BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
VIEQUES, Puerto Rico - The metal shards are visible along
the hillsides in all directions. They dot the arid ground that
is now being covered with a new growth of vegetation.
Crossing the island along a dirt trail, visitors walk by a rusted rocket launcher, the hulks of a couple of tanks and jeeps, the carcass of a jet plane riddled with bullet holes. Bullets and shells are strewn everywhere. Here and there, a five-foot bomb juts out, half-buried in the ground. Once- beautiful lagoons are pock-marked with bomb craters that give them a moon-like appearance.
The turquoise coast and gleaming white beaches in the distance, as well as the wild cotton plants rapidly growing back amid the brush, are a reminder of what this area might look like undisturbed.
We are in the U.S. Navy's restricted zone in eastern Vieques, known as the "Inner Range."
Militant reporters visited this area August 28 at the invitation of Ismael Guadalupe, a school teacher and leader of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques. We accompanied a group of 20 high school and junior high school students from the town of Vieques. Two activist fishermen took us in their boats to the restricted zone, a wet 30-minute ride from the town's port.
The U.S. military has used this area as a live-fire range for decades. No bombing has occurred since April 19, however, when a Navy warplane allegedly went "off course" and dropped two 500-pound bombs on an observation post, killing David Sanes, a 35-year-old Vieques resident employed as a civilian guard, and wounding four others. The Pentagon suspended training exercises on the island in face of public anger. Protesters quickly set up several makeshift camps in the restricted zone to deter the Navy from resuming its target practice.
Example of U.S. colonial rule
"The fundamental reason for what we face in Vieques is that
Puerto Rico is not a sovereign nation," Guadalupe tells the
students. "Others make the decisions. For example, the
governor of Puerto Rico, who says he wants the Navy out of
Vieques too, must request this of another government - the
U.S. government."
Another example of Puerto Rico's colonial status, Guadalupe adds, is the fact that Washington has 17 political prisoners in its jails, many of whom have been locked up for 19 years because of their actions on behalf of Puerto Rico's independence.
The controversy over Vieques has erupted into a major political question in Puerto Rico, sparking popular outrage and forcing all political parties and figures to take a position. The US. government too is worried about keeping a lid on these developments.
Vieques is a small island, 18 miles long and 5 miles wide, off the eastern coast of the main island of Puerto Rico. Many of its 9,300 residents earn their livelihood from fishing or are public employees; with few other sources of jobs left, unemployment is high.
The U.S. Navy occupies two thirds of the island. It uses the western tip as an ammunition storage area and the eastern zone as a firing range, squeezing the residents into the middle. Vieques is part of the Navy's Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility, together with the Roosevelt Roads naval base on the main island.
Pentagon officials argue that Vieques is "irreplaceable" as the biggest training range for the Atlantic fleet and their only facility for combined air, land, and sea operations using live ammunition. Military training here involves marines, Navy SEALs, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines. Most of the U.S. pilots sent to Yugoslavia for Washington's bombing campaign earlier this year trained in Vieques.
The fishermen took us to one of the civil disobedience camps set up on a beach the U.S. military normally uses for amphibious landings. Teachers affiliated to the Hostos National Congress, a pro-independence coalition, have built a wooden schoolhouse there. The camp is named after Eugenio María de Hostos, a 19th century educator and leader of Puerto Rico's independence struggle. The schoolhouse, now with a modest library, has been visited by brigades of teachers, students, and others over the past four months.
Under a tent nearby, Guadalupe and Carlos Ruiz, a junior high school physical education teacher, begin an exchange with the students on the history of the struggle to force the U.S. Navy out of their island. Ruiz is part of a group of teachers who have been coming to the restricted zone every weekday after work and camping here on weekends.
When the teachers are at work, the camp is tended by Martín Irizarry, a heavy equipment mechanic from Utuado, on the main island. He explains, "I came here when I heard the Navy make statements that they were only bombing on `uninhabited land.' That outraged me - as if the residents of Vieques don't exist! This is our land."
Decades of struggle
Guadalupe reminds the youth that the Navy has occupied most
of the island since 1940, when Washington was preparing to
enter World War II. The U.S. military authorities evicted
3,000 residents to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands - a nearby
U.S. colony - and elsewhere. Fishermen, farmers, and workers
were given 24 hours to evacuate. Squatters' homes were
bulldozed, but the owners of three sugar plantations were
bought out.
"Our parents and grandparents began the fight 50 years ago," Guadalupe points out. Fishermen have spearheaded an ongoing struggle that has seen ups and downs over the decades, every peak coinciding with a rise in the independence movement.
The constant bombings and naval and submarine maneuvers have devastated the livelihood of Vieques residents as well as the environment. Agriculture was decimated. On the days of bombing practice Navy officials would tell the fishermen to wait until nighttime to fish. The military-caused pollution has destroyed coral reefs, sandbars, mangrove trees, and other flora and fauna.
Guadalupe himself joined protests as a student in 1964, when the Navy was seeking further land encroachments. In the early 1960s "the Cuban revolution helped awaken the independence struggle and the issue of Vieques," he noted.
By 1975, protests forced the Navy to stop bombing the nearby island of Culebra.
Another upswing began in 1978. Fishermen launched the Crusade for the Rescue of Vieques. When Washington launched its Springboard 78 war maneuvers against revolutionary Cuba, U.S. admiral Robert Flanagan told the fishermen to stop fishing for three weeks until the maneuvers were over. Instead, fishermen ran their boats in front of the warships, disrupting the maneuvers and tangling the expensive propellers in their fishing nets.
In protests in May 1979, 21 people were arrested and 13 were jailed. Guadalupe spent almost five months in U.S. prisons in Atlanta and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. One young pro- independence protester, Angel Rodríguez Cristóbal, was killed while in a federal prison in Tallahassee.
To quell the protests, the Navy signed a "Memorandum of Understanding" in 1983 with the colonial administration of Gov. Carlos Romero Barceló, promising to fund industrial development to generate jobs and to protect the environment.
A company making military uniforms opened in Vieques but closed in a few months. "The new factories all shut down and the economic situation got worse," Guadalupe said. Unemployment here is 50 percent and 73 percent of the island's residents live below the official poverty line, compared with 58 percent in the rest of Puerto Rico.
"Endangered species were found dead. Explosive devices kept flying over our towns," he added. The 3,000 mahogany trees planted by the Navy were later cut down to make room for a military radar facility. Washington has used Vieques as a springboard for military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean. In 1983, U.S. troops practiced their invasion of Grenada on the Puerto Rican island. When Vieques fishermen discovered that U.S. forces were practicing war moves there against Nicaragua, they alerted the revolutionary government of that country. The island was also used in the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama.
The F/A-18 Hornet jet that took off from the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier and dropped the bombs that killed David Sanes was carrying out target practice before joining the U.S. forces assaulting Yugoslavia. Since then, U.S. military officials have howled that the suspension of training exercises in Vieques is damaging U.S. troops' military preparedness.
The New York Daily News reported September 7 that 2,200 soldiers in the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit will sail from North Carolina for the Mediterranean to relieve the 26th expeditionary unit that fought in Kosova "without having trained for their main mission by hitting the beach in Vieques under cover of naval gunfire and airstrikes." And the U.S. destroyer John Hancock is set to sail from Norfolk, Virginia, to the Persian Gulf or the Mediterranean "without any sailors aboard qualified to fire its fore-and-aft 5-inch deck guns," the paper reported. "It's a serious issue," a U.S. Navy official whined.
When the news of Sanes' death was reported, the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques mobilized immediately. Within hours, 200 angry protesters demonstrated at the entrance to the U.S. Navy's Camp García. The next day, 300 people picketed at City Hall to demand the U.S. military leave.
The Association of Fishermen of the South organized a protest by two dozen fishermen who took their boats to the area where Sanes was killed. They laid wreaths and placed an eight-foot cross at the top of the hill in his memory, renaming the site Mount David.
`Life or death for fishermen'
"The fishermen have always been in the forefront of this
struggle," said Tito Ventura, 40, a member of the fishermen's
association who has fished since he was a boy. "It's a matter
of life or death to us." There are about 500 fishermen in
Vieques today, but only 150 fish full-time; the rest have to
work a second job, Ventura said.
In addition to Mount David, several other protest camps have been established in the restricted zone in defiance of the Navy -one by the fishermen, the teachers' camp, and a camp organized by the Puerto Rican Independence Party, whose president, Rubén Berríos, a senator in Puerto Rico's legislature, has been living there for more than three months. The pro-statehood mayor of the town of Cataño set up his own camp for a while.
Guadalupe pointed out that delegations of unionists, fishermen from around Puerto Rico, students, and political and religious figures have visited the camps to express support for the fight to get the U.S. military out of Vieques.
"When teachers' brigades come to this camp, we give them a talk and prepare an educational program about Vieques for them to take back and teach their students when classes start in September," he told the visiting students.
"Delegations of electrical workers, telephone workers, water workers, members of the Puerto Rican Workers Federation, and other unions have come here or marched in the town of Vieques," Guadalupe noted. The Teamsters union issued a statement supporting the July 4 demonstration of 50,000 at the Roosevelt Roads naval base in Ceiba, which called for the U.S. military to leave Vieques. The protest attracted a broad range of political forces, including independentista groups and the pro-Commonwealth Popular Democratic Party, as well as endorsement from sections of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party. Martín Irizarry, the mechanic, noted that they have received delegations from several U.S. cities, underscoring the impact this political struggle has had among working people and youth in the United States who are Puerto Rican.
In face of this groundswell of opposition, Gov. Pedro Rosselló appointed a special commission on Vieques. The governor's panel issued a scathing report detailing the disastrous economic and environmental effects of the U.S. Navy's use of the island and recommending its complete withdrawal. Rosselló presented this report at United Nations hearings in July on the colonial status of Puerto Rico.
The Clinton administration appointed its own panel, which conducted hearings in Vieques and is soon supposed to present its findings to the U.S. government. The Baltimore Sun reported September 3 that the panel will recommend the Navy relocate within five years, continuing its target practice during that period. In response, Berríos announced that his camp will remain in the restricted zone if the U.S. Navy resumes its war maneuvers there.
In face of this public outrage, U.S. authorities admitted in May what Vieques residents have been charging for years - that the Navy had been firing uranium bullets. Navy officials claimed one "accidental" firing of 263 uranium bullets had taken place in February.
Guadalupe showed visitors one of the rusty tanks used for target practice. Pointing to the gaping bullet holes, he said, "When [fishermen's leader Carlos] `Prietó Ventura and I saw the perforations in one of these tanks in 1994, we realized they were using uranium bullets, because only that kind of shell can penetrate such thick armor."
The Navy has even polluted Vieques with napalm, another fact that only now is being widely acknowledged.
The Navy-caused contamination "is noticeable when it rains - you can smell the chemicals coming from the lagoon," Guadalupe said, pointing to some of the water-filled craters. Cancer rates for Vieques inhabitants are almost double the average in the rest of Puerto Rico.
After observing some of the destruction caused by the U.S. military, many of the youthful visitors expressed shock. "I had heard about all this, but seeing the craters and bullets and everything is a brutal thing to witness," said Vicente Ballesteros, 17.
Emanuel Portera, 17, remarked, "The Navy is arrogant. It will be a hard fight but we have to get them out of here." Portera's mother was recently laid off from the General Electric fuse plant on the island.
`We must be the owners'
In the discussion with the students at the camp, Guadalupe
pointed out that part of the fight is to force the U.S.
military to clean up their toxic mess when they leave. It's
also over the future of the island and who will control
it - the residents or the wealthy investors who have plans to
build big tourist hotels on the beautiful beaches.
"We haven't been fighting all these years so you will become the garbage collectors for the rich," Guadalupe told the group of youth. "No, you must be the owners. The land must be enjoyed by the people of Vieques. The beaches must be open to all. We must protect the coral reefs. We must not only take back Vieques but develop it."
Guadalupe said the goals of the movement are "the four D's: demilitarization, devolution, decontamination, and development."
He pointed to the broader issues involved in the fight beyond the U.S. Navy presence. Vieques - together with Ft. Allen near the town of Juana Díaz on the main island - is the site of over-the-horizon radar facilities, which U.S. authorities claim are nonmilitary because they are supposedly for tracking international drug trafficking. There have been numerous protests in Puerto Rico against the radar system, however, which in fact is part of Washington's increased military intervention in Latin America under the cover of the "war on drugs."
"We're not fighting simply to get the Navy out of Vieques - we have to get all the U.S. military bases out of Puerto Rico," Guadalupe emphasized.
Another aspect of the growing U.S. military presence in this Caribbean nation - which is already covered with U.S. bases - is the current transfer of the U.S. Southern Command from Panama to Puerto Rico. A protest against this stepped-up military presence took place August 27 in front of Ft. Buchanan in San Juan.
On September 1, under the banner "We want to study without the military," thousands of students marched through the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) campus in Río Piedras, in the San Juan metropolitan area, to protest the presence of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) training program on campus and demand the U.S. Navy get out of Vieques. Student struggles during the anti-Vietnam War movement forced ROTC out of the UPR campuses in 1971. But the officer-training program still recruits students from its off-campus site.
Rise in social struggles
The renewed flaring of the struggle to remove the U.S. Navy
from Vieques has been intertwined with the fight to release
the Puerto Rican political prisoners, a battle that appears on
the verge of an important victory. A large demonstration
calling for the release of the prisoners was held in San Juan
August 29. Virtually all the high school students visiting the
restricted area of Vieques expressed support for the release
of the prisoners.
Both struggles register the new rise of anticolonial and labor resistance in Puerto Rico, signaled last year with the widely popular strike by telephone workers against the government's - ultimately successful - move to sell the state- owned telephone company. Half a million workers waged a two- day general strike in July 1998 in support of the phone workers and what they saw as their national patrimony.
The working-class resistance can also be seen in a number of other social struggles, from the fight against government attacks on the health-care system to protests against the deteriorating water service.
On August 20, the town of Toa Alta, west of San Juan, erupted in an angry protest over unmet promises to provide reliable water service and clean bathrooms at a local high school. Some 500 high school students, infuriated by the latest postponement in installing new water tanks, marched out of school that morning to demonstrate in front of the mayor's office.
When the police began to violently shove them around, the youth fought back, pelting the cops with rocks and lying down in the road to block traffic. Hundreds of students then marched to police headquarters to protest the brutality and trapped four cops in the station. Authorities responded by sending in riot police, SWAT teams, and police helicopters.
Migdalia Jiménez, a member of the Young Socialists in Chicago, contributed to this article.