Socialist Action /April 2002
US Resumes Bombing of Puerto Rican Island
By GERRY FOLEY
The U.S. Navy resumed its practice bombing of the island of Vieques,
off the coast of Puerto Rico, on April 1, despite massive opposition among
the Puerto Rican people to the Navy's use of the island as a test range.
The present exercises are scheduled to last until April 20.
In its April 2 story on the new bombing of Vieques and the protests against
it, the London Guardian noted that Sila Calderon, the present governor of
Puerto Rico, which in principle is a self-governing commonwealth, was elected
largely on her promise of getting the Navy out of Vieques.
The Puerto Rican governor has accepted President Bush's pledge to end
the bombing by May 2003. But Congress passed a law in the wake of the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks to allow the Navy to use the island as a test range
until it can find an alternative-that is, indefinitely.
The Navy resumed its bombardment with "inert bombs," nonexplosive
projectiles dropped for target practice. Nonetheless, environmental experts
say that even inert bombs are a danger to the island's inhabitants because
they stir up toxic substances that have been deposited by 70 years of bombing,
such as heavy metals.
There is ample evidence that toxics rained on the island have entered
the local food chain and are causing cumulative damage. Cancer rates on
the island far exceed the averages, obviously as a result of the pollutants
deposited by the bombing. In fact, the outrage of the local population
was exacerbated by a rash of cancer deaths that immediately preceded the
resumption of the Navy's exercises.
In 1999, a civilian guard was killed by an off-target live bomb. Following
that, for two years the range was flooded by thousands of protesters, who
tried to prevent the bombing by civil disobedience. They were eventually
cleared by federal marshals.
In the first protests against the new bombing, five protesters have already
been arrested. The Guardian reported complaints from the Puerto Rican Independence
Party that the police attacked a March 30 vigil with pepper gas and rubber
bullets. But the paper cast doubt on them, while playing up an alleged attack
on a single pro-Navy demonstrator.
U.S. authorities have a long history of riding rough-shod over Puerto
Rican and even U.S. public opinion to permit the Navy to continue its destruction
of the island and its people. U.S. liberal political figures, like Black
leader Al Sharpton and Robert Kennedy Jr. have been arrested for participating
in protests on Vieques.
The extent of the protests on Puerto Rico and in the United States itself
clearly has the military on the defensive. That is the reason for Bush's
promise, but the pressure will have to continue and broaden still further
to force the Navy to quit the island.
The movement against the bombing of Vieques has now become part of the
resistance to the United States militarization drive in the name of the
"war on terrorism." An April 7 noon protest called for at Jack
London Square in Oakland, Calif., is one of the first actions called in
the United States itself.
Socialist Action /April 2002 |