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Carmen Yulín says she’s “not for sale”

By on August 27, 2016

San Juan’s mayor Carmen “Yulín” Cruz Soto warned she’s “not for sale,” reacting to the personal attacks issued against her by the New Progressive Party’s (NPP) representative candidate Víctor Parés Otero.

“As a country, we must analyze which is the underlying problem and that is that there are people for sale and there are others that buy people; I am not for sale and I don’t buy people,”  stated the capital’s mayor in a briefing with journalists upon inquiries about Parés Otero’s propositions regarding her receiving money in convict Anaudi Hernández Pérez’s mansion.

carmen yulin (INS)

San Juan mayor Carmen Cruz Soto stood firm against attacks issued by NPP representative candidate Víctor Parés Otero.

Businessman Hernández Pérez, former fundraiser for the Popular Democratic Party (PDP), plead guilty in the District Court of the United States in Puerto Rico of creating a government corruption scheme, which led him to testify the following week against other people implied.

Cruz Soto stood firm in establishing that it was a “legal donation,” so it’s registered as such, but based on Parés Otero’s criterion “we must tell the NPP to give back (convict ex Secretary of Education) Víctor Fajardo’s donations,” if that’s what “we will reduce to as a country.”

The mayor affirmed the necessity of knowing which are the fundamental problems and how will they be addressed.

She recalled that “on June 2014 there was an entire explanation by the press that I received a legal donation, and it’s informed and there was never a contract with the city of San Juan.”

“But that’s the type of thing that shows how we cannot succumb as a society, and this goes beyond any of us. We cannot say as a country that ‘I was late but you were more late’,” she added.

Cruz Soto emphasized that she has “never mediated to my consideration any other situation that deals with the firmest rectitude on all political and government matters.”

She insisted that under her administration, “the municipality of San Juan has been managed with the righteousness it deserves, and that’s how I’ve operated my campaign and how I will continue operating it.”

 

 

“I believe that this is the problem in seeing who I will drag under the bus, where they will fall and when they will get hit, because that detracts not just the political class, but the country as well,”  she asserted.

The mayor argued that this type of approach, with abundant political attacks, dissuades “good” people from entering politics because it doesn’t protect the presumption of innocence.

Regarding Jaime Perelló’s abdication as president of the House of Representatives, Cruz Soto believes that the PDP’s gubernatorial candidate David Bernier is protecting the former’s presumption of innocence because he is not asking the House Speaker to abandon his seat.

“That’s why I think this is a cautionary measure that protects Representative Jaime Perelló’s presumption of innocence, because he is not being asked to leave completely–he is being petitioned to allow at this moment the vice president (Roberto Rivera Ruíz de Porras) to carry on the rest of the term to dissipate, in the case of an Extraordinary Hearing, the issues may be managed from that perspective, politicaaly speaking,” she explained.

 

 

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