When Carmen Valencia was five years old, troops came banging on her door. Her mother grabbed a long machete. “I had no idea what was going on, but I thought, if they come in here, they’re going to kill us.”
Now 78, Valencia has lived most of her life on Vieques, one of the Caribbean’s most picturesque islands, under the thunder of bombs. They roared from navy planes just over the hill by her mother’s house, leaving the smell of smoke hanging thick in the air.
She was even more frightened of the troops, who would stalk her neighborhood looking for women to harass.
But Valencia and her whole family are US citizens. Vieques is part of Puerto Rico, a US territory. She wasn’t living in an enemy country – just a 52-square-mile island of farms and cattle ranches, ringed by pristine gold beaches and crystal waters.
To the US navy, Vieques was what an admiral called its “crown jewel”: the perfect environment to use for target practice. From 1941 until 2003, the navy fired an appalling quantity of explosives into Vieques’ land and sea, and 20 years later, islanders still bear the devastating consequences.
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Formerly a Spanish colony, Puerto Rico was seized by the US in 1898 as a war prize. In the following years, a series of racist supreme court rulings defined Puerto Rico’s status as a territory “belonging to” but not “part of” the United States, citing its “alien races” and “savage tribes”. Though Puerto Ricans were made US citizens in 1917 – partly so that they could be drafted into the first world war – they still can’t vote in presidential elections, and their sole representative to Congress can’t vote either.
In 1941, US troops evicted Vieques’ roughly 10,000 residents at gunpoint and relocated them to a narrow strip of land in Vieques’ center. The rest of the island was turned into a de facto war zone – deploying, by one navy admiral’s estimate, as much as 3m pounds a year of live ordnances containing napalm, depleted uranium, lead, and other toxic chemicals, for more than 60 years. “They did anything here that they wanted,” Valencia says.
Islanders protested in vain until 1999, when the navy accidentally dropped a 500lb bomb on a lookout post, killing David Sanes, a 35-year-old Viequense who worked there as a security guard. Viequenses responded with civil disobedience to impede the navy base’s operations, drawing global headlines and visits from Ricky Martin, Al Sharpton, and the Dalai Lama. Valencia joined a new group called the Vieques Women’s Alliance, which mobilized hundreds of women to the front lines. In 2001, she and 30 other women broke into the base and were briefly jailed. “We wanted to be arrested,” she says. “We had to speak our right to be there.”
After two years of protests, George W Bush admitted defeat. “They don’t want us there,” he conceded (“the most beautiful speech I ever heard,” Valencia says). And 20 years ago, on 1 May 2003, the base closed for good.
Though the islanders defeated the US navy without a single bullet, another struggle was just beginning. Two decades later, Vieques is wounded by abnormally high rates of disease, a discriminatory economic system, and a lack of basic services that’s made living here even harder than before. This is a story about the long-term consequences of colonialism, and a community that’s determined against all odds to get free.
‘Sooner or later, we’re dead with something’
To many visitors, Vieques feels like paradise. Wild horses roam the winding streets, in front of Spanish-style houses with sweeping sea views. It’s the site of one of the world’s few bioluminescent bays, with aquatic microorganisms that glitter blue under a moonless sky. And the former navy grounds have been designated as a wildlife refuge, home to some of the continent’s most diverse bird populations.
What tourist brochures don’t usually mention is the dizzying number of unexploded ordnance – what the military calls UXOs – that still litter Vieques’ land and water. The navy is in charge of the cleanup, and so far it’s removed 129,000 munition items from more than 4,400 acres, according to Dan Waddill, the navy’s Vieques restoration branch head. But the military hasn’t begun removing explosives from the surrounding seas. “The land was a higher priority,” he says, “and the underwater work is more difficult.” The navy previously announced a completion date of 2032, but that’s been pushed back to 2033, Waddill says.
When cleaning crews find a UXO, they prefer to detonate it in open air, a method that the navy considers least dangerous: “It’s just not safe for the workers to transport those munitions to a detonation chamber,” Waddill says. Those blasts come without warning, sometimes piercing through Sunday church services. But what disturbs residents the most are the explosive chemicals released into the air – something they fear has been slowly killing them over the decades.
Though no official cause has been determined, studies have found unusually high concentrations of toxic metals like mercury, uranium, and arsenic in viequenses’ hair and urine. Shortly before the navy’s departure, Carmen Ortiz Roque, a Puerto Rico epidemiologist who studied Vieques for years, found residents there were 30% likelier to die from cancer than other Puerto Ricans, with significantly higher rates of heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, and infant mortality. Another analysis found Vieques islanders over 50 are as much as 280% more likely to have lung cancer than other Puerto Ricans. “The human population of Vieques is by far the sickest human population that I’ve ever worked with,” Ortiz Roque said.
The navy insists it’s not to blame, citing a 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) that concluded that any airborne contaminants from the navy’s bombing would be “essentially undetectable” for Vieques residents. “The navy activities were several miles from where the people live,” Waddill says. The explosions would have left “very, very small concentrations” of organic chemicals that “disappear quickly”, and “those activities just didn’t cause exposure to the people that live there”.
That’s not how the islanders see it. During the 1999 protests, Viequenses rallied around Milivi Adams, a toddler diagnosed with a rare form of nerve cancer. Doctors found elevated uranium levels in the girl’s blood; she died just months before the navy closed its base.
Nearly everyone on the island has lost someone. The Vieques Women’s Alliance’s co-founder, Gladys Rivera, died of stomach cancer in 2007. Valencia’s husband, a civil servant named Luis, died in 2014 of liver failure, though he rarely drank. “People who have been here, sooner or later they’re dead with something,” Valencia says. “[The navy doesn’t] believe it’s like that, but it is our truth.”
Making the situation even deadlier is Vieques’ lack of a medical center. In 2017, Hurricane Maria reduced Vieques’ only hospital to rubble. Years later, a replacement still hasn’t been built. That’s been devastating for Vieques, where half the residents live in poverty and nearly one-fifth have no health insurance. Now, Viequenses who need medical care must fight with tourists for ferry tickets to Puerto Rico’s main island, sometimes camping out overnight just to get on board. Some never make it: like 13-year-old Jaideliz Moreno Ventura, who died in 2020 after experiencing flu-like symptoms that turned into convulsions. Her family took her to Vieques’ makeshift local clinic, but it lacked a working respirator – her family is now suing the Puerto Rican government.
That’s left the islanders to take things into their own hands. Over the last decade, Valencia has been volunteering with Nilda Medina, a fellow veteran of the Vieques Women’s Alliance, to arrange mobile cancer screening vans to visit Vieques by cargo ferry a few times a year. The work can be emotionally draining. “Every day I learn that there is one more person with cancer,” Medina says.
The weight grew even heavier when her husband, a well-known activist named Robert Rabin, died of cancer last March. In Rabin’s final months, the couple had to wake up at four in the morning to take the ferry to his chemotherapy sessions in Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan. When they returned home to Vieques, there was no way to get morphine. “He had a very, very hard cancer. But he knew there was no medication here. So he never said he had pain, he never complained,” Medina says, her voice breaking. “He was very quiet, like he was doing civil disobedience.”
‘There is no plan’
Illness isn’t the only thing that threatens the islanders’ survival.
During their war games for roughly two months a year, the number of navy troops would swell to as many as 100,000. When they weren’t shredding Vieques with explosives, they swarmed into town, reordering the island’s economy to run their bars, laundromats, and brothels. Though the troops harassed and assaulted local residents with impunity, the islanders also dreaded the drills ending, which meant another 10 agonizing months without work.
Today, the island is experiencing what many residents see as another kind of colonial conquest from wealthy US mainlanders – norte americanos. Walking around in Isabel Segunda, one of the island’s two towns, I overhear far more English than Spanish. On the beachfront, marble-floored luxury villas offering on-site massages charge guests as much as $3,000 a night. At sundown in Esperanza, a resort area to the south, beer joints packed with white Americans spill into the streets. I meet a couple from Miami who are visiting Vieques for the first time, and already considering buying property here.
In 2012, Puerto Rico’s governor enacted huge incentives for Americans who move there and buy real estate – including full exemptions on their income and capital gains tax. That’s drawn a flood of investors, including the YouTube influencer Logan Paul, who snapped up a $13m mansion near San Juan in 2021, and the crypto mogul Brock Pierce, who paid $18.3m last year to buy Vieques’ luxury W hotel, which closed after Hurricane Maria.
Native Viequenses already living there wouldn’t qualify for these tax breaks. But in the last two decades, officials have done “nothing, zero” to invest in local economic development, Medina says. “There is no plan.”
Locals say that gringos began snatching up property in Vieques almost as soon as the navy left, often turning it into vacation rentals to rack up tax-free profits. In 1999, a home in Vieques could be had for about $50,000, says Judith Conde, a family and consumer sciences researcher and a co-founder of the Vieques Women’s Alliance. Those prices doubled, then quadrupled, and now she often spots houses selling for $1m or $2m. Even a ruined structure on an overgrown lot can fetch $250,000, an unimaginable sum for most Viequenses, whose per capita income is less than $9,000, recent census figures show.
As a result, Conde says, she’s seeing homelessness at a rate that would have been unthinkable in Vieques 20 years ago. Meanwhile, American buyers often knock on her door and ask, “How much is your house?” She responds: “We don’t have a sign – do you see something that says it’s for sale?”
Vieques’ local government has defended the capital influx as something that boosts the economy. But because the wealthy gringos pay so few taxes, the municipal budgets remain grossly underfunded – one of the reasons Vieques still doesn’t have a hospital. Vacation rental owners are now supposed to register and pay occupancy taxes, but many owners don’t bother registering their properties. Kathy Gannett, a community activist who runs a guesthouse, says those regulations aren’t strong enough; she’s never met someone who’s been audited. (Vieques’ mayor did not return requests for comment.)
With few prospects, many young Vieques residents end up leaving the island. And some who can’t afford to end up in the illegal drug trade. Elda Guadalupe, 45, is a middle school science teacher, and sees students’ desperation first-hand: “I’ve had 13-year-old kids say to me, ‘Yeah, I’m just going to traffic drugs. It’s easier.’” She tries telling them, “If you traffic drugs, there’s not a lot of options. You can get caught and go to jail, or you’re going to end up in the drug war and maybe get killed.” Their reply breaks her heart: “If I get caught, they’ll let me out soon. And if I get killed, at least I gave my family some money.”
Food equals freedom
For the Viequenses, colonization isn’t an abstract concept: they can literally taste it. Though it was once its own agricultural powerhouse, Puerto Rico is now forced to depend on imports for roughly 85% of its food, mostly from the US. In Vieques, “that number is closer to 98%, and it’s always the worst food,” says Guadalupe. Produce must take a long journey from the mainland US to Puerto Rico’s main island, before it finally arrives to Vieques. “Even when the vegetables get here, the meat and milk is already rotten, because it’s been waiting so long in the trucks,” she says. If there’s bad weather, “sometimes you go to the supermarket and there’s no food at all”.
Under the Jones Act, a controversial trade law enacted a century ago, Puerto Ricans may only import cargo from US ports on vessels that are US-built, US-owned, US-operated, and US-crewed. The rule roughly doubles the cost of sending goods to Puerto Rico, so even the food that’s going bad is expensive. Guadalupe sees the lack of fresh items as a contributor to Viequenses’ health problems: “People are eating more canned food, which uses more salt, which means more hypertension. Then you need to transport yourself to the main island because there’s no specialist doctors here. And it’s a cycle.”
Guadalupe wants to revive the traditions that once made Vieques self-sufficient. In 2018, she and a group of Viequense women started La Colmena Cimarrona, a 20-acre sustainable farming project near the center of the island. The work is tough – to create the farm, they had to clear acres of unruly bushland by hand – but now there are living quarters, a greenhouse, and an irrigation pond that feeds rows of crops, including a colonnade of gently swaying plantain trees. They sell their produce to local residents at a 25% discount.
Ana Elisa Peréz-Quintero, a La Colmena co-founder, says they’re trying to create a new vision of survival. “How do you compete with a drug lord or a Brock Pierce, or just a plain gringo with a lot of money and privilege?” she says. “They want to own the land and keep a few of us as service people, to serve the piña coladas and build all the hotels. We’re really trying to create something new.”
For Guadalupe, the goal is simple: “If you can produce your own food, you can eventually produce your own freedom.”
More resources and less fear
There are other signs that Vieques isn’t ready to give up. Recently, the Women’s Alliance reconvened for the first time in years, including members who were born after the navy protests. Conde, the women’s alliance co-founder, says their energy inspires her: “They’re more conscientious about poverty, and about issues like feminism, patriarchy, colonialism, and racism in the struggle,” says Conde. “I saw me in 1999, but with more resources and less fear.”
With the hospital still not built, fed-up Viequenses have been staging another protest, stacking cinder blocks on the sidewalk outside the shuttered site. Some sign their own names; others write the name of Jaideliz Moreno Ventura, the girl who died in 2020.
In Congress, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative, Jenniffer González-Colón, has spent years pushing for reparations to Viequenses harmed by navy activities. Her latest bill, the Vieques Recovery and Redevelopment Act, would appoint a special master to approve compensation between $50,000 to $110,000 to each islander, depending on the severity of the impact. It would also be a way to compel real answers on what really happened to residents: “We should allow them to prove their case,” González-Colón says.
Valencia isn’t waiting for politicians. These days, she accompanies cancer patients to the main island, especially the ones “with nobody to take care of them”. But recently, she got sick with a mysterious kidney condition. No one knew how to help her in Vieques, and specialists in San Juan said it would be an eight-month wait. So she did something most islanders can’t afford: she flew to Miami, where her daughter is a medical worker. And after a weekend stay in a hospital there, “I was feeling just great.”
The painful moment came afterward. Valencia’s son-in-law took her on a harbor cruise, and someone pointed out the man-made islands in Biscayne Bay. Valencia immediately felt her blood pressure rising. “Those islands were not done by God. Why didn’t the navy make their own islands to do their practices someplace else?”
She imagined Vieques: just a tiny dot, too small to even show up on most world maps. Home. “And they had to pick us. It was as if they wanted us to disappear.”
• This article was amended on 2 May 2013. An earlier version used the word “ordinance”, when ordnance was meant.
