[News] Guam won’t give up more land to the U.S. military without a fight

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://prismreports.org/2021/06/04/guam-wont-give-up-more-land-to-the-u-s-military-without-a-fight/
Guam
won’t give up more land to the U.S. military without a fight
Frances Nguyen - June 4, 2021
------------------------------

Guam is losing to the U.S. military. More than 1,000 acres of native
limestone forests, which have been part of the island landscape for
millennia, will soon be cleared to construct a massive firing range complex
as part of a planned U.S. military buildup—an operation more than a decade
in the making that will relocate some 5,000 Marines (and 1,500 of their
family members
<https://www.guampdn.com/story/news/local/2021/04/21/increased-monitoring-northern-guam-lens-aquifer/7297670002/>)
to the island from Okinawa and elsewhere beginning in 2025.

The site for the firing range complex sits next to Guam’s National Wildlife
Refuge. Not only do these forests provide critical habitat to endangered
endemic species of plants and animals, but it also hosts several
thousand-year-old historically and culturally significant sites to
Chamorros, the Indigenous people for whom the island is their ancient
homeland.

In these same forests, yo’åmte (healers) harvest medicinal plants to treat
a range of ailments, from anxiety to bronchitis. Julian Aguon, a Chamorro
human rights lawyer, activist, and scholar, knows many yo’åmte, including
his Auntie Frances Arriola Cabrera Meno, who—as he writes in the opening
essay
<https://progressive.international/wire/2020-06-12-julian-aguon-no-country-for-eight-spot-butterflies/en>
of his hybrid memoir *The Properties of Perpetual Light*
<https://www.amazon.com/Properties-Perpetual-Light-Julian-Aguon/dp/193519836X/>—converses
with the plants in a secret language as part of the healing process.

“But such things are inevitably lost in translation,” he writes. “No
military on earth is sensitive enough to perceive something as soft as the
whisper of another worldview.”

While Aguon and an Indigenous-led resistance movement
<https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/guam-colonialism/> have fought
for over a decade to halt the buildup of U.S. armed forces on Guam, they’ve
only succeeded in reducing the number of troops and shifting the location
of certain military installations from other ancient Chamorro villages.
Now, Aguon writes, “the bulldozers are back with a vengeance.”

The U.S. military owns about 49,000 acres of land on Guam, roughly a third
of the island. Anderson Air Force Base and Naval Base Guam are already
installed there and the military buildup will add a third: Marine Corps
Base Camp Blaz. Access to much of these forests, including sites
significant to Chamorro cultural identity, will likely be cut off once it
becomes a “surface danger zone” for the new base, threatening to sever a
millennia-old cultural practice, among other things.
*Increased militarization*

After decades of protests against the U.S. presence on Okinawa (with
several incidents across the years of servicemen raping local women and
girls), the U.S. and Japan signed a bilateral agreement in 2006 to relocate
more than 8,600 Marines from Japan to Guam, which was determined to be a
more preferable lilypad for U.S. interests. A three-hour flight from Tokyo
and Manila, Guam’s bases position U.S. soldiers within striking distance
should a rising China, the U.S.’ main rival in the region, get
confrontational.

No representatives from Guam were present during those negotiations, and
neither was their permission needed. As a U.S. territory, Guam’s land is
considered U.S. soil, the westernmost point of the country.

Not only does the U.S. military buildup pose an environmental threat to
their homeland, it also directly threatens Guam’s residents: The base’s new
location along the northern coastline sits dangerously close to the
Northern Guam Lens Aquifer, the island’s sole source of drinking water.
Further restricted access to the land and surrounding water would strangle
Chamorro lifeways, such as fishing, foraging for medicinal plants, and
visiting ancestral sites.

“I’m outraged and overcome,” Aguon said. “Not just because of what the
militarization of this island means for us but what it means for everyone
else, too.”

The buildup on Guam means increased militarization
<https://www.civilbeat.org/2016/12/what-the-military-isnt-saying-about-its-training-plans-in-the-marianas/>
across the Mariana Islands, the Western Pacific archipelago that includes
Guam. Neighboring islands Pagan and Tinian, part of the Commonwealth of the
Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), are particularly targeted: coral reefs
around Tinian would be utilized as practice grounds for amphibious vehicles
and Pagan would be used for bombing.

It could be one of the largest peacetime military buildups in U.S. history
<https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/dreading-the-dredging-military-buildup-on-guam-and-implications-for-marine-biodiversity-in-apra-harbor/>,
making it a hypervisible target for the U.S.’ rivals in the region. The
Defense Department reported in September that Beijing was undergoing its
own military buildup as part of its plans to “revise the international
order.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-is-ramping-up-nuclear-and-missile-forces-to-rival-us-pentagon-says/2020/09/01/00c4dca4-ec95-11ea-a21a-0fbbe90cfd8c_story.html>
”

The engine-revving in this region, while nothing new, has been escalating
in recent years. In the summer of 2017, President Donald Trump’s war of
bravado with Kim Jong Un led to the North Korean leader loudly boasting
about firing four Hwasong-12 ballistic missiles near Guam
<https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/bases-okinawa-guam-nuclear-targets-170906121731012.html>,
after Trump threatened (from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course) to
unleash “fire and fury the world has never seen
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/08/trump-north-korea-fire-and-fury/536367/>”
against Kim. Guam is three times closer to Pyongyang than it is to the U.S.
mainland. Those missiles would’ve taken only 14 minutes to reach the island.

Aguon notes in his memoir that in Guam, residents were given “spectacularly
useless suggestions” like, “Wash your hair with shampoo, or soap and water.
Do not use conditioner … because it will bind radioactive material to your
hair.”

“There is no real way to steel oneself for oblivion,” Aguon said.
*‘Separate but unequal’*

As an unincorporated territory, Guam is a colonial possession of the United
States, a literal U.S. colony recognized by the United Nations
<https://www.un.org/dppa/decolonization/en/nsgt>. While the people of Guam
are U.S. citizens, they don’t have full voting power: Residents cannot vote
in presidential elections and have only a non-voting delegate in the House
of Representatives. Congress can overturn any law passed by Guam’s
legislature and can freely decide which parts of the Constitution apply to
the territory.

This “separate but unequal
<https://www.guampdn.com/story/news/2021/03/30/house-resolution-reject-u-s-supreme-court-insular-cases/7057409002/>”
treatment was dictated by the Insular Cases, a series of Supreme Court
decisions from 1901 that has allowed the United States to deny access to
federal programs, voting rights, and equal rights to people living in the
territories it acquired in the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which formalized the
handover of Guam from Spain to the U.S. at the outset of the
Spanish-American War.

The Insular Cases argued that those living in the territories were “alien
races” who didn’t understand the concept of freedom and couldn’t be trusted
to govern themselves, an argument Aguon says served “to provide
constitutional cover to the imperial project.”

“Not once since 1898—America’s imperial meridian—has this country been able
to come up with a satisfactory legal justification for maintaining its
constellation of overseas colonial possessions,” he said

On May 13, a resolution
<https://www.guampdn.com/story/news/2021/03/30/house-resolution-reject-u-s-supreme-court-insular-cases/7057409002/>
was heard before Congress to reject the application of the Insular Cases to
any current or future cases involving the territories, citing the racist
doctrine upon which they are premised. But the resolution, as some have
pointed out
<https://www.guampdn.com/story/news/local/2021/05/15/insular-cases-a-step-but-deeper-issues-remain-for-guam/5069809001/>,
won’t actually address the colonial relationship between Guam and its
administering authority—which Guam can’t challenge without permission from
the U.S.

The federal court case of *Davis v. Guam*
<https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/12/davis-v-guam/>, for which Aguon
argued on behalf of the Government of Guam before a Ninth Circuit Court,
effectively denied Guam’s government from making even a symbolic move to
allow native inhabitants to express what they wanted their future political
relationship with the U.S. to be. The suit, filed by Arnold Davis, a white
American and resident of Guam, claimed that Davis’ ineligibility to vote in
a non-binding plebiscite violated his 14th and 15th Amendment rights as it
discriminated against him based on his race.

“It’s not only counter-historical, it’s absurd,” Aguon said.
“Decolonization is a remedy for the colonized, not those who hail squarely
from the colonizer.”

Guam is likewise unable to address the existential climate crisis before it
and its Pacific Island neighbors in the center of climate change’s premier
arena
<https://www.npr.org/2019/10/05/764570478/we-need-support-pacific-islands-seek-help-and-unity-to-fight-climate-change>.
Marine life and coral in the region are already dying off without the
military’s help. At one point, the military’s plans for Guam included the
dredging and expansion of Apra Harbor, the island’s main port and the
largest deep-water port in the Western Pacific, to accommodate
nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, which would have resulted
in the destruction of more than 70 acres of coral reef
<https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/dreading-the-dredging-military-buildup-on-guam-and-implications-for-marine-biodiversity-in-apra-harbor/>.
This is part of a longer history of the military remaking the topography as
well as the biodiversity
<https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/guam-military-wildlife/536622/>
of the island.

“Climate change is not just on our doorstep; it’s banging down the door,”
Aguon said. But Guam can’t answer on its own, not least of all because a
third of the island is under occupation by one of the largest polluters on
the planet
<https://qz.com/1655268/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-140-countries-combined/>
.

But while Guam appears to be losing from every angle, centuries of
dispossession have taught the Chamorro people to look at winning
differently. Even with the unsuccessful legal outcome of *Davis*, Aguon
noted that “it opened up a space not only for conversations about whose
ancestors experienced the harm of colonization (and whose did not) but also
for a wide range of critical legal interventions at the international
level.”

The UN Human Rights Council recently intervened, sending a joint allegation
letter <https://unpo.org/article/22133> to the U.S. government in support
of both the Chamorro people’s opposition to the buildup and their right to
self-determination. Aguon’s firm, Blue Ocean Law, with the Unrepresented
Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), prompted the Council’s
investigation. The government may ignore the letter entirely, but Aguon
said that it’s more helpful to think of it as a powerful reminder that
“might does not make right, and that the world is watching.” With an
energized American public, which is reckoning with long-standing social and
political issues that have challenged the country’s identity and role on
the global stage, Aguon hopes that Guam and Chamorro traditions might yet
survive.

“Part of our work as people who dare to believe that anything we love can
be saved is to prepare our wills to withstand some losing, so that we may
lose and still set out again, anyhow,” he said.
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