Puerto Rico Update Archives

Vieques Brings Out the
Worst In the U.S.

By Luis A. Figueroa

I grew up in Puerto Rico, witnessing as a youth the anti-Vietnam War movement, the rise of militant labor and the student movements of the late 1960s through the 1970s.

Photo: Abby Bogomolny

Puerto Rican towns bring banners to hang in the Vieques Justice and Peace Camp.

Moreover, I had the opportunity to participate in student politics on the island from 1976 to 1982, as well as the early years of the struggle to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques (1978-1982).

I've seen firsthand how under certain circumstances government agencies display a measure of brutality that makes one wonder about their moral and ethical values. Thankfully, what happened in Puerto Rico between April 26 and May 1 of this year did not include killing.

It all started on Holy Thursday, the day preceding Good Friday. Insensitive to the fact that Puerto Rico is a very religious, mostly Catholic country, the Navy stunned everyone by announcing it would resume its use of the Vieques island bombing range after April 26. The Navy knew that a coalition of evangelicals, Catholics, Episcopals and others had been at the forefront of the campaign to close down the firing range and clean up the mess left by six decades of live-fire war games. It also knew that a Puerto Rican layman would that weekend be beatified at the Vatican, the second step toward sainthood, making it an intensively religious April in the archipelago.

As expected, hundreds of people boarded ferries, private boats and small airplanes to join the locals in Vieques who were protesting the bombing. Nearly two hundred of them entered military grounds. Dozens actually making it to the surreal, crater-dominated landscape of the firing range.

They were not prepared for what the Navy had up its sleeve.

The protesters, including Vieques fishermen, U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., a Vieques parish priest and members of Puerto Rico's Senate, were not only arrested but also beaten while under detention. They were "jailed" in a filthy, roofless empty dog kennel the Navy's K-9 unit dogs don't use since an air-conditioned kennel was built for them and left there for more than a day, under the sun and overnight in heavy tropical rains. Then, still handcuffed, they were trans-ported without life preservers on barges to the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station on the main island, all the while -around 48 hours- without the possibility of calling their lawyers.

This amounted to no less than political hostage taking on the part of the US Navy and US Marshalls Service.

And like in the classic days of colonialism, when empires of old used oppressed peoples against themselves and each other, the Navy brass deployed a large number of African-American, Puerto Rican and other Latino and Latina Naval MPs and Marshalls to do their dirty work. Some seamen and women relished it, others expressed their shame to the detained when their commanding officers were not present.

Meanwhile, relatives and lawyers were left wondering for days whether the arrested were alive, and whether they were being held in Vieques or in the Roosevelt Roads base. Attorneys from the Puerto Rico Bar Association tried to file habeas corpus writs in an attempt to locate the prisoners and have them processed, only to find that the entire U.S. District Court bench had taken the weekend off.

Next came an unprecedented two-day scene in which two District Court magistrates decided to process those arrested in Vieques at the federal jail rather than in the court building itself. This allowed the magistrates and the U.S. attorney's office to exclude reporters and relatives from the hearings. After strong objections from the news media, two pool reporters were allowed to witness the hearings for what were nothing more than misdemeanor charges. In almost any other jurisdiction, the accused would be released and given a court date.

But no, this is colonialism at its best: People are being imposed cash bails from $3,000 to $30,000, and in some cases no bail at all. In a country where per capita income is about the size of some of these bails, people have been left inside until someone can loan them the funds.

Moreover, the way Congressman Gutierrez was treated is illustrative. He was arrested on Saturday but not released until Tuesday. He was beaten by Naval MPs and marshalls while on custody. And he received, like others, a prohibition on entering the island of Vieques, even before the actual trial for these offenses had even taken place.

While those arrested remained in custody, Navy MPs and federal marshals tear-gassed and fired rubber shotgun pellets at those groups in Vieques who were standing across the fence from the naval grounds. Among them were elderly folk, families with small children, clerics who were praying for peace and an end to the bombing - and members of the Puerto Rican police department who were there to keep order on the civilian side.

In the pandemonium that ensued, captured by photographers and TV crews, we saw children as small as a six-month old infant, as well as Puerto Rican police officers gasp for air as the US forces kept shooting more tear gas and rubber pellets. In an unprecedented scene, Puerto Rico's police chief, Superintendent Pierre Vivoni, who is himself a former judge and prosecutor, publicly blasted the Navy on live television for its brutality.

During the civil rights movement, the federal government intervened to enforce federal court rulings that were slowly dismantling the Jim Crow laws of the South. It was local officials who under the mantra of "states rights" or "local control" tried to opposed them. But today in Puerto Rico, the courts, the Justice Department and the armed forces are displaying some of the rawest aspects of colonialism.

This was never more evident than on April 30, when a Puerto Rican delegation met with Defense Department officials in Washington to sign documents transferring several thousand acres of land on the western end of Vieques to civilian hands. The U.S. Department of Interior, Puerto Rico's former colonial oversight bureau, retained another large chunk of land covering almost all the western shoreline.

The Puerto Rican delegation reportedly refused to sit down and sign the documents while the Navy was still bombing Vieques, as it was at that moment. The Defense Department eventually called the U.S. Southern Command headquarters at Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in eastern Puerto Rico and ordered the bombing halted.

But it seems that the ink had not even dried, and the Puerto Rican officials had not even gotten into their cars, when word came that the bombing had resumed.

Vieques Vice-Mayor Henry González said he felt that even with the Indians in the nineteenth century, the US Army would grant a truce while treaties were signed. We shouldn't be treated worse than Indians, he said.

Well, I wonder.

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