Gaspar Roca

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Gaspar Roca (b. 1926 - d. April 8, 2007) was a Wharton School-trained economist that held prominent positions in government and the private sector, including the presidency of the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company (PRIDCO).

The founder and editor of El Vocero, Gaspar Roca initially filled the market niche for a crime-oriented tabloid left by the closing of El Imparcial newspaper. Under his leadership, El Vocero eventually evolved into what it is today, a mainstream newspaper that can now be described as a tabloid only in the size of the paper it is printed on, with legitimate news occupying its front page and most news pages, a well-known set of columnists, including Luis Dávila Colón, José Arsenio Torres, Roberto Rexach Benítez, Eudaldo Báez Galib and Juan Manuel García Passalacqua, and a wide variety of sections and supplements.

One of his most important contributions to journalism was his willingness to bankroll important freedom-of-information lawsuits that have opened government to intense press and public scrutiny, an example of which is the United States Supreme Court decision declaring unconstitutional the Puerto Rico judiciary's rule barring the press from over 30,000 yearly closed-door preliminary hearings where probable-cause was determined in criminal proceedings, El Vocero de Puerto Rico vs Puerto Rico, 508 US 147 (1993). Other examples include the 1992 lawsuit that forced political candidates to make public their personal finances, and the case declaring unconstitutional Puerto Rico's "criminal defamation" law that had a chilling effect on the exercise of press freedom right in Puerto Rico.

Every newspaper in Puerto Rico has benefitted from these El Vocero-bankrolled judicial victories. Many newspapers on the mainland US have also benefitted from these landmark victories that Gaspar Roca bankrolled. For example, many freedom-of-the-press court cases and lawsuits filed before state and federal courts cite the holding in El Vocero's 1993 US Supreme Court case. See, for example, the Reporters Committee for Press Freedom's filing regarding access to sex offenders' data in Otte vs Doe^[1].