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<font size="1"><a href="https://prismreports.org/2021/06/04/guam-wont-give-up-more-land-to-the-u-s-military-without-a-fight/">https://prismreports.org/2021/06/04/guam-wont-give-up-more-land-to-the-u-s-military-without-a-fight/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Guam won’t give up more land to the U.S. military without a fight</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Frances Nguyen - June 4, 2021<br></div>
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<p>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 <a href="https://www.guampdn.com/story/news/local/2021/04/21/increased-monitoring-northern-guam-lens-aquifer/7297670002/">1,500 of their family members</a>) to the island from Okinawa and elsewhere beginning in 2025. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a href="https://progressive.international/wire/2020-06-12-julian-aguon-no-country-for-eight-spot-butterflies/en">opening essay</a> of his hybrid memoir <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Properties-Perpetual-Light-Julian-Aguon/dp/193519836X/"><em>The Properties of Perpetual Light</em></a>—converses with the plants in a secret language as part of the healing process. </p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>While Aguon and an <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/guam-colonialism/">Indigenous-led resistance movement</a>
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.” </p>
<p>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. </p>
<h4><strong>Increased militarization</strong></h4>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>The buildup on Guam means <a href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2016/12/what-the-military-isnt-saying-about-its-training-plans-in-the-marianas/">increased militarization</a>
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.</p>
<p>It could be one of the largest peacetime military buildups <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/dreading-the-dredging-military-buildup-on-guam-and-implications-for-marine-biodiversity-in-apra-harbor/">in U.S. history</a>,
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 “<a href="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">revise the international order.</a>”</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/bases-okinawa-guam-nuclear-targets-170906121731012.html">firing four Hwasong-12 ballistic missiles near Guam</a>, after Trump threatened (from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course) to unleash “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/08/trump-north-korea-fire-and-fury/536367/">fire and fury the world has never seen</a>”
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“There is no real way to steel oneself for oblivion,” Aguon said.</p>
<h4><strong>‘Separate but unequal’</strong></h4>
<p>As an unincorporated territory, Guam is a colonial possession of the United States, a literal U.S. colony <a href="https://www.un.org/dppa/decolonization/en/nsgt">recognized by the United Nations</a>.
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. </p>
<p>This “<a href="https://www.guampdn.com/story/news/2021/03/30/house-resolution-reject-u-s-supreme-court-insular-cases/7057409002/">separate but unequal</a>”
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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 </p>
<p>On May 13, <a href="https://www.guampdn.com/story/news/2021/03/30/house-resolution-reject-u-s-supreme-court-insular-cases/7057409002/">a resolution</a>
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
<a href="https://www.guampdn.com/story/news/local/2021/05/15/insular-cases-a-step-but-deeper-issues-remain-for-guam/5069809001/">some have pointed out</a>,
won’t actually address the colonial relationship between Guam and its
administering authority—which Guam can’t challenge without permission
from the U.S. </p>
<p>The federal court case of<em> </em><a href="https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/12/davis-v-guam/"><em>Davis v. Guam</em></a>,
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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>Guam is likewise unable to address the existential climate crisis before it and its Pacific Island neighbors<a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/10/05/764570478/we-need-support-pacific-islands-seek-help-and-unity-to-fight-climate-change"> in the center of climate change’s premier arena</a>.
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 <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/dreading-the-dredging-military-buildup-on-guam-and-implications-for-marine-biodiversity-in-apra-harbor/">the destruction of more than 70 acres of coral reef</a>. This is part of a longer history of the military remaking the topography as well as the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/guam-military-wildlife/536622/">biodiversity</a> of the island.</p>
<p>“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 <a href="https://qz.com/1655268/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-140-countries-combined/">one of the largest polluters on the planet</a>.</p>
<p>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 <em>Davis</em>,
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.”</p>
<p>The UN Human Rights Council recently intervened, sending a <a href="https://unpo.org/article/22133">joint allegation letter</a>
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. </p>
<p>“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.</p>
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