# Wanda Vázquez Garced The governor of Puerto Rico from August 2019 to January 2021. She was the second woman to hold the office and the first former governor of Puerto Rico to plead guilty to a crime. [[Donald Trump]], whom she endorsed in 2020, pardoned her in January 2026. ## Career - **Prosecutor.** Born in San Juan in 1960, she spent about twenty years as a district attorney in Puerto Rico's Department of Justice, specializing in domestic and gender violence. In 2010 she was appointed head of the Office of the Women's Advocate. - **Secretary of Justice, 2017–2019,** under Governor Ricardo Rosselló. - **Governor, August 7, 2019 – January 2, 2021.** Rosselló resigned in August 2019 after mass protests. He had tried to install [[Pedro Pierluisi]] as his successor, but Puerto Rico's Supreme Court ruled Pierluisi's swearing-in unconstitutional, and the office passed to Vázquez as Secretary of Justice. As governor, she faced a scandal in January 2020, after the southern earthquakes, when residents found a warehouse in Ponce full of undistributed relief supplies from [[Hurricane Maria]]. She fired her emergency management director. A member of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, she lost its August 2020 primary to Pierluisi. She endorsed Trump in October 2020. ## The bribery case She was arrested on **August 4, 2022**. Prosecutors charged that between December 2019 and June 2020 she agreed to a deal with the banker [[Julio Herrera Velutini]] and his consultant [[Mark Rossini]]. In exchange for promised campaign money, she would remove the regulator examining his bank. Prosecutors said she demanded the commissioner's resignation in February 2020 and in May 2020 appointed a former consultant to the bank. She said she was innocent. Under a 2025 deal the felony charges were dropped. On **August 27, 2025** she pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor: accepting the promise of a campaign contribution from a foreign national, which was never paid. Prosecutors asked for a year in prison. Her lawyers said that request broke the plea agreement. Trump pardoned her on **January 15, 2026**, before she was sentenced. A White House official called the case a political prosecution. She accepted the pardon. The full sequence, and the money that moved around it, is on [[Herrera Velutini Pardon]]. ## See also - [[Herrera Velutini Pardon]] · [[Julio Herrera Velutini]] · [[Mark Rossini]] · [[Pedro Pierluisi]] - [[Pardon Power]] · [[Pardons as Currency]]