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Muñoz said: "There comes a moment when a reasonable, intelligent man who wants to serve people says to himself. 'I want to see what's true about this fixed idea of mine.' " Muñoz' own honest reappraisal forced him early in the '30s to begin hedging on the desirability of breaking away from the U.S. "I want my people to want independence," he explained to a friend in those days. "Once they do that, they will set powerful forces in motion and may bring things to the point where independence is unnecessary or even bad." Later, when Congress, piqued by anti-U.S. riots in Puerto Rico, briefly considered an independence bill that would have pushed the island outside U.S. tariff walls, Muñoz had switched his views so much that he likened the bill to the Latin American ley de fuga—the custom of freeing a prisoner and shooting him in the back "while he escapes."
By 1938, when he formed his Popular Democratic Party and ran for the island Senate, Muñoz had decided that "status is not the issue." To the jíbaros, the country men, he promised labor laws and land reform instead of independence. He urged voters to "lend me your vote" rather than sell it to the opposition. His followers called him El Vate (The Bard) and elected him to office. In those days, needlewomen who worked at home in the island's second biggest industry after sugar were getting just 3¢ for hemming a dozen handkerchiefs.
Fomento. At that point Puerto Rico, its hungry people jamming an eroded land without oil, coal or iron, looked hopeless. Undeterred. Muñoz counted the island's assets: plentiful labor, an open door through U.S. tariff walls for anything the island could grow or make, a ready-to-hand brain trust of half a dozen bright young U.S.-educated economists, professors and businessmen. Among them: Rafael Pico, now president of the government's bank, and Roberto Sánchez Vilella, now Secretary of State (Vice-Governor). Rex Tugwell. named Governor, implanted an efficient civil service and a knack for the kind of economic planning that is flexible enough to improvise when necessary. By long tradition, the Puerto Rican government had—and never lost—a notably un-Latin reputation for incorruptibility among top officials. With these assets, Muñoz started the institution islanders call Fomento (development), a plan to "free the human spirit" in Puerto Rico by raising living standards above the animal level through industrialization.
To get factories going, Muñoz tapped a young pharmacist (University of Michigan '32) named Teodoro Moscoso Jr., who left a job running his family's wholesale drug business in Ponce to form and boss Fomento. The program's principle, as summed up by Moscoso: "Economic development is not an end but a means of attacking poverty." It avoided political doctrines; Muñoz early ruled that Fomento should "have no fixed taboos, no sacred cows in the choice of instruments to achieve a better standard of living."