Vieques

Vieques exists as Puerto Rico's primary example of what happens when a small community stands between an empire and its military needs. In the 1940s, the US Navy converted two-thirds of this 52-square-mile island—eight miles east of the Puerto Rican mainland—into an extension of Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. Thousands of inhabitants were forcibly relocated to a six-mile-wide strip in the middle, surrounded on both sides by training grounds, weapons depots, and bombing ranges.

For sixty years, live-fire exercises, air-to-ground bombing, and ship-to-shore shelling continued. Vieques became the poorest municipality in Puerto Rico, with the highest unemployment and infant mortality rates. Residents had nowhere to go and no economic alternatives. Then, on April 19, 1999, a Navy bomb killed David Sanes, a Puerto Rican security guard. Public fury reignited.

The protests became a movement. In February 2000, 150,000 people marched in San Juan for Peace for Vieques. Celebrities joined—Ricky Martin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jesse Jackson—alongside thousands of ordinary Puerto Ricans. Despite arrests, the civil disobedience continued. President George W. Bush ordered the Navy's withdrawal by May 1, 2003. What protesters achieved was remarkable: a superpower's military apparatus retreated from territory it had occupied for over six decades.

Modern Vieques carries the scars. Much of the former Navy land remains closed due to unexploded ordnance and chemical contamination; cancer rates are disproportionately higher than the rest of Puerto Rico. But the island is rebuilding. Mosquito Bay—the brightest bioluminescent bay in the world—draws tourists for glowing night kayak rides. Wild paso fino horses roam the streets. By 2026, Vieques tests whether colonial trauma transforms into eco-tourism, or whether the Navy's legacy outlasts the Navy itself.