Proyecto Dignidad unexpectedly elected two legislative candidates, including Joanne Rodríguez Veve, who won an at-large seat in the territorial Senate after garnering the second-most votes island-wide. This year, the party could become a much bigger player. Not only is it fielding hundreds of candidates, but polling by El Nuevo Día, the territory’s paper of record, found that 48 percent of respondents had a positive impression of PD. The party has raised tens of thousands more dollars than it did last cycle, thanks in part to conservative Puerto Rican donors living on the mainland.
In San Sebastián, a northwestern town of about 8,000, Proyecto Dignidad leaders are hopeful they might win their first mayoral seat after attracting a former vice mayor once-aligned with the pro-statehood PNP to become their candidate. He has the endorsement of Javier Jiménez, the incumbent mayor, who gained national attention when he assembled local volunteers to help rehang power lines after Hurricane Maria left the town without electricity for nearly two months.
“The government didn’t do its job,” Jiménez, a man with a warm demeanor and thin glasses, recalls while sitting on a bench in San Sebastián’s plaza. It was a pivotal moment that made him question his allegiance to the PNP, which was in charge of the island at the time. Eventually, Jiménez’s perception that the party leans too left—by backing gender-inclusive language, by supporting abortion rights, and by imposing mask mandates—prompted him to leave the PNP and run for governor under Proyecto Dignidad’s banner this year. “The PNP has distanced itself from its principles and the value for life that I treasure,” he says.
Pedro Pierluisi, the sitting PNP governor, has fought to staunch the flow of conservative Christian support from his party by wielding increasingly religious rhetoric; at an April meeting of public sector employees, he claimed that “like the Parable of the Talents, God has given me abilities and aptitudes.”
“The island’s corrupt bipartisan party system is mostly responsible.”
Meanwhile, in a similar dynamic, the pro–status quo PPD is losing frustrated young voters to the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (MVC), a new left-leaning, pro-labor, anti-privatization party. The two newcomer parties were both targeted by a PPD-backed lawsuit, that, following a June ruling from the island’s Supreme Court, saw several alternative candidates knocked from the ballot, over allegations they failed to gather the required signatures.
While they have something of an alter-ego dynamic, both upstart parties reflect a growing desire of many Puerto Ricans to set aside the endless debate over their relationship to the United States and tackle pressing economic and social issues instead. It’s a development that might frustrate Democrats who dream that Puerto Rican statehood would improve their party’s prospects of controlling the US Senate. (The MVC has said it would punt decisions over the island’s political status to a new constitutional assembly; PD expresses no preference on the question.)
Like many in the party, Arzuaga López, the Juncos mayoral hopeful, thinks Puerto Rico needs to look within to solve its problems. The 58-year-old says she grew up in an area without paved roads and potable water but with a strong religious community where she was “taught what was right.” When she became more involved with her church, she came to feel that the two traditional parties backed by her parents, who themselves were split over statehood, were failing to address Puerto Ricans’ moral core.
“We can involve the community, including churches…I’ve been working with a school here to offer workshops related to values,” Arzuaga López says. “And we’re using people from within Proyecto Dignidad to help.”
Jiménez, too, thinks islanders should keep their attention close to home. “We can’t aspire for any change in our status,” he says, until Puerto Ricans “put our house in order.”
