When Puerto Rico held its first presidential straw poll in 2024, Republicans received just 26% of the support, while then-Vice President Kamala Harris got 73%. The result was no messaging accident. It was the predictable outcome of a local Republican organization that has, for decades, operated as an elite social club rather than a serious, competitive political party.At the center of this scheme sits the Fonalledas family. Jaime Fonalledas leads Empresas Fonalledas, which owns Plaza Las Américas — the Caribbean’s largest mall — along with extensive holdings in dairy, manufacturing, real estate, and banking that employ thousands across the island. His wife, Zoraida Fonalledas, has served as the national committeewoman of the Republican Party of Puerto Rico since 1995. She has sat on the RNC’s Budget, Rules, and Arrangements committees, co-chaired the post-2012 Growth & Opportunity Project, and steered consistent family donations to the GOP. In 2012, she chaired Mitt Romney’s Puerto Rico campaign. All this is not casual participation. It is entrenched gatekeeping that protects commercial interests while limiting the party’s broader electoral reach.
The island’s structural gridlock traces back to the late 1960s, when prominent Republican dissidents allied with Republican industrialist Luis A. Ferre and local Democratic leader Carlos Romero Barcelo to launch the New Progressive Party as the institutional vehicle for statehood. Much of the old local Republican Party’s infrastructure and energy then flowed into the NPP rather than sustaining a separate Republican organization capable of contesting local races. Thus, Puerto Rico’s original Republican Party shrank into a national-facing shell useful only for securing RNC delegate slots, forcing local conservatives to run under the NPP banner instead.
