Why Are We in Vieques? (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine October 2001

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Why Are We in Vieques? (Cont.)

I ARRIVED AT MY DIFFICULT decision to join the invasion of Vieques only after I was convinced that its people had exhausted every legal and political avenue to secure their rights. In my 18 years as a lawyer and environmental advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Riverkeeper movement, I had never engaged in an act of civil disobedience. As an attorney, I have a duty to uphold the law. But I also had a countervailing duty in this case. The bombardment of Vieques is bad military policy and disastrous for public health and the environment. But the most toxic residue of the Navy's history on Vieques is its impact on our democracy. The people I met there are United States citizens, but the Navy's abusive exercise of power on the island has left them demoralized, alienated, and feeling that they are neither part of a democracy nor the beneficiaries of the American system of justice.

Vieques has the sleepy, almost timeless ambiance of a García Márquez novel. The island is carpeted with broad expanses of unspoiled tropical hardwood forests, and it is home to 14 threatened and endangered species. Ranchers drive cattle across empty scrub savannas while droves of sea turtles nest on some of the most beautiful white sand beaches in the Caribbean. Vieques's coast is spangled with brown pelican rookeries, vibrant coral reefs, and mangrove estuaries where rare Antillean manatees calve. Mosquito Bay, just east of Esperanza, is one of the brightest bioluminescent bays on earth. On moonless nights, you can read a book by its phosphorescent light.

In 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, the Navy arrived on Vieques and began to "temporarily" expropriate the bulk of the island for a naval base that it never built. It forcibly deported 3,000 Viequenses, mostly to St. Croix, typically offering them $30 each for their homes and giving them 24 hours to get out. Over the following decades, the Navy refused to relinquish its beachhead. The military's so-called Dracula Plan to deport Vieques's remaining residents—living anddead, to discourage the aggrieved from visiting family grave sites—was derailed only by the direct intervention of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. After the closure of its other bomb range on nearby Culebra in 1975, the Navy annually saturated Vieques with thousands of pounds of ordnance—a total that eventually exceeded the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb.

Naval bombs and missiles pulverized Vieques's rainforests, blew its pelican rookeries and coral reefs to smithereens, filled mangrove estuaries, and poisoned the island's aquifers with deadly chemicals. Navy pilots and gun crews killed sea turtles and whales, and Viequenses allege that the military narrowly missed bombing residential areas and injuring civilians; one local fisherman recalls seeing a crucial offshore pelican habitat "burning from incendiary bombs."

Not surprisingly, Navy exercises regularly interfered with the local fishing industry. Tensions ran high: The bombing meant that large areas of the coastal waters were off-limits for weeks at a time; ordnance sometimes fell near fishing boats; and the ongoing conflict between the Navy and the fishermen led to the first organized opposition to naval operations on the island.

In November 1979, an early leader of the anti-Navy movement, Angel Rodríguez Cristóbal, died in federal custody in Tallahassee, Florida. Officially, he committed suicide, but there are many on Vieques who believe he was murdered. In early 1980, a bomb was planted in the San Juan offices of the Puerto Rico Bar Association, which was offering pro bono representation to fishermen who had been arrested. A Navy lieutenant—the officer in charge of community relations in Vieques—was charged in connection with the crime.

The turning point in the movement against the military presence occurred in April 1999 when a U.S. Marine Corps Hornet fighter jet missed its target area and dropped two 500-pound bombs near the observation post, injuring a Navy officer and three civilian workers, and killing a Viequense civilian security guard named David Sanes. That May, hundreds of civilians and religious and political leaders moved into the impact zone itself, where they built an encampment (complete with a church) out of plywood and canvas. The Navy temporarily stopped bombing. In December 1999, in the face of the public outcry, President Bill Clinton ordered the Navy to halt the use of explosives on Vieques and to replace live ordnance with concrete-filled shells. In February 2000, 150,000 Puerto Ricans rallied in San Juan to protest further bombing.

The first time I went to Vieques, in April 2000, I met with fishermen, community and political leaders, and scientists. I was accompanied by Dennis Rivera, who is Puerto Rican by birth. For him, the fight over Vieques has become an almost religious crusade, and he has used his union's political muscle to make it an urgent issue in New York. We visited the protesters in the live impact zone, and I went diving offshore to inspect the reefs. The coral had been shattered by bombs and crushed beneath a graveyard of sunken decoy ships; the ocean floor looked like an army-navy store, the reef bristling with dud bombs. I found what I believed to be clear civil and criminal violations of three federal environmental statutes—the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Endangered Species Act—and agreed to represent a host of Vieques fishing and community groups in their legal fight against the Navy.

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