Romero Barceló, Carlos (1932– )

Puerto Rican politician and advocate of full US statehood, governor 1977–85. He helped to form the New Progressive Party (PNP) in 1967, and became PNP leader in 1973. As governor, he promoted house construction, inward US investment, and privatization. Re-elected in 1980, his advocacy of US statehood fanned terrorist outrages by the Armed Forces for National Liberation (FALN) and, in the wake of a police scandal, he lost his governorship to Rafael Hernández Colón in 1984. After 1993 he became Puerto Rico's Resident Commissioner in Washington, sitting in the US House of Representatives, but holding restricted voting powers.

Romero established the PNP with Luis Antonio Ferré Aguayo, and in 1968 Ferré was elected governor of Puerto Rico and Romero mayor of San Juan. After a successful two terms as mayor, he replaced Ferré as PNP leader, and was narrowly elected governor in 1976, having campaigned on a programme of economic restructuring. His housing programme was engineered through a Puerto Rico Development Fund.

He was born into a prominent San Juan political family, his grandfather having founded the now defunct Liberal Party and his father being a Supreme Court judge. He studied at Yale University and practised as a lawyer, before entering politics in the mid-1960s as a member of the Statehood Republican Party, which advocated full US statehood for Puerto Rico.