The 1967 status plebiscite

On July 23, 1967, Puerto Rico held its first referendum on its own political status, asking voters to choose among three options: continuing the Estado Libre Asociado status, statehood, or independence. A majority of voters chose to remain the Estado Libre Asociado, the same status that had been established fifteen years earlier under the 1952 Constitution. It would not be the only time voters faced this question; two more referendums followed later in the century, covered in another lesson on this site, each asking a version of the same unresolved question about what the ambiguous middle ground of the Estado Libre Asociado really meant in practice.

The vote's most lasting consequence, however, had nothing to do with which option won. The island's main pro-statehood party at the time, the Partido Estadista Republicano, chose to boycott the referendum in protest rather than take part in a process it saw as flawed from the start. That boycott backfired on the party itself, and badly. Dissident pro-statehood members, who did not want to sit out the vote and cede the field, broke away and founded an entirely new political organization, the Partido Nuevo Progresista, known by its Spanish initials PNP, built specifically to keep the statehood argument alive at the ballot box.

The new party did not stay a minor player for long. Its founder, the industrialist Luis A. Ferré, ran for governor in the very next election and won, ending the Popular Democratic Party's twenty-year hold on the office in 1968. A referendum meant to settle a question about the island's relationship with the United States ended up, instead, rewriting the island's party system almost overnight, a reminder that status votes in Puerto Rico have always carried consequences well beyond their stated ballot question, reshaping who held power long before they ever resolved what status itself should mean, a pattern the later chapters of this site on the 1993 and 1998 votes make clear had not gone away.

Sources: Referéndum de estatus de Puerto Rico de 1967. See Sources. Freeze 2026-08-22.