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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/26/the-toxic-legacy-of-us-foreign-policy-in-vieques-puerto-rico/">counterpunch.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The Toxic Legacy of US Foreign Policy in Vieques, Puerto Rico</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Monisha Ríos - April 26, 2023<br></div>
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<div id="gmail-attachment_280232" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-280232" src="https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screen-Shot-2023-04-24-at-7.38.09-AM-680x391.png" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="225"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-280232" class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Detonation of unexploded bombs on Vieques Island. Photo: US Navy.</p></div>
<p>Puerto Ricans had no say in the U.S. war of conquest with Spain over
its colonial possessions or in the Treaty of Paris that dictated they
were to become the property of a new empire. The United States acted
according to a <a title="well-crafted strategic narrative" role="link" href="https://fpif.org/puerto-rico-the-gibraltar-of-the-caribbean-and-launchpad-for-empire/">well-crafted strategic narrative</a>
of white saviorism and American exceptionalism without concern for the
people whose land it stole. It wanted to further its control to the
south and east via its expansionist foreign policy – and it needed to
extend military power beyond its violently acquired borders to do so;
the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, known as the cornerstone of U.S. foreign
policy, provided the impetus.</p>
<p>In 1941 began the first surge of forced removals in Vieques, an
island off the east coast of Puerto Rico. Once again, there was no
democratic process, no vote, and no consent was sought or given. This
land theft process began shortly before Pearl Harbor. Sugar plantation
workers lost their jobs as families were forced from their homes and the
subsistence farming plots that fed them. With as little as a 24-hour
notice, their belongings were tossed into uncleared resettlement plots
that “lacked any previous conditioning, water, or basic sanitary
provisions,” and their family homes were bulldozed. Some, including
pregnant women and children, were given only tarps to live under for
three months until the Navy brought materials for them to build a new
home. Under these conditions, several people became severely ill, and a
pregnant woman died.</p>
<p>The second wave of forced removals began in the fall of 1947 with the
implementation of the Truman Doctrine. This doctrine marked the shift
in U.S. foreign policy toward interventionism in the affairs of other
nations to further the interests of the United States and expand its
global presence, leading the Department of Defense to become one of the
largest real-estate holders, with almost 4,800 sites worldwide ,
covering over 27.2 million acres of property. In Vieques, the Pentagon
upended the agricultural economy with its seizures of 17,500 acres of
agricultural land to create an extensive practice range for war
exercises and weapons testing. This land seizure effectively displaced
40 percent of the available workforce and restricted the local food
supply. By 1948, the U.S. Navy had forcibly taken a total of 77 percent
of the island of Vieques away from its people and set the stage for an
extreme assault on non-human life.</p>
<p>The displaced Viequenses were either sent out of Puerto Rico or
squashed into the overcrowded remaining 23 percent of their island.
Meanwhile, the Navy <a title="allocated" role="link" href="https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/HAC/PHA/reports/isladevieques_08262003pr/background.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">allocated</a>
the westernmost portion of the island to the Naval Munitions Support
Detachment (NASD), 100 acres of which the Navy still occupies with its
Relocatable-Over-the-Horizon Radar system (ROHR). The eastern segment
was divided into the Eastern Maneuver Area (EMA), the Atlantic Fleet
Weapons Training Facility (AFWTF), the Surface Impact Area (SIA), and
the Live Impact Area (LIA). The Navy held its first large-scale joint
training exercise, Operation Portrex, on Vieques in March of 1950. It
was the biggest war game at the time, <a title="involving" role="link" href="https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20140519/BILLS-113hr1726v2-SUS.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">involving</a>
“more than 32,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne division and the United
States Marine Corps, supported by the Navy and Airforce” all with the
purpose of preparing the United States for its part in the Korean War.</p>
<p>Brigadier General Edwin L. Sibert, the assistant director of
operations for the Central Intelligence Group (now known as the Central
Intelligence Agency) at the time of his participation in Portrex,
described how this relatively new “practice of conducting large-scale
and realistic maneuvers in the time of peace, incorporating new
developments not only in weapons and tactics, but also in intelligence,
psychological, and paramilitary devices, provides assurance that the
first battles of the next war will at least be fought with the methods
of the last maneuvers.” Conducting large-scale and realistic maneuvers
has exposed Viequenses to the same conditions as the civilian
populations of numerous target countries in U.S. wars of choice and
conquest over the course of nearly six decades. These conditions have
included being subjected to the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations
of exploding bombs, gunfire, deployment of chemical weapons, aerial
attacks, and ship-to-shore bombardment.</p>
<p>Conventional warfare tactics were accompanied by psychological
warfare and conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). International
Humanitarian Law <a title="defines" role="link" href="https://www.icrc.org/en/document/five-things-know-about-sexual-violence-conflict-zones" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">defines</a>
the use of sexual violence in conflict as a war crime and can also be
considered a crime against humanity in certain contexts. Yet somehow
these considerations do not apply to all impacted communities, nor do
they ensure that the United States is held accountable for its brutal
actions in this regard.</p>
<p>Social scientists have collected testimonies from Viequense women
concerning sexually violent conduct of military personnel, who sometimes
numbered as many as 100,000 in place with a population of roughly
10,000 inhabitants. One woman related the “legacy of the military
occupation of the island [to] how women in the 50s and 60s were confined
to their homes by the presence of drunken sailors in the street.”
Another woman told how her mother would keep “a machete under her pillow
to defend her family in case carousing sailors broke into the house.”
There are countless other stories that have been silenced and ignored.</p>
<p>Many of these women have been central to resisting the militarization of Vieques, including through the campaign <a title="Justice for Vieques Now" role="link" href="https://www.justiceforviequesnow.org/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Justice for Vieques Now</a>. Their <a title="demands are straightforward" role="link" href="https://www.justiceforviequesnow.org/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">demands are straightforward</a>.
They have called for demilitarization, including the removal of
Relocatable Over-The-Horizon Radar system and Mount Pirata
Telecommunications Center. They’ve campaigned for decontamination,
involving enclosed detonation of unexploded ordnance to mitigate the
ongoing harm to community health from open detonation, They’ve demanded
the restoration and return of all lands controlled by the federal
government. And they’ve supported a community-directed Master Plan for
Sustainable Development of Vieques approved in 2004, in addition to a
modern hospital and compensation for health problems related to military
activity.</p>
<p>Although the United States paints a so-called feminist face on its
twenty-first-century implementation of the Monroe Doctrine, women in
Vieques are still fighting for justice and trying to heal their
community from the toxic legacy of U.S. foreign policy, while the very
government that claims to “defend” their “freedom” ignores their
demands. The plight of Vieques is a prime example of why U.S. foreign
policy must be critically analyzed, called into question, and restrained
by the people of the United States in whose name unspeakable harm is
being done–abroad and within their own communities. U.S. citizens should
be asking who profits from U.S. interventionism, who develops U.S.
foreign policy, whose interests are served and who pays the price, who
wins when the very earth that sustains us is contaminated by unnecessary
military activity and can’t produce food. After 200 years, the time has
come to do away with the colonial law of the past that has plagued our
communities in Latin America and the Caribbean for far too long. It’s
time for the abolition of the Monroe Doctrine, the Jones Act, and the
Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act.</p>
<p><em>This essay first appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus.</em></p>
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<em>Monisha Ríos, PhD, MSW (ella/she/elle/they) is a Puerto
Rican psychologist, social worker, and anti-imperialist veteran of the
U.S. Army. Since 2013, she has been investigating the American
Psychological Association’s 104-year role in the weaponization and
militarization of psychology in service to imperialism. Monisha works to
expose the psychological warfare component of U.S.-led hybrid warfare,
with a special focus on the narratives used to destabilize peoples’
movements toward liberation from capitalist-imperialist oppression in
Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond. She is the founding director
of Centro Solidario de Puerto Rico.</em>
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