Luis A. Ferré and the 1968 election

Luis A. Ferré, born in Ponce in 1904 and alive until 2003, made his fortune as an industrialist, running Puerto Rico Iron Works and Puerto Rico Cement, after training in mechanical engineering at MIT. When the island's old pro-statehood guard boycotted the 1967 status referendum discussed in another lesson on this site, Ferré responded by founding an entirely new political vehicle, the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, in 1967.

The bet paid off almost immediately. In the 1968 general election, Ferré defeated Luis Negrón López of the Popular Democratic Party by a narrow margin, becoming the third democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico and serving from 1969 to 1973, and in the process ending the PPD's twenty-year control of the governor's office. As governor, he had the Constitution of Puerto Rico amended to lower the voting age to eighteen, and created the island's Environmental Quality Board in 1970, before the federal U.S. Environmental Protection Agency even existed.

Ferré's public life extended well beyond politics and industry. In 1959 he founded the Ponce Museum of Art, built around his own personal art collection, and in 1963 he bought the painting "Flaming June" by Frederic Lord Leighton at a moment when it was considered too out of fashion to be worth much. That painting later became one of the museum's most celebrated holdings, a striking vindication of the art world's own judgment of the piece.

Part of his file surfaced only decades later, through declassified documents cited in recent sources: Ferré appears to have worked as a Cold War-era CIA asset under the code name SKEWER-1, reportedly recruited in 1957 to help in efforts against Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. This detail rests on recently declassified material more than on settled, long-established fact, and it is presented here with that caveat rather than as certainty. Ferré lost re-election in 1972 to Rafael Hernández Colón, after a 1971 student strike at the UPR's Río Piedras campus that the police repressed with force, a controversy about which Ferré later said he had "mixed feelings."

Sources: Luis A. Ferré. See Sources. Freeze 2026-08-22.