how the US navy devastated a tiny Puerto Rican island – Repeating Islands


[Many thanks to Yarimar Bonilla for bringing this item to our attention.] “For many years, the army fired explosives on Vieques. The US residents who dwell there nonetheless face the implications.” Wilfred Chan studies from Vieques, Puerto Rico. Learn full article at The Guardian.

When Carmen Valencia was 5 years outdated, troops got here banging on her door. Her mom grabbed an extended machete. “I had no concept what was happening, however I assumed, if they arrive in right here, they’re going to kill us.”

Now 78, Valencia has lived most of her life on Vieques, one of many Caribbean’s most picturesque islands, beneath the thunder of bombs. They roared from navy planes simply over the hill by her mom’s home, leaving the odor of smoke hanging thick within the air. She was much more terrified of the troops, who would stalk her neighborhood searching for ladies to harass.

However Valencia and her complete household are US residents. Vieques is a part of Puerto Rico, a US territory. She wasn’t residing in an enemy nation – only a 52-square-mile island of farms and cattle ranches, ringed by pristine gold seashores and crystal waters.

Previously a Spanish colony, Puerto Rico was seized by the US in 1898 as a struggle prize. Within the following years, a sequence of racist supreme court docket rulings outlined Puerto Rico’s standing as a territory “belonging to” however not “a part of” the USA, citing its “alien races” and “savage tribes”. Although Puerto Ricans have been made US residents in 1917 – partly in order that they could possibly be drafted into the primary world struggle – they nonetheless can’t vote in presidential elections, and their sole consultant to Congress can’t vote both.

In 1941, US troops evicted Vieques’ roughly 10,000 residents at gunpoint and relocated them to a slim strip of land in Vieques’ middle. The remainder of the island was became a de facto struggle zone – deploying, by one navy admiral’s estimate, as a lot as 3m kilos a yr of dwell ordnances containing napalm, depleted uranium, lead, and different poisonous chemical compounds, for greater than 60 years. “They did something right here that they wished,” Valencia says.

Islanders protested in useless till 1999, when the navy by chance dropped a 500lb bomb on a lookout put up, killing David Sanes, a 35-year-old Viequense who labored there as a safety guard. Viequenses responded with civil disobedience to impede the navy base’s operations, drawing international headlines and visits from Ricky Martin, Al Sharpton, and the Dalai Lama. Valencia joined a brand new group referred to as the Vieques Girls’s Alliance, which mobilized a whole lot of girls to the entrance traces. In 2001, she and 30 different ladies broke into the bottom and have been briefly jailed. “We wished to be arrested,” she says. “We needed to converse our proper to be there.”

After two years of protests, George W Bush admitted defeat. “They don’t need us there,” he conceded (“essentially the most lovely speech I ever heard,” Valencia says). And 20 years in the past, on 1 Might 2003, the bottom closed for good.

Although the islanders defeated the US navy with no single bullet, one other battle was simply starting. 20 years later, Vieques is wounded by abnormally excessive charges of illness, a discriminatory financial system, and an absence of primary companies that’s made residing right here even more durable than earlier than. This can be a story concerning the long-term penalties of colonialism, and a group that’s decided in opposition to all odds to get free.

‘In the end, we’re lifeless with one thing’

To many guests, Vieques looks like paradise. Wild horses roam the winding streets, in entrance of Spanish-style homes with sweeping sea views. It’s the location of one of many world’s few bioluminescent bays, with aquatic microorganisms that glitter blue beneath a moonless sky. And the previous navy grounds have been designated as a wildlife refuge, dwelling to a number of the continent’s most numerous chicken populations.

What vacationer brochures don’t normally point out is the dizzying variety of unexploded ordnance – what the army calls UXOs – that also litter Vieques’ land and water. The navy is accountable for the cleanup, and to this point it’s eliminated 129,000 munition gadgets from greater than 4,400 acres, in keeping with Dan Waddill, the navy’s Vieques restoration department head. However the army hasn’t begun eradicating explosives from the encompassing seas. “The land was the next precedence,” he says, “and the underwater work is harder.” The navy beforehand introduced a completion date of 2032, however that’s been pushed again to 2033, Waddill says. [. . .]

Although no official trigger has been decided, research have discovered unusually excessive concentrations of poisonous metals like mercury, uranium, and arsenic in viequenses’ hair and urine. Shortly earlier than the navy’s departure, Carmen Ortiz Roque, a Puerto Rico epidemiologist who studied Vieques for years, discovered residents there have been 30% likelier to die from most cancers than different Puerto Ricans, with considerably larger charges of coronary heart illness, liver illness, diabetes, and toddler mortality. One other evaluation discovered Vieques islanders over 50 are as a lot as 280% extra more likely to have lung most cancers than different Puerto Ricans. “The human inhabitants of Vieques is by far the sickest human inhabitants that I’ve ever labored with,” Ortiz Roque mentioned.

The navy insists it’s to not blame, citing a 2013 report by the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention’s Company for Poisonous Substances and Illness Registry (ATSDR) that concluded that any airborne contaminants from the navy’s bombing could be “primarily undetectable” for Vieques residents. “The navy actions have been a number of miles from the place the individuals dwell,” Waddill says. The explosions would have left “very, very small concentrations” of natural chemical compounds that “disappear rapidly”, and “these actions simply didn’t trigger publicity to the those that dwell there”.

That’s not how the islanders see it. In the course of the 1999 protests, Viequenses rallied round Milivi Adams, a toddler recognized with a uncommon type of nerve most cancers. Docs discovered elevated uranium ranges within the woman’s blood; she died simply months earlier than the navy closed its base.

Practically everybody on the island has misplaced somebody. The Vieques Girls’s Alliance’s co-founder, Gladys Rivera, died of abdomen most cancers in 2007. Valencia’s husband, a civil servant named Luis, died in 2014 of liver failure, although he not often drank. “Individuals who have been right here, eventually they’re lifeless with one thing,” Valencia says. “[The navy doesn’t] imagine it’s like that, however it’s our reality.” [. . .]

For full article and images, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/30/vieques-puerto-rico-us-navy-base-training



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