For decades, the military had fired explosives at Vieques. Citizens still facing the consequences
When Carmen Valencia was five years old, infantrymen knocked on her door. His mom grabbed a long machete. ” I had no idea what was going on, but I think if they got here, they were going to kill us. “
Now 78, Valencia has lived most of his life on Vieques, one of the most picturesque islands in the Caribbean, under the roar of bombs. Military planes roared just above the hill near his mother’s home, leaving a thick smell of smoke in the air.
He was even more afraid of the troops, who roamed his community looking for women to harass.
But Valencia and his entire circle of relatives are U. S. citizens. Vieques is part of Puerto Rico, a U. S. territory. USAGOLDEN beaches and crystal clear waters.
For the U. S. Navy, Vieques what one admiral called its “crown jewel”: the best environment to use for artillery training. From 1941 to 2003, the Navy had fired a horrific amount of explosives on the land and sea of Vieques, and 20 years later, the islanders were still suffering the devastating consequences.
Formerly a Spanish colony, Puerto Rico seized the United States in 1898 as a war prize. In the following years, a series of racist Supreme Court decisions explained Puerto Rico’s prestige as a territory “belonging” but not “componenting” the United States. , mentioning their “alien races” and “wild tribes”. Although Puerto Ricans became U. S. citizens in 1917, in part to qualify for enlistment in World War I, they still cannot vote in presidential elections, and their only representative in Congress cannot vote either.
In 1941, U. S. troops expelled approximately 10,000 inhabitants of Vieques at gunpoint and relocated them to a narrow strip of land in downtown Vieques. The rest of the island became a de facto war zone, deployed, according to one estimate through a naval admiral, up to £3 million a year of live recipes containing napalm, depleted uranium, lead and other poisonous chemicals, for more than 60 years. “Here they did everything they were looking for,” Valencia said.
The islanders protested in vain until 1999, when the Navy dropped a 500-pound bomb on a checkpoint, killing David Sanes, a 35-year-old Vieques who worked there as a security guard. The Vieques responded with civil disobedience to hinder operations. of the naval base, attracting global headlines and visits from Ricky Martin, Al Sharpton and the Dalai Lama. Valencia had joined a new organization called the Vieques Women’s Alliance, which had mobilized many women on the front. In 2001, she and 30 other women stormed the base and were briefly imprisoned. “We sought arrest,” he said. We had to communicate about our right to be there. “
After two years of protests, George W. Bush admitted defeat. ” They don’t need us there,” he acknowledged (“the most charming speech I’ve ever heard,” says Valencia). And 20 years ago, on May 1, 2003, the base was permanently closed.
Although the islanders defeated the U. S. Navy. Without a single bullet, another fight was just beginning. Two decades later, Vieques was wounded by abnormally high rates of disease, a discriminatory economic formula, and a lack of basic facilities that made life here even more complicated. than before. It is a story about the long-term consequences of colonialism and about a web formed by our minds against all odds to free themselves.
To many visitors, Vieques seemed like a paradise. Wild horses roam the winding streets, past the Spanish-style houses with stunning sea views. It is the site of one of the world’s few bioluminescent bays, with aquatic microorganisms twinkling blue under a moonless sky. And the former military grounds have been designated as a refuge, home to some of the continent’s most varied bird populations.
What the tourist brochures fail to mention is the staggering amount of unexploded ordnance, what the military calls UXO, that still litters the land and water of Vieques. ammunition of more than 4,400 acres, according to Dan Waddill, chief of the Navy’s recovery branch on Vieques. But the army has not begun cutting explosives from the surrounding seas. harder. ” The Navy had in the past announced a final touch date of 2032, but that has been pushed back to 2033, Waddill says.
When cleanup crews locate a UXO, they prefer to blow it up in the open, an approach the Navy considers the least dangerous: “It’s just not safe for personnel to get this ammunition into a detonation chamber,” Waddill says. These explosions occur without warning, puncturing Sunday religious services. But what worries citizens most are the explosive chemicals released into the air: anything they worry about will slowly kill them for decades.
Although no official cause has been determined, studies have found unusually high concentrations of poisonous metals such as mercury, uranium and arsenic in the hair and urine of Viequese. Shortly before the Navy departed, Carmen Ortiz Roque, a Puerto Rican epidemiologist who had studied Vieques for years, had found that citizens were 30 percent more likely to die of cancer than other Puerto Ricans, which was particularly consistent with rates of central disease, liver disease, diabetes and infant mortality. Other research had revealed that Vieques residents over the age of 50 were up to 280 consistent with a percent higher chance of having lung cancer than other Puerto Ricans. “The human population of Vieques is by far the sickest human population I’ve ever worked with,” Ortiz Roque said.
The Navy insists this is not to blame, citing a 2013 report through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) that concluded that any airborne contaminants from Navy bombing would be “essentially undetectable” for Vieques. residents. ” The navy’s activities were several miles from where other people lived,” Wadill says. The explosions allegedly left “very, very small concentrations” of biological chemicals that “disappear quickly” and “these activities the other people who live there. “
That’s how the islanders see it. During the 1999 protests, Vieques supported Milivi Adams, a baby diagnosed with a rare form of nerve cancer. Doctors found high levels of uranium in the girl’s blood; He died a few months before the Navy closed its base.
Almost everyone on the island has lost someone. The co-founder of the Vieques Women’s Alliance, Gladys Rivera, had died of abdominal cancer in 2007. Valencia’s husband, a civil servant named Luis, died in 2014 of liver failure, though he rarely drank. “The other people who have been here, faster or later, died with something,” Valecia says. “[The navy] is not like that, but it’s our truth. “
The lack of a medical center on Vieques made the scenario even more deadly. In 2017, Hurricane Maria had reduced Vieques’ only hospital to rubble. Years later, a replacement one has yet to be built. That had been devastating for Vieques, where part of the population lived in poverty and nearly one-fifth had no health insurance. Now, Vieques who need medical attention have to fight with tourists to get ferry tickets to Puerto Rico’s main island, camping overnight just to get on board. Some never make it: like 13-year-old Jaideliz Moreno Ventura, who died in 2020 after experiencing flu-like symptoms that turned into seizures. Relatives were now suing the Puerto Rican government.
That left the islanders in their own hands. For the past decade, Valencia had volunteered with Nilda Medina, another veteran of the Vieques Women’s Alliance, to organize cell cancer screening vans to Vieques by ferry several times a year. Work can be emotionally draining. Every day I am informed that there is one more user with cancer,” says Medina.
The weight increased further when her husband, a well-known activist named Robert Rabin, died of cancer last March. In Rabin’s final months, the couple had to wake up at 4 a. m. to catch the ferry for their chemotherapy sessions in Puerto Rico’s capital. When they returned home to Vieques, there was no way to discharge morphine. “I had very, very hard cancer. But I knew there were no medicines here. So he never said he was in pain, he never complained,” Medina says. , his voice broken. ” He was very quiet, as if he was doing civil disobedience. “
The disease is the only thing threatening the survival of the islanders.
During their war games for about two months of the year, the number of naval infantrymen increased to 100,000. When they weren’t trashing Vieques with explosives, they invaded the city, reorganizing the island’s economy to run its bars, laundries, and brothels. Although the troops harassed and assaulted local citizens with impunity, the islanders also feared the termination of the exercises, which meant 10 grueling months without work.
Today, the island is consistent with what many locals believe to be some other type of colonial conquest through wealthy continental-American Americans. Walking through Isabel Segunda, one of the two villages on the island, I hear much more English than Spanish. Luxurious oceanfront marble-floored villas that provide on-site massages cost up to $3,000 depending on the night. As the sun sets in Esconsistent withanza, a southern resort, breweries filled with white Americans spill into the streets. I know a couple from Miami who are visiting Vieques for the first time and are already buying assets here.
In 2012, Puerto Rico’s governor put in place massive incentives for Americans to move there and buy genuine property, adding full exemptions on their source of income and capital gains taxes. a $13 million mansion near San Juan in 2021, and cryptocurrency mogul Brock Pierce, who paid $18. 3 million last year to buy Vieques’ W luxury hotel, which closed after Hurricane Maria.
The other indigenous peoples of Vieques already living there would not be eligible for such tax relief. But over the past two decades, officials have done “nothing, nothing” to invest in local economic development, Medina says. “There is no plan. “
Locals said the gringos had begun capturing homes in Vieques almaximum as soon as the Navy left, turning them into vacation rentals to collect tax-free profits. in the client’s family and science circle and co-founder of the Vieques Women’s Alliance. Those charges doubled, then quadrupled and now you see homes being touted for $1 million or $2 million. An unimaginable sum for most Viequenses, whose source of income consistent with the capita was less than $9,000, according to a recent census.
As a result, Conde said, he saw homelessness at a rate that would have been unthinkable in Vieques 20 years ago. Meanwhile, American buyers knock on your door and ask, “How much does your space cost?”She replies, “You don’t have a sign, do you see anything that says it’s for sale?”
The local government of Vieques had defended the influx of capital as stimulating the economy. But because wealthy gringos pay so little tax, municipal budgets remain grossly underfunded, one reason Vieques still doesn’t have a hospital. Vacation rental homeowners are now expected to register and pay occupancy taxes, however, many homeowners do not bother to register their properties. Kathy Gannett, a network activist who runs a guesthouse, says those regulations aren’t strict enough; She has never met who she has been audited. (The mayor of Vieques did not respond to requests for comment. )
With few prospects, many young Vieques eventually left the island. And some who can’t end up in drug trafficking. Elda Guadalupe, 45, is a high school science teacher and notices the students’ desperation: The 13-year-olds tell me, ‘Yes, I only pass to do drug trafficking. It’s easier. ‘ She tries to tell them, “If you deal drugs, there aren’t many options. You can get caught and go to jail, or you’re going through to end up in the war on drugs and maybe get killed. “His reaction breaks his heart: “If I get stuck, they will soon let me out. And if they kill me, at least I have given money to my family. “
For the Viequenses, colonization was not a summarized concept: it is possible that they literally give it flavor. Once its own agricultural powerhouse, Puerto Rico is now forced to rely on imports for about 85 percent of its food, most commonly from the United States. “That number is closer to 98%, and it’s still the worst food,” says Guadalupe. The products had to make a long adventure between the continental United States and the largest island of Puerto Rico, before they nevertheless reached Vieques. “Even when the vegetables arrive here, the meat and milk are already rotten, because they’ve been waiting so long in the trucks,” he says. If the weather is bad, “sometimes you go to the supermarket and there is no food. “
Under the Jones Act, a questionable industry law enacted a century ago, Puerto Ricans can only import goods from U. S. ports. U. S. -based vessels in U. S. -built, U. S. -owned vesselsU. S. and U. S. -operated products ship to Puerto Rico, so even the food being sold is expensive. Guadalupe sees the lack of new products as a contributing factor to Viequenses’ fitness problems: “People are eating more canned food, which uses more salt, which means more hypertension. Then you have to send yourself to the main island as there are no specialist doctors here. And it’s a cycle. “
Guadeloupe needs to revive the traditions that once made Vieques self-sufficient. In 2018, she and a Vieques women’s organization introduced La Colmena Cimarrona, a 20-acre sustainable agriculture assignment near the center of the island. Paintings are difficult to create the farm, they had to deliver transparent acres of rebellious shrubs; However, there are now housing, a greenhouse and an irrigation pond that feeds the rows of crops, adding a colonnade of gently swinging bananas. They sell their products to local citizens at a 25% discount.
Ana Elisa Peréz-Quintero, co-founder of La Colmena, says they seek to create a new vision of survival. “How do you compete with a drug dealer or a Brock Pierce, or just a gringo with a lot of money and privileges?”She says. They need to own the land and keep some of us as service staff, to serve the piña coladas and build all the hotels. We’re looking to create something new. “
For Guadeloupe, the purpose is simple: “If you can produce your own food, you can produce your own freedom. “
There were other signs that Vieques was in a position to give up. Recently, the Women’s Alliance came together for the first time in years, adding members born after Navy protests. Conde, co-founder of the women’s alliance, says her power inspires her: “They are more aware of poverty and issues like feminism, patriarchy, colonialism and racism in the struggle,” says Conde. “I saw myself in 1999, but with more resources and less fear. “
With the hospital still unbuilt, weary Vieques organized another protest, stacking cinder blocks on the sidewalk outside the closed site. Some point to their own calls; others write the call of Jaideliz Moreno Ventura, the daughter who died in 2020.
In Congress, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative, Jenniffer González-Colón, had spent years of reparations not easy for Vieques harmed by the Navy’s activities. between $50,000 and $110,000 for each islander, depending on the severity of the impact. It would also be a way to force genuine answers about what happened to the residents: “We deserve to be allowed to make their case,” Gonzalez-Colon says.
Valencia does not wait for politicians. Today he accompanies cancer patients on the main island, especially those who “have no one to take care of them. “But recently, she fell ill with a mysterious kidney disease. Juan’s specialists said it would be an eight-month wait. So she did something islanders can’t afford: She flew to Miami, where her daughter is a medical worker. And after a weekend in a hospital there, “I felt fine. “”
The painful moment came later. Valencia’s son-in-law took her on a cruise ship in port and pointed out the synthetic islands of Biscayne Bay. Valencia immediately felt the tension rise in his blood. their own islands to do their training elsewhere?”
He imagined Vieques: just a dot, too small to even appear on most maps of the world. House. And they had to decide. It was as if they were looking for us to disguise.