Puerto Rico’s Victoria Ciudadana Draws Strategy for 2020 Elections

The Victoria Ciudadana Movement (Citizens Victory Movement, MVC) carried out its first meeting with some 400 delegates in the Juana Diaz municipality (south), with the aim of becoming an electoral option in Puerto Rico.

The organization, which proposes to break with the two-party system that has dominated the Puerto Rican political scene for more than 60 years, began on Sunday to draw up its strategy for the November 2020 elections.

Alexandra Lugaro, a 38-year-old lawyer, is one of its emblematic figures after having secured 172,818 votes as an independent candidate for government, representing 11.11% of the vote in the 2016 elections. The MVC intends to promote an organizational structure based on the internet.

About 57% of participants in the meeting supported the proposal for the movement to be built through grassroots networks, with a 21-person leadership body, a general coordinating committee made up of 101 people, and a base of community organizations, unions, and environmental, feminist, cultural and student groups.

Lugaro said that they will meet again on September 29 to choose the leadership body and define the electoral objectives, although it will not be until October that they will choose the candidates at a national level, including for the governorship, commissioner residing in Washington and legislators.

The group, which has not immediately assumed a position on US colonial domination of Puerto Rico, also includes other renowned figures such as Ana Irma Rivera, former president of the Bar Association of Puerto Rico, political analyst Nestor Dupre, Attorney Rosa Segui and former governor Rafael Bernabe, of the Working People’s Party.