To the US navy, Vieques was what an admiral called its “crown jewel”: the perfect environment to use for target practice. From 1941 until 2003, the navy fired an appalling quantity of explosives into Vieques’ land and sea, and 20 years later, islanders still bear the devastating consequences.
Formerly a Spanish colony, Puerto Rico was seized by the US in 1898 as a war prize. In the following years, a series of racist supreme court rulings defined Puerto Rico’s status as a territory “belonging to” but not “part of” the United States, citing its “alien races” and “savage tribes”. Though Puerto Ricans were made US citizens in 1917 – partly so that they could be drafted into the first world war – they still can’t vote in presidential elections, and their sole representative to Congress can’t vote either.
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 ordnances 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.”
After two years of protests, George W Bush admitted defeat. “They don’t want us there,” he conceded (“the most beautiful speech I ever heard,” Valencia says). And 20 years ago, on 1 May 2003, the base closed for good.
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.