Now the governor himself, Rosselló lives in the same colonial fortress of his youth, with a family of his own. But the estate had turned into a cage, guarded by police officers in riot gear and ringed by protesters who wanted him gone.
After days of escalating protests, Rosselló has announced that he is resigning from office, an unprecedented step in Puerto Rico’s history that brings a promising political career, for now, to a disgraceful end. “My only north has been the transformation of this island and the well-being of our people,” he wrote in a resignation letter made public Thursday, the morning after a late-night, online address to the public.
It took just two weeks for his administration to reach the point of collapse, undermined by a popular uprising that the governor initially thought he could withstand. Yet Rosselló misread the anger brewing among his people after years of economic stagnation and broken promises.
He also may have overestimated his ability to swiftly combat problems that had been brewing in Puerto Rico for decades. As a candidate, he promised sweeping change to lift the island out of its extended economic slump. But he was forced to contend with a federal oversight board that imposed austerity measures which, coupled with the governor’s move to privatize the publicly owned power utility, sowed deep public discontent. The poor response to a devastating hurricane that struck the island in 2017 only added to the accumulated frustrations that helped turn people against a governor who was increasingly seen as a golden boy, both isolated and privileged.
On Thursday, Rosselló’s successor remained unclear, as powerful politicians displeased with the idea of elevating the secretary of justice who is next in command negotiated behind close doors on a potential alternative candidate. Before leaving office next week, the outgoing governor would have to nominate that person to be his secretary of state — meaning the question of who governs Puerto Rico could be up to Rosselló.
After spending much of his political career dogged by accusations that his success came through the network of political influence he inherited from his father, Rosselló wound up the victim of a crisis of his own making. Shunning party elders, the governor, a notorious workaholic, surrounded himself with a tight-knit cluster of young, influential friends, and the arrogant, frat-style bantering they shared at the expense of those outside their circle became his undoing.
The governor’s troubles came after the publication of hundreds of pages of a leaked private group chat on the messaging app Telegram, an embarrassing development that under different conditions might have been survivable in modern politics. The chat lifted a curtain on Rosselló’s private personality, and many Puerto Ricans did not like what they saw.
But the cliquish chat mirrored Rosselló’s style of governing, depending on an insular group of associates who rejected the advice of outsiders, many of whom said they watched from afar as the administration got deeper and deeper into trouble. He caught flak for having a $245,000 Chevrolet Suburban and spending the brutal days after Hurricane Maria in 2017 at the air-conditioned emergency operations center.
“Ricky loved the limelight,” recalled Yosem E. Companys, a former business partner and mentor to Rosselló. “And he especially loved that people would ingratiate themselves with him. He loved being surrounded by yes men.”
With crisis enveloping his administration, the governor found himself increasingly isolated, having lost support from the public, the leaders of his political party and many of his own aides, who tendered their resignations and left Rosselló, 40, almost completely alone.
“It was impossible to govern like that,” said Antonio Sagardía, Puerto Rico’s former justice secretary.
Sagardía said he spoke to Rosselló on Tuesday and told him that he had no choice but to step down as governor after Puerto Rico’s Justice Department issued search warrants for cellphones belonging to Rosselló and 11 of his current and former aides as part of a criminal investigation into the private group chat.
In his resignation letter, Rosselló noted that the island under his administration saw its highest economic growth in a decade, and the lowest unemployment rate ever, although experts say the growth mainly came from hurricane recovery spending. Unemployment dropped because so many people fled after the hurricane, some analysts noted.
The leaked messages, in addition to being rude and profane, suggested the administration was inappropriately favoring its politically connected friends, just days after federal authorities had arrested two former top officials and four other people in a corruption investigation.
For people who thought they knew Rosselló, reading his crude comments introduced them to a side of him that he appeared to have shown only to his male buddies.
“He was very respectful, always very kind, very much a gentleman,” said Rep. Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s nonvoting resident commissioner in Congress, who publicly demanded Rosselló’s resignation last Friday. “It was two completely different personalities.”
When he ran in 2016, Rosselló’s résumé seemed sterling for a first-time candidate with far-reaching family connections in politics: Tennis player at MIT. Doctorate in biomedical engineering at Michigan. Postdoctorate research at Duke.
González-Colón and Sagardía described Rosselló as a methodical and tireless worker once he was elected. He slept little and liked to draw his own graphs and charts — sometimes with pens in various colors that he carried in his pocket. He was known for working late into the night and then waking at 4 a.m. to go running in Old San Juan — where he was sometimes spotted sending messages even while jogging along the cobblestone streets.
“He is very organized, the way doctors and scientists are,” said Sagardía, who has known Rosselló since he was a teenager. “We are not talking about just anybody.”
But Rosselló packed his team with trusted friends who in many cases had as little experience in government as he did. Elders from his New Progressive Party, which supports Puerto Rican statehood, felt that Rosselló gave some of them a cold shoulder, refusing to ask or take their advice.
“I think this is an unfortunate combination of a group of people that may have been hardworking and well-intentioned but were inexperienced, and there was a lot of arrogance around,” said Luis G. Fortuño, a former New Progressive governor who was not friendly with Rosselló.
Rosselló acted like his own chief of staff, concentrating power in his office and walling himself off with his close advisers and no one else, Fortuño said. “There seemed to be a bunkerization of that inner circle: You were either with them or against them.”
Fortuño said that he met last year with the governor’s former chief of staff, Raúl Maldonado, and told him that rumors were circulating that some of the people in the governor’s inner orbit “were not necessarily acting according to the law.”
Maldonado, who was among those in the Telegram chat, later became the treasury secretary and publicly denounced what he said was corruption within the administration. He was fired, it seemed, for his disloyalty.
Companys, Rosselló’s former mentor, recalled Rosselló’s wedding in 2008, seven years before he ran for governor. He had invited his closest friends to suburban Detroit for the wedding to his first wife. It was a festive affair that drew from the emerging top ranks of Puerto Rican politics — and the groom and his friends joked about which positions they would someday assume in Rosselló’s administration.
Companys gave Rosselló his first job in politics at the behest of Pedro J. Rosselló, Ricardo’s father and the former governor, who had himself been a mentor to Companys. In 2004, Companys ran the Latino campaign for Wesley Clark, a Democratic presidential hopeful, and brought on an eager Rosselló to help in Arizona.
“Pedro told me, ‘Listen, I don’t want my son in politics — I just think it’s dirty business and I don’t want my family to be hurt any further — but he’s very persistent,’” Companys recalled.
A few years after the campaign, Rosselló approached Companys, who was then a doctoral student at Stanford, to join forces on a Silicon Valley startup.
Rosselló and Companys settled on an idea to develop real-time political polling software under a firm they named Bullitics. When Companys mentioned that they would need a significant amount of money to get started, Rosselló told him not to worry, he had sufficient resources.
The startup went nowhere, and people Companys had brought into the venture didn’t get paid, he said.
Companys said he covered some of Rosselló’s debt with money of his own, and then declared bankruptcy.
“He lives in a bubble,” Companys said of Rosselló. “That’s just the way that his entire life has been.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.