page 18 note • The “Miss Universe” and preliminary “Miss U.S.A.” beauty contests were brought to Puerto Rico a year ago by the Chief of the Economic Development Agency, at an annual cost to the taxpayers of $200,000, in high hopes of propping up the sagging tourism industry by making San Juan “the beauty capital of the world.” Some bombs exploded at the Cerromar Hotel, site of the contest, last May during the “Miss U.S.A.” contest, causing several millions in damage to the new hotel but injuring no one and not perceived by the millions of satellite TV-watchers. Again, the leader of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, a left-wing pro-Independence movement, announced that his followers would picket the contest, described as “an insult to women” and “a rape of Puerto Rican culture” in its slick, characterless commercialism. Newspapers were full of renewed fear of violence, and tight security measures turned the hotel into a police compound. Georgina Rizk, reigning “Miss Universe” and representative of Lebanon, was forbidden by her government to travel to Puerto Rico to crown her successor; it was feared she might be attacked in revenge for the killing of sixteen Puerto Ricans among the civilians massacred some weeks earlier by three Japanese terrorists associated with Arab liberation fronts. This year's “Miss Japan” was under heavy guard. While the Puerto Rican public—hysterical with joy two years ago when a local girl won the crown in Miami—disputes the merits of the overblown public relations stunt, the threat and fear of violence received worldwide attention.

page 19 note • This in itself was a major reform. Up through the last election in 1968 candidates of all major parties tended to be elected “by finger.” The PDP was then still dominated by the towering figure of Luis Munoz Marin himself. Although Munoz had voluntarily withdrawn after four terms as Governor, in 1964, fearful of his own benevolent despotism, he had pointed the finger at Robert Sanchez Vilella, for thirty years his chief dispatcher and disciple. Sanchez was indeed elected in 1964, but during die next four years he quarreled with the PDP high command. A private scandal, leading to his divorce and remarriage and alienation from PDP conservatives, who thought he pushed the party too far to the left and to “perfumed independence” or autonomy with only nominal federal union, led to his failure to be renominated in 1968. Sanchez then broke with the PDP and formed his own “People's Party,” which now advocates a hybrid of independence and commonwealth that is unlikely to receive more than a handful of votes in November. In 1968, however, Sanchez's party pulled enough votes away from the PDP—10 per cent—to secure Ferre's NPP election.