By Roberto Barretto
FOR OVER 60 years the people of Puerto Rico have struggled against the repressive institutions of the U.S. Federal Government to force the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. In the last three years, that struggle has become a massive movement of resistance that has used civil disobedience as its primary weapon. Six decades of military practices has exposed for all to see some of the damaging effects of the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Most noticeable are the health problems suffered by the population. Vieques has the highest rate of cancer in all of Puerto Rico, yet has no other industry but the military. In general, the social and environmental degradation associated with the militarization of the island is now evident.
The U.S. military continues to be one of the principal polluters in Puerto Rico as well, an island 100 miles long by 35 miles wide with the highest percentage of land used for military purposes in all of the U.S., including the second largest naval base, Roosevelt Roads in Ceiba. According to a report issued in March 2002 by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), there are at least 79 former military installations in Puerto Rico (besides the firing range in Vieques and other bases still in use) that have been polluted by the Department of Defense. These include dangerous toxic and radioactive waste materials, mainly buried in underground tanks. The regional director of EPA, Carl A. Soderberg, cautioned that these are not included in the national priorities to be cleaned by the Super Fund, meaning that there are no moneys allocated nor is there a date or a schedule for a possible clean up.
As in Vieques, many communities on the main island of Puerto Rico are organizing themselves to confront some of the same social and environmental problems. These are caused not only by the U.S. military, but by public and private industries and particularly by urban developers. An environmental crisis exists in Puerto Rico that has been decades in the making.
But now, after the experiences of the last decade, new movements have reached higher levels of confidence and greater capacity for struggle.
In the last ten years, important movements were raised by common people to defend their economic interests or the well-being of their communities. These included the mobilizations in 1995 to oppose the ROTHER military radar system that intended to militarize vast amounts of agricultural land; the resistance in 1997 to the NASA rocket experiments conducted in close proximity to residential areas; the People’s Strike in 1998 to prevent the privatization of public services; and the movement to force the Navy out of Vieques after 1999. Communities organized to demand water, clean air, health services, and adequate schools, and to prevent sand extraction, to counter deforestation and unrestricted urban sprawl.
These defensive movements have pitted the interests of vast sections of the working class and significant sections of the middles classes against the interest of the bosses, particularly against the building industry and the government. The struggle over the environment is only an expression of a broader social conflict–a chapter in Puerto Rico’s class struggle.
For instance, rich developers are displacing poor communities that have existed since the times of slavery, some of them formed originally by freed slaves that settled without any legal title to the land. Often courts refuse to accept evidence that would prove that those living for generations on these lands are entitled to them. But recently, under pressure from below, the government had to give in to the demands of some communities.
In a case over a beach front development in Aguadilla, the community fought all the way to the Supreme Court and lost. They vowed to resist, threatening another "Villa Sin Miedo" if the government attempted an eviction. Villa Sin Miedo was a community formed by land squatters. In 1982 the government forcefully evicted the community and burned all their property, paying a high political price for it.
Although in the case of Aguadilla all legal means had been exhausted, the government avoided the confrontation by expropriating the developer and granting property titles to the community. A similar victory happened this year in Juan Domingo in Guaynabo. At the present, the government is in the process of expropriating a developer in Trujillo Alto to preserve 14,000 trees from being clear cut, following a militant community struggle to save the woods.
These victories are significant, but represent only a tiny portion of the projects that have been approved for the immediate future. In other cases, such as in Loiza, poor residents have been forced out of their houses by greedy developers. Governor Sila Calderón has been pushing new procedures to speed up the permit process for building projects. Frustrated with the slow progress, she replaced the heads of the Planning Board by appointing an active U.S. Army Reserve officer as director to the agency and a representative of the developers as his aide. This has enraged both the environmental movement and the movement for the liberation of Vieques.
According to federal law, in order for the Navy to practice in Vieques it needs to comply with all Puerto Rican environmental laws, including a permit given by the Planning Board, now headed by a counter-insurgency expert. During the last military exercises in April, the Navy did not comply with vital environmental regulations, but governor Calderón waived the requirements by entering into negotiations with the military.
With the new appointments, developers expect to get hundreds of permits fast-tracked for projects that most Puerto Ricans can’t afford–such as $500,000 homes for the rich. (Construction of affordable housing is virtually nonexistent.) The government’s Urban Renewal Projects are expected to destroy poor communities in the inner cities of Caguas and Santurce and displace the residents by gentrification. The construction of Route 66, a project on which many others projects are dependent, is in progress despite the opposition of countless communities.
One of these communities has established a camp in an important highway in Trujillo Alto. Since April they have blocked the construction of a key section of Route 66. This and other similar struggles have brought the government to the negotiating table with communities and environmental groups.
However, the governor is trying, with some success, to divert the activism from the streets into committees where the communities’ demands can be weakened.
She is proposing the formation of an Advisory Council to the governor on environmental affairs. This in turn would present recommendations for an environmental act to be made into law. Some groups have vowed to work with the governor under the principles of the 4 Cs: "commitment, confidence, communication, and cooperation." But other groups are starting to realize that Calderón is just continuing the same patterns of development that she promised to reform during her electoral campaign. According to Wanda Colón, of Communities Opposed to Route 66, the projects pursued by the Calderón administration "are of the same style and format of those of (former governor) Rosselló that Sila Calderón has criticized so much." Likewise, Juan Rosario of Missión Industrial has stated that the administration’s message is, "We are going to continue with the same model of development."
Meanwhile there is no independent coordination body between the different communities fighting the developers. However, communication and cooperation among the groups has improved significantly. There are new openings for these movements to work together, especially since many of the activists have previously participated in the struggle for Vieques, where they have established common links.
This year, on July 25, the Constitution of Puerto Rico will turn 50 years old and Calderón’s government is preparing a huge celebration. In 1952, the so called Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was established to hide the Island’s status as a U.S. colony. Together with the new constitution, the government launched "Operation Bootstrap" to modernize the island’s economy that had primarily been an agrarian country exporting sugar, coffee, and tobacco. The whole process was dominated by a great hope that the "new" arrangement between Puerto Rico and the U.S. would greatly improve people’s lives.
Over a century of U.S. colonial rule in Puerto Rico and 50 years of industrialization has produced a sea of unfulfilled promises for Puerto Rican workers. According to the 2000 census, 48 percent of Puerto Ricans still live in poverty. Militarization and environmental destruction severely reduce the quality of life for most of the population.
Now, the federal government is quietly preparing to take over 15 percent of the national territory of Puerto Rico under the pretext of environmental protection. The Puerto Rico Land and Water Conservation Act of 2000, now embodied in congressional bills HR 3954 and HR 3955, is being pushed in Congress to give total control of over 22 percent of the country’s water reserves to the U.S. government. Over 100,000 acres of land would be expropriated.
Once this land is in their control, it would be very difficult to stop the U.S. government from using it for military practices, for mining, or for dangerous experiments. All these have happened before. In the 1960s, the U.S. government used the Caribbean Rain Forest in El Yunque to experiment with Agent Orange and with radiation. The effects of these experiments on the general population has never been determined.
It is likely that new struggles will continue to arise as more and more lands are taken by the military or the developers, further pushing the poor into marginal area. To be successful, these struggles need to unite and develop a class analysis in order to present a coherent opposition to the government. The left has an important role to play. The class arguments are needed to convince those who think cooperation with the government is going to solve the crisis. The government’s image as an impartial mediator between communities and developers needs to be challenged.
As Puerto Ricans continue to fight for the withdrawal of the Navy from Vieques and for the clean-up and return of lands, many activists have joined other community struggles. But official links between the Vieques organizations and other social movements remain mostly symbolic. A greater effort should be made to bring together these efforts, the fight against the priorities of imperialism and the fight against the priorities of the industrial bosses. These are two expressions of the same colonial relationship.
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