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June 14 is an important date in U.S. and Puerto Rican history which is too often overlooked: 24 years ago, the Bush administration announced a decision to end the bombing of the island municipality of Vieques in Puerto Rico.
The New York Times reported on June 14, 2001, on the plans to halt military exercises:
The Bush administration will announce on Thursday that it will halt all military exercises and aerial bombing runs on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques by May 2003, reversing the Navy’s long-running insistence that no other locale is suitable for battle simulations, senior officials said tonight.
The decision was made today at a White House meeting that included President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, who has frequently voiced concerns that the mounting protests against the Navy operations and the arrest of the protesters seeking to block the exercises was costing Mr. Bush vital support among Hispanics. Also attending was Gordon England, the secretary of the Navy, who told lawmakers tonight that he would recommend that the Navy stop using the range by 2003, officials said.
Another exercise involving the dropping of inert bombs is scheduled to begin on Monday, and a senior administration official said today that ”we wanted to get the word out quickly” that the administration would end the exercises, though not as quickly as Puerto Rican officials have demanded.
Cessation of the bombings highlights the results of winning a long-term struggle of protest and resistance against the colonial powers who control the island. It is also important to note that though the bombing/target practice on tiny Vieques was halted, the effects of high cancer rates on the island are present today, and protests against the U.S Navy to get them to do a better job of cleaning up the area persists.
The Zinn Education Project marked the significance of the end of the bombing exercises date:
The end of the exercises came after decades of protests from Puerto Rican activists against the contamination caused by the bombings. For example, people living in Vieques were 27% more likely to contract cancer than other people living in Puerto Rico.
To highlight this history, artist Dave Buchen produced the poster “Vieques Libre,” distributed by Justseeds. On the poster, it says:
In 1941, the U.S. Navy expropriated 75 percent of the island of Vieques. The residents were forced to live in a narrow swath of land while the rest was turned into a bombing range. For the next six decades, the Navy launched bombs from ships, dropped napalm from planes, fired depleted uranium shells, staged mock invasions on the beaches, and rented out the island to arms manufacturers to test their munitions.
On April 19, 1999, that all changed when the U.S. Navy dropped a five hundred pound bomb on David Sanes, a Vieques resident who worked on the base, killing him instantly. The next day a group of activists entered the restricted zone as an act of remembrance and resistance. One of them, Tito Kayak, spent the night camped out on the naval base.
ABC News reported on the opposition to the Vieques bombings:
Residents and critics have long described the bombings as a health threat, but the Navy says its bombs are not dangerous, and that the range is vital for national security.
Over the past several years, opposition to the exercises grew steadily. During the last bombing runs in late April and early May, about 180 people were arrested after they trespassed on the bombing range in an effort to stop the military exercises.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, Bronx Democratic Party chairman Roberto Ramirez and New York state legislator Jose Rivera were among those arrested.
[…]
Word from the White House comes just five days before bombing was expected to resume, and 11 ships and 10,000 sailors have begun practicing battle formations on the island, which is home to 9,100 people.
Democracy Now took a look back at the events on the 10th anniversary:
Democracy Now reported:
On the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, thousands are commemorating the 10th anniversary of when the U.S. Navy stopped using their home as a bombing range. Since the 1940s, the Navy used nearly three-quarters of the island for bombing practice, war games and dumping old munitions. The bombing stopped after campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience but the island continues to suffer. At the current cleanup rate, the Navy says, it will take until 2025 to remove all the environmental damage left by more than 60 years of target practice. A fishermen recently discovered a giant unexploded bomb underwater. The island of about 10,000 people also lacks a hospital to treat illnesses such as asthma and cancer that may be attributed to the military’s former bombing activity. “We believe the military is really not interested in cleaning up Vieques and rather interested in continuing to punish Vieques for having thrown the U.S. Navy out in 2003,” says Robert Rabin of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques. “This is a process that we believe is happening with no real supervision, no genuine community participation.”
Al Jazeera reported on the dangerous aftermath of the bombings, as half of the island is a toxic Superfund site:
In 2021, NBC News reported that the cleanup by the U.S. military will take more than a decade to complete:
The reopening of hiking trails and various white-sand beaches on two tiny Puerto Rican islands long used as Navy bombing ranges and now popular with tourists will be delayed more than a decade, according to a federal report released Friday.
Cleanup efforts in Vieques and Culebra led respectively by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will continue through 2032 at an additional cost of $420 million for a total of $800 million, stated the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
“Substantial work remains,” the report stated. “Challenges include logistics, the islands’ topography and environment, and the safety concerns around handling unexploded munitions. The Navy also faces challenges on Vieques with community distrust of the military handling cleanup efforts.”
So far, crews have removed munition including 32,000 bombs, 12,000 grenades and 1,300 rockets from Vieques, where the U.S. government relocated residents when the Navy began using the island as a training range in the 1940s. Meanwhile, crews have cleared more than 5,000 unexploded ordnances since January 2020 in Culebra, where the military ceased all activities in 1975. An unknown number of munitions remains on both islands located just east of Puerto Rico as teams use tools ranging from machetes to drones to help clean the area.
At present, given the Trump administration’s drastic cuts to spending, there is no way to tell when the cleanup will be completed. Viequenses, as the island residents are known, have not given up their struggle to raise awareness and pressure both the U.S. government and Puerto Rico’s governing body to make the cleanup a priority.
Meet Myrna Pagan, who I introduced on Daily Kos back in 2018. She is now a leader and organizer of the Vieques council of elders, and will be 90 years old on Nov. 3. She is the founder of the Vidas Viequenses Valen movement (Vieques Lives Matter) established by the people of the island to continue their struggle for justice to force the U.S. Navy to close its bombing range and base and now to complete the cleanup.
She was interviewed on Talk World Radio:
Nuyorican poet, professor, and activist Mariposa Fernandez recently wrote about Pagan here on Daily Kos.
Pagan also testified before the U.S. House of Representative Natural Resources Committee on
H.R. 1317, the Vieques Recovery and Redevelopment Act of 2021:
When I was diagnosed with uterine cancer, I decided to have all my family members do heavy metal testing. The results were alarming. Every single member of our three generations were contaminated at toxic levels. I survived cancer. My husband, Charlie, did not. We lost our son, Derek, at the young age of thirty-two because of liver failure. One of my grandchildren was born with several anomalies and another with Kostmann’s syndrome, rare immune disorder. I have nine grandchildren and all of them have respiratory problems. Sadly, my story is not a unique one.
We, the people of Vieques, suffer an acute health crisis. Every family I know has someone with cancer or has lost someone with cancer.
Being sick in Vieques is a daunting challenge. For medical treatment we must travel to the big island and we depend on a maritime transportation system that more often than not fails to provide reliable service. When it does work, it takes us an hour to travel to the coastal town of Ceiba. Then we take an expensive taxi ride to San Juan and either have to pay a hotel or sleep at friends’ or relatives’ houses unless we can make it back to the ferry. If we make it back after chemo, it is a
very nauseating ride. In addition, expecting mothers face similar difficulties, as they cannot give birth in Vieques, due to the lack of a maternity ward.Many of our patients forego treatment because of this excruciating ordeal. The situation is dire, given there has been no facility in Vieques since 2017 when Hurricane María devastated our island. Even before the hurricane, the only health center on the island did not have the adequate equipment to treat dialysis nor cancer patients nor most of the illnesses we face.
We lack the most basic requirements to meet the health needs of our people. We lack what every American has living in the most rural parts of the Country. Currently, there is a provisional health center but there is no birthing room, no x-ray service, and only meager medical emergency triage services are available. Viequenses are constantly struggling for life. At the start of the pandemic, while the rest of the country was worried about having enough respirators or nurses, we knew that if we got serious Covid we had no chance to survive.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Vieques, its history, and how it impacted Puerto Rico, the Coqui Report has this primer:
Join me in the comments section below for more Vieques news, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.