It remains difficult to get people on the U.S. mainland who are not Puerto Rican to pay attention to issues in Puerto Rico. Given the recent attacks on teaching un-sanitized history, I wonder if Vieques and its struggles will ever make it into high school curricula.
Interestingly enough, this week The Guardian published one of the best journalistic efforts to delve into both Vieques’ past and problematic present. I hope everyone will take the time to read it.
For the story, reporter Wilfred Chan interviewed Island residents, like 78-year-old Carmen Valencia.
When Carmen Valencia was five years old, troops came banging on her door. Her mother grabbed a long machete. “I had no idea what was going on, but I thought, if they come in here, they’re going to kill us.”
Chan covers the dark history, as well as the untenable current situation on the island.
In 1941, US troops evicted Vieques’ roughly 10,000 residents at gunpoint and relocated them to a narrow strip of land in Vieques’ center. The rest of the island was turned into a de facto war zone – deploying, by one navy admiral’s estimate, as much as 3m pounds a year of live ordinances containing napalm, depleted uranium, lead, and other toxic chemicals, for more than 60 years. “They did anything here that they wanted,” Valencia says.
Islanders protested in vain until 1999, when the navy accidentally dropped a 500lb bomb on a lookout post, killing David Sanes, a 35-year-old Viequense who worked there as a security guard. Viequenses responded with civil disobedience to impede the navy base’s operations, drawing global headlines and visits from Ricky Martin, Al Sharpton, and the Dalai Lama. Valencia joined a new group called the Vieques Women’s Alliance, which mobilized hundreds of women to the front lines. In 2001, she and 30 other women broke into the base and were briefly jailed. “We wanted to be arrested,” she says. “We had to speak our right to be there.”
[…]Though the islanders defeated the US navy without a single bullet, another struggle was just beginning. Two decades later, Vieques is wounded by abnormally high rates of disease, a discriminatory economic system, and a lack of basic services that’s made living here even harder than before. This is a story about the long-term consequences of colonialism, and a community that’s determined against all odds to get free.
This 12-minute 2019 Al Jazeera feature deeply explores the impact of the Navy’s half-century of war games on Vieques, and includes interviews with all sorts of folks fighting to make Vieques better—and those who may just be making things worse.
RELATED STORY: Women in Vieques, Puerto Rico, lead the fight against U.S. Navy contamination of their island”
Monisha Rios, whose bio describes her as “a disabled Army veteran, autoethnographer, clinical social worker, human rights advocate and activist,” wrote about ”The Toxic Legacy of U.S. Foreign Policy in Vieques” on April 23 for the think tank Foreign Policy in Focus.
The women of Vieques, an island off the east coast of Puerto Rico, have been on the front lines of the generations-long struggle for peace and justice to end the havoc wrought by U.S. foreign policy on their island, in their homes, and on their bodies.
Social scientists have collected testimonies from Viequense women concerning sexually violent conduct of military personnel, who sometimes numbered as many as 100,000 in place with a population of roughly 10,000 inhabitants. One woman related the “legacy of the military occupation of the island [to] how women in the 50s and 60s were confined to their homes by the presence of drunken sailors in the street.” Another woman told how her mother would keep “a machete under her pillow to defend her family in case carousing sailors broke into the house.” There are countless other stories that have been silenced and ignored.
Many of these women have been central to resisting the militarization of Vieques, including through the campaign Justice for Vieques Now. Their demands are straightforward. They have called for demilitarization, including the removal of Relocatable Over-The-Horizon Radar system and Mount Pirata Telecommunications Center. They’ve campaigned for decontamination, involving enclosed detonation of unexploded ordnance to mitigate the ongoing harm to community health from open detonation. They’ve demanded the restoration and return of all lands controlled by the federal government. And they’ve supported a community-directed Master Plan for Sustainable Development of Vieques approved in 2004, in addition to a modern hospital and compensation for health problems related to military activity.
Although the United States paints a so-called feminist face on its twenty-first-century implementation of the Monroe Doctrine, women in Vieques are still fighting for justice and trying to heal their community from the toxic legacy of U.S. foreign policy, while the very government that claims to “defend” their “freedom” ignores their demands. The plight of Vieques is a prime example of why U.S. foreign policy must be critically analyzed, called into question, and restrained by the people of the United States in whose name unspeakable harm is being done–abroad and within their own communities. U.S. citizens should be asking who profits from U.S. interventionism, who develops U.S. foreign policy, whose interests are served and who pays the price, who wins when the very earth that sustains us is contaminated by unnecessary military activity and can’t produce food. After 200 years, the time has come to do away with the colonial law of the past that has plagued our communities in Latin America and the Caribbean for far too long. It’s time for the abolition of the Monroe Doctrine, the Jones Act, and the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act.
Puerto Ricans gathered on the island Monday to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Navy’s withdrawal
“Where before military bombs sounded, today another sounds: the Puerto Rican [bomba.] Vieques celebrates today 20 years without the Navy.”
Yet Vieques still has no hospital.
RELATED STORY: A 3-year-old child dies in Vieques, Puerto Rico, which still has no hospital
The Puerto Rican government promised that construction of the new hospital would commence in January 2023, but it was February before current Gov. Pierluisi signed a contract, proclaiming that finally, “the design and construction process of the new hospital in Vieques” would begin.
Every morning, a self-described “Nuyorican that moved back to Puerto Rico” who goes by Shelly tweets about the situation.
Join me in the comments for more on Vieques, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.
