Federal and local lawmakers in Puerto Rico, as well as civil rights and advocacy organizations, have called for investigations after ProPublica reported how a federal probe into a drugs-for-votes scheme in Puerto Rico prisons got quashed after the 2024 elections.
The territory’s representative in Congress, Pablo José Hernández Rivera, called on members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to join him in a push for a congressional probe into the matter.
“The report published today by ProPublica details facts that no elected official — whether in Puerto Rico or in Washington — can ignore,” he said in a statement in Spanish.
The same day, Rep. Héctor Ferrer Santiago, a Popular Democratic Party member, introduced a resolution in the territory’s House ordering its Committee on Public Security to investigate, calling the allegations “serious!” and saying the House has “an inescapable duty to investigate.”
Their requests came the day ProPublica published its investigation detailing how prosecutors had uncovered a drugs-for-votes scheme being run by a violent gang in Puerto Rican prisons and were deep into looking at whether now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón or her campaign were involved. In the days following President Donald Trump’s election in 2024, as prosecutors prepared the indictment, they were told by supervisors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico to exclude the voting-related charges against inmates and prison staff, four sources with knowledge of the investigation told ProPublica. Then, once Trump took office, they were told to abandon the probe into potential political ties entirely, the sources said.
