MIAMI — Aníbal S. Acevedo Vilá, the governor of Puerto Rico, has been charged with 19 criminal counts related to the financing of three political campaigns from 1999 to 2004, including conspiracy to violate federal campaign laws, wire fraud and illegally using campaign funds for his personal use, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday.  

The indictment, which stemmed from a grand jury investigation lasting more than two years, also charged 12 of Mr. Acevedo’s political associates on the Caribbean island and in the United States with participation in the various schemes.

“Electoral fraud undermines the essence of our representative form of government and operates to the detriment of every Puerto Rican,” said Rosa Emilia Rodriguez-Vélez, the United States attorney in San Juan.

Mr. Acevedo, 48, a Democrat who is running for re-election as the candidate of the island’s pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party, denied on Thursday that he had committed any crimes. He contended that the indictment was politically motivated and was “the result of three years of leaks, rumors and spectacle designed to harm me.”

He said he would address his constituents at 5:30 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday and turn himself in to the authorities on Friday morning. Nine of the other defendants were arrested on Thursday and federal officials said that the remaining three were being sought.

The governor and the other defendants, if convicted, face possible prison terms of 3 to 20 years and fines of up to $250,000 on each count, the authorities said.

The 27-count indictment accuses the defendants of conspiring to illegally raise money to pay off large debts stemming from Mr. Acevedo’s successful campaigns in 2000 and 2002 to be Puerto Rico’s nonvoting representative in Congress, a position he held from 2001 to 2005, the year he became governor. The reported campaign debt in 2000 was about $545,000, the indictment says.

In the scheme, the indictment asserts, Mr. Acevedo, with the help of other defendants, solicited and then reimbursed illegal campaign contributions from members of Mr. Acevedo’s family and staff, and from the family members and staff of a group of business executives in and around Philadelphia.

In an effort to circumvent contribution limits, the governor and his associates disguised the source of the contributions by listing them under other people’s names, the indictment alleges.

In return for the Pennsylvania contributions, the indictment says, Mr. Acevedo helped the business executives obtain contracts from Puerto Rican government agencies for themselves and their clients.

During the governor’s successful 2004 gubernatorial bid, the indictment says, Puerto Rican business executives made large and unreported donations to the campaign — as much as $50,000 apiece — by disguising them as payments to the campaign’s public relations and media company. The campaign would paper over the contributions by drawing up fake invoices to make them appear to be payments for legitimate business expenses.

The indictment also accuses Mr. Acevedo of spending campaign funds on personal expenses and illegally failing to report it on his income tax returns. Federal officials say that Mr. Acevedo used this money to pay for family vacations in Miami, Orlando and China; to pay for $57,000 worth of “high-end” clothing; and to pay personal credit card bills.

The investigation had been a lively topic of conversation and speculation in Puerto Rico’s political circles since it began; in the absence of many hard facts about what invesitgators were finding, rumor became the operative currency. In recent months, the consensus among political analysts and politicians had been that Mr. Acevedo would probably escape charges but could be named by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator.

So news that the governor himself had been indicted seemed to take even the most seasoned and jaded members of the island’s political class by surprise. But it also produced something of a collective exhalation, and allowed the island to pass from the wilderness of gossip to the stark realities of a federal criminal case.

Not surprisingly, the indictment dominated the island’s news media on Thursday, as well as conversations in the workplace and around the kitchen table.

“It is the talk everywhere, and in general, what you hear is people saying what an embarrassment this is for Puerto Rico,” said Michelle Fabelo, a finance manager in San Juan.

“This is a zoo, you can imagine,” added Luis Dávila Colón, a prominent political analyst in San Juan.

Reaction on the island appeared to hew to the sharp divisions of national politics, with Mr. Acevedo’s supporters backing his claim that the prosecution was politically motivated and his opponents saying that the indictment seemed to underscore their long-held contention that the governor was corrupt.

In a statement circulated by the governor’s office, Thomas C. Green, a Washington attorney who represents Mr. Acevedo, called the charges against the governor “senseless” and questioned why the indictment was unsealed “only months” before the election.

“This is an unprecedented and undeserved intrusion by the federal government into the affairs and electoral process in the Commonwealth,” he said in a statement.

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