Vieques: The Puerto Rican People Say ‘¡Ya Basta!’

by Hank Williams

The small Puerto Rican Island of Vieques has been at the heart of heated debate recently, and become the symbol for a larger Puerto Rican resistance movement pushing for independence.

Debate over the island centers on the U.S. Navy’s continued use of the island, which is still home to about 9,400 people, for military training exercises using live ammunition.

The Navy claims that the island is the only location within the United States that allows battle ships to launch attacks from the sea, Marines to stage amphibious landings, and jets to bomb from the air all at once.

The Navy argues that argues that Vieques is vital to US defense. In a recent statement to British Broadcasting (BBC) News, Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Bob Garcia said: “Without the experience of live firing exercises, our troops would not be able to do their jobs as well on real battle fields, and that means more casualties, more of our people would become prisoners, and we would be faced with longer conflicts.” Garcia concludes “this [training] keeps people from getting hurt unnecessarily.”

Killing Sparks Uprising

This claim runs contrary to some of the facts, as a civilian security guard, David Sanes Rodríguez, was killed on April 19th, 1999 by a bomb that missed its target by almost two miles and hit his observation post. This resulted in outcry by residents and a protest held last July 4th drew 50,000 people to the island to march on the base demanding its permanent closure. The Navy’s investigation found that a plane that had strayed from its proper course and sighted the wrong target caused the accident.

The problems and opposition go deeper than that last incident, however. The Navy has had a base on Vieques since 1938 and took over a majority of the island’s territory in 1941. Residents were forced to accept the price for expropriated land set by the Navy. Two choices were offered: leave or prepare to be evicted—by force, if necessary.

Now the Navy occupies over 75 per cent of the island, including the most arable land, leaving the population clustered on a small strip in the center. The effect has been the destruction of large-scale agriculture. Constant traffic by Navy ships disrupts fishing, which is the biggest industry left on the island. General Electric was one of the few large manufacturing operations, but that plant closed this year. Vieques has a staggering unemployment rate of nearly 50%, compared to 14% for the rest of Puerto Rico.

Radioactive Pollution

According to BBC News, the Navy used napalm during training exercises and has admitted that it had wrongly fired 267 radioactive shells at the island in February. Napalm was a defoliant used on a massive scale during the Vietnam War that has been linked to high cancer levels and other medical problems in veterans, due partially to the chemical Dioxin, a known carcinogen. Depleted Uranium ammunition was used extensively during the Gulf War and is suspected to be one of the culprits behind both the high level of birth defects and cancer in Iraqi children since the war ended and Gulf War Syndrome—the sickness that has infected many Persian Gulf veterans.

A 1988 article by engineer and environmental consultant Rafael Cruz-Pérez identified three main ways the military’s bombings pollute the environment in Vieques: chemicals released from the missiles’ explosive payloads, dust and rock particles released into the air as from impacts and explosions, and metallic residue left by detonated missiles.
To make matters worse, the Navy doesn’t remove junk used for target practice from the island, so metals decompose from additional explosions and leach into the soil where the chemicals contaminate both the soil and drinking water. Tanks, artillery and aircraft lie rusting across the sand dunes, shredded by thousands of bullets and rockets and the ground is strewn with empty shell-casings, dummy bombs, and mortars.

Protesters had scientists test the soil and they found dangerously high levels of toxic metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. The Navy contradicts those claims, insisting its tests prove the levels are within acceptable limits.
It may depend which study the Navy is talking about, however, as Cruz-Pérez referred to a scientific study done by the Navy in his article, which found the sources of drinking water in Vieques’ Isabel Segunda village and Barrio Esperanza polluted with toxic chemicals like TNT, tetryl and RDX. In the ’70s, the US Environmental Protection Agency sampled Vieques’ air and soil and determined that the air has unhealthy levels of particulate matter and the ground has iron levels above normal.

Studies carried out by the Puerto Rico Department of Health have shown that from 1985 to 1989 the rate of cancer in Vieques was 26 percent higher than the rest of Puerto Rico. Rafael Rivera-Castaño, a retired professor from the University of Puerto Rico’s Medical Sciences Campus, has documented an increase in both rare diseases and rather mundane ones, like asthma, which is significantly affecting Vieques’ children. “How can the children of Vieques get asthma if this is such a small island,” Rivera- Castaño asks. “The winds that blow in from the ocean are rich in iodine, which prevents asthma. The only possible cause is air pollution. We don’t have factories here, the only source of air pollution here is the Navy.”

Forcing the Navy Out

The Navy may be seeing the writing on the wall: a Pentagon panel recommended in October that the Navy shut down the Vieques range after five years, while cutting the use of live ammunition in half in the interim. President Clinton has personally tried to intervene and broker a deal, but no compromise is likely to be acceptable to Puerto Ricans, who have united on the issue. Pro-statehood Governor Pedro Rosello and Puerto Rican politicians on the mainland, including Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer are also firmly opposed to any further use by the military.

More importantly, citizens and protestors are seeing their efforts start to pay off and now believe that they can win. Vieques’ fishermen are extremely courageous, having confronted naval warships at sea several times. In 1978, fishermen were informed that they would not be allowed to fish for 3 weeks due to intensive military maneuvers by NATO countries along Vieques’ entire coastline. As a result, the fishermen, fed-up with the Navy’s arrogance, took a desperate gamble on February 6 and forty fishing boats “invaded” waters where target practice with live ammunition was about to begin. They were successful delaying the maneuvers and awakening support of the entire Puerto Rican nation.

Ruben Berrios, leader of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, has camped on the Navy’s land ever since Sanes’ death and says he will stay at his camp until he’s dragged off or the navy leave. He is part of a wide coalition of Puerto Rican politicians, church groups and civil organizations who are all demanding that Navy abandon Vieques.
“This whole side of the island is an ecological abomination and it does not look good for the most powerful nation in the world to deny the human rights of a civil population,” said Berrios in a BBC interview.

Puerto Rico the Colony

Berrios and others see Vieques as part of a larger struggle and the situation as a microcosm of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the rest of the United States. Puerto Rico became a possession of the United States as a direct result of the Spanish-American War of 1898 after 400 years of Spanish colonial rule. After the invasion the US established a military government, which lasted up to 1900, when the Foraker Act authorized the President of the United States to appoint a civilian governor. In 1917 the Jones Act granted US citizenship to all island residents. In 1948 Puerto Ricans were finally allowed to elect their own governor, but still have no representation in Congress.
Today, after 101 years of direct economic, political and military rule, Puerto Rico continues to be a US colony. Given its geographical position, Puerto Rico has always played a key strategic military role for the United States. The Central Intelligence Agency Factbook notes Puerto Rico’s “important location along the Mona Passage—a key shipping lane to the Panama Canal; San Juan is one of the biggest and best natural harbors in the Caribbean.”
Despite the odds, the protestors persevere. “I know that there is a great danger,” said Pablo Connelly, one of the civilians protesting at Mount David. He adds: “I know that the risks are great, but all the risks are worth it. I do this for my children and for the children of all Viequenses and I know that during the time that I remain here there is not going to fall a single bomb in Vieques.”