Copyright information: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html
In Vieques, the navy rehearses amphibious landing exercises, parachute drops, and submarine maneuvers. It conducts artillery and small arms firing, naval gunfire support, and missile shoots. The navy bombs the island from air, land, and sea. Vieques is the navy’s declared “university of the sea,” a small island target range situated next to 195,000 square miles of ocean and airspace controlled by the military for so-called integrated training scenarios. Vieques, the navy claims, provides a unique venue for the realistic training of U.S. troops, one of the few places where different naval units on the East Coast can come together to prepare for combat.
Furthermore, the navy argues that Vieques is crucial not only to the battle readiness of its Atlantic Fleet but to the training of U.S., NATO, South American, and Caribbean allied forces. Thousands of U.S. and allied troops invade Vieques during large-scale maneuvers, or “war games.” Since 1992 alone, the U.S. military has rehearsed interventions in the Balkans, Haiti, Iraq, and Somalia in Vieques. The training of military forces on Vieques, the navy asserts, is essential to protect U.S. interests, meet national security commitments, and ensure the readiness and safety of military personnel. The navy argues that the island is crucial to national defense.1
The Civilian Presence in Vieques
The navy notes that Vieques is only one of a number of civilian communities living side by side with the military. The geography of the situation, however, makes this case unique (see map 1). Vieques is a fifty-one-squaremile island, roughly twice the size of Manhattan, where residents live wedged between an ammunition depot and a maneuver area. The navy has taken control of two-thirds of island land, squeezing a civilian residential community into its center. Residents frequently refer to Vieques as a ham sandwich and see themselves as lunchmeat between thick slices of bread.2
In Vieques, schoolchildren in starched uniforms laugh and play at recess while automatic-weapons fire echoes in the town plaza. People go about their daily routines as helicopters cut across the horizon and warships prowl the coastline. The rhythm of everyday life is punctuated by the thunder of bombs. Although the navy maintains no formal jurisdiction over the civilian sector, in reality it controls the fate of the entire island. The navy controls the majority of the land, water, and air surrounding Vieques. It controls nautical routes, flight paths, aquifers, and zoning laws in civilian territory. For decades the navy held title to the resettlement tracts in the civilian sector, where the majority of the island’s population lived under constant threat of eviction.
The navy has long maintained ambivalence toward island residents. It has regarded the socioeconomic development of the island as a threat to naval operations and actively thwarted development plans in the civilian sector. In the 1960s, the navy secretly planned to remove civilians from Vieques and relocate them elsewhere. A presidential order prevented the navy from evicting residents, but left unresolved the underlying tension between military interests and the human needs of the community. For decades, people in Vieques have lived helter-skelter and uncertain while the navy carefully orchestrated the movement of thousands of troops, the testing of weapons, the business of war.
Recent Conflict
During the 1990s the long-running dispute between the navy and the community continued to simmer. This “cold peace” finally ended near the decade’s conclusion. In April 1999 a navy jet on a training mission mistakenly dropped its load of five-hundred-pound bombs not on the intended target range but on the military observation post one mile away. The explosions injured one guard and killed a civilian employee of the base, David Sanes Rodríguez. Outrage over the death of Sanes reignited the decades-long conflict. Protestors occupied a military target range littered with live ordnance and built little wooden houses on hills pierced with missiles. They slept in hammocks strung from the barrel of a battered tank and ferried food back and forth in small, weathered fishing boats. They staked Puerto Rican flags in the muddy craters left by bombs and covered an entire hillside with white crosses, naming the hill Monte David (Mount David), after David Sanes. The white crosses symbolized all those Viequenses who have died of cancer—poisoned, people here believe, by air, land, and water contaminated by decades of bombing.
The death of Sanes spurred a wider mobilization that led tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans to march in the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital city, demanding a halt to military training exercises in Vieques. Puerto Ricans across the United States organized rallies and marches to stop the bombing of Vieques. The nonviolent resistance movement has drawn the support of prominent Puerto Rican celebrities, artists, and U.S. politicians as well as Nobel Peace Prize winners Rigoberta Menchú and the Dalai Lama. Vieques has been the focus of international solidarity efforts from Seoul, Korea, to Okinawa, Japan, to India and Europe. Hundreds of protestors have been arrested for acts of civil disobedience on the island. Prominent U.S. political figures such as Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy, Jr., and New York political activist Rev. Al Sharpton have been jailed for trespassing on federal land during demonstrations on Vieques. Protest temporarily halted all military activity at this central training facility for over a year and continues to disrupt naval training exercises.
A Colonial Dilemma
Protest against the navy in Vieques has focused international attention on the contradiction posed by U.S. advocacy for global democracy and human rights and the U.S. Navy’s apparent subordination of a community of American citizens with no voice in the U.S. federal government. “This is part racism, and in part environmental racism,” argues Ivan Meléndez, a forty-yearold fisherman and antinavy activist. “The navy is doing things here that it would never do in the States. Leaving its garbage here, destroying our environment. Getting paid by other countries to leave its garbage here.”
While the navy is quick to argue the necessity of Vieques to national defense, Meléndez’s comments highlight an aspect of Vieques’s subordination that the navy is less quick to acknowledge. Vieques makes good economic sense for the military. Although in many countries the U.S. military pays rent or “permission cost” for access to land, the navy pays no fees to Puerto Rico for the base in Vieques.3 Neither does it pay taxes or contribute financially in any way to this municipality that has been impoverished by the expropriation of two-thirds of its land and the strangling of its entire economic base. On the contrary, the municipality acts as a source of revenue for the U.S. military. The navy rents out Vieques to foreign militaries to bomb, earning by its own estimates $80 million per year.4
“I think if this were happening in Manhattan, or if it were happening in Martha’s Vineyard, certainly the delegations from those states would make certain that this would not continue,” says former Puerto Rican governor Pedro Rosselló.5 Statehood proponents in Puerto Rico note that political pressure forced the navy to close its live bombing range in Kaho’olawe, Hawaii, an uninhabited island in a U.S. state, while protestors and politicians have been unable to leverage a similar deal for the inhabited island of Vieques, a U.S. possession. The navy responds that Vieques is only one of fifty-seven military training sites in the United States using live or inert ordnance, and that the burden borne by Vieques citizens is no different from that of other American citizens in locations with full congressional representation (U.S. Navy 1999).
It is clear, however, that a different set of standards governs military activity in Vieques and exercises in the mainland United States. In 1997 the Environmental Protection Agency ordered a halt to live and dummy artillery shelling at the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod when evidence showed that explosive fallout was contaminating the water supply.6 Yet for years environmental officials have recognized the contamination of Vieques’s coastal waters and drinking supply as a result of the navy bombing, and no comparable action has been taken.7
The restructuring of the U.S. military in the aftermath of the cold war has stimulated a wave of base closures and new scrutiny of the material effects of the U.S. military on its surrounding communities. Scientists have discovered significant environmental contamination caused by the most routine military activity, raising troubling questions about both the extent of contamination at firing ranges like the one in Vieques and the scope of a cleanup. Here thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance have accumulated over decades, with staggering implications for the environment and the health and safety of the civilian population.
It is not only the extent of bombing that poses problems in Vieques, but also the nature of military testing practices. The navy itself, in a controversial web page, advertised the availability of the Vieques target range to foreign navies, to fire “most non-conventional weapons inventory” and to provide “airspace, surface, and subsurface water space for developmental and operational testing of new and existing weapons systems.” The term “nonconventional weapons” typically refers to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.8 What constitutes a “developmental” or “new” weapons system is an open question. The inference from military advertisements that the U.S. Navy and its allies are testing nonconventional and new weapons systems on an island inhabited by nearly ten thousand human beings raises the eerie specter of the past.
It recalls the trauma unleashed by nuclear testing in Nevada in the 1950s, where clouds of atomic dust traveled hundreds of miles to contaminate dispersed farming communities, where moon-faced children bore testament to the dangers of human design.9 It evokes the memory of the fireball four miles wide that vaporized an entire island in the Bikini Atoll and the rain of white ash that poisoned islanders already made nomads by strategic design.10 Recent revelations that the navy fired depleted uranium munitions on the Vieques range in violation of federal law and navy policy raise additional concerns about the contamination behind military fences. What is the impact on the surrounding civilian population of this type of new weapons testing? How is it that the navy carries out these activities in the face of opposition and protest from a resident population of American citizens?