Kim­ber­ly Mack­han

More than 15,000 peo­ple gath­ered at the spe­cial Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) con­ven­tion over the week­end, PNM San Fer­nan­do East con­stituen­cy chair­man Tina Gron­lund-Nunez says. "With re­gards to the con­ven­tion, I was most pleased with the turnout," Gron­lund-Nunez, a Gov­ern­ment Sen­a­tor, said yes­ter­day in a tele­phone in­ter­view. "The reg­is­tra­tion count from the peo­ple sign­ing in, from my un­der­stand­ing, crossed 13,000." She said the PNM was able to com­mand a high turnout at its spe­cial con­ven­tion al­though it did not ad­ver­tise the event much. "It does demon­strate that not on­ly San Fer­nan­do East is very well-or­gan­ised, but it al­so demon­strat­ed that oth­er con­stituen­cies are al­so very well-or­gan­ised in that (mo­bil­is­ing its sup­port­ers)," Gron­lund-Nunez said. "I do not know if you no­ticed. There were no ads on the ra­dio re­al­ly."

She an­tic­i­pat­ed that more than 15,000 per­sons at­tend­ed the po­lit­i­cal event.

"(I was) talk­ing to my area man­agers this morn­ing, be­cause this (fig­ure) took every­one by sur­prise," Gron­lund-Nunez said. She said she want­ed to make sure that every­one was han­dling it prop­er­ly and the or­gan­is­ers found out that a lot of the mem­bers did not reg­is­ter at all. "So they came out, but they did not wor­ry to go up to the desk to reg­is­ter." She said the fail­ure of PNM mem­bers from the San Fer­nan­do East con­stituen­cy to reg­is­ter would have oc­curred among oth­er con­stituen­cies. "And if that hap­pened (among the mem­bers) in San Fer­nan­do East, I would think it hap­pened in all the oth­er con­stituen­cies. "There­fore, a ma­jor part (of the at­ten­dees) did not reg­is­ter at all. "There­fore, I would say the un­of­fi­cial count might be over 15,000..."