From a young age I was fortunate enough to visit the Island of Vieques. I have enjoyed the beauty of Punta Arena, Puerto Diablo, Navío, Media Luna and Sombe. I have seen the sunset from Esperanza and admired the bioluminescence of its bays. But above all I have enjoyed the beauty of the people of Vieques. As a teenager I was able to sail around the island and to my surprise the United States Navy was dropping bombs. I could hear the strong explosive detonations followed by a cloud of dust rising towards the sky like a war movie preview. But it was not a movie, it was the day-to-day reality of the island that I cared for and loved so much.
Little by little I was learning more about Vieques' reality. Vieques is a 22-mile-long island off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, which was taken over by the US Navy during World War II. It has been used as a target range for training bombers and naval artillery ever since. Two thirds of Vieques is now a Navy base. On the western part of the island is one of the Navy's largest ammunition dumps. The eastern part of the island has been systematically pounded and polluted as the Navy's bombing range. The North Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility there is one of the largest live weapons training grounds in the world.
It was on April 19, 1999, when two Marine Hornets from the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy dropped two bombs on an observation tower killing David Sanes Rodriguez instantly and injuring four other people, that my conscience and morality were outraged. How could this happen in Puerto Rico? How is it possible that people are dying in what is called a 'time of peace?' How can the over 9,000 residents of Vieques live right next to a bombing range?
I left Puerto Rico in order to study abroad, but I never forgot what I witnessed in Vieques: bombs exploding close to a land where human beings live. I am working now on the last years of my doctoral studies in social and personality psychology at the City University of New York, and as a psychologist I can say that what is going on in Vieques is the dehumanization of both the people of Vieques and the agents of the violence: the US Navy. How can I explain this? When a person negates another person the right to live in peace, he denies the oppressed his right to be truly human, but he also denies it to himself.
By expropriating the people of Vieques from their land, the US Navy, as well as the Puerto Rican Government, violated the most precious and longed-for right in this life: Peace. How can the US Navy and all of the US Armed Forces claim to be working for world peace and welfare by making war if they are the first to violate our civil and human rights? Every day there is more evidence of this: the use of agent orange, Napalm, and depleted uranium, all tested on Puerto Rican soil. Just last week the US Department of Defense publicly admitted to testing biological weapons in the Vieques bombing range in 1969. Is this not one of the crimes that the United States uses to accuse other governments of being terrorists? In Vieques the US can experiment with anything they want and it is called "national security," but in other places in the world they call it "terrorism." My message here is that if one standard is used to judge those from the famous "axis of evil" we should also use the same standard to judge those who proclaim to be the liberators and institutionalizers of democracy.
Today I do not say these words to change this system, which I know to be unjust. If the system wanted to hear the pleading voices of the Vieques community it already would have. I come before you only to express my feelings and to denounce what is happening in Vieques as simply wrong. I do not say this using a political argument, nor an environmental or biological one, each of which have immeasurable validity. Today I use a civil and human rights argument, because what is being violated in Vieques is the human right to peace and liberty.
For trying to bring peace to the people of Vieques, I served 30 days in the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) of Guaynabo City, where the treatment I received was as dehumanizing as the treatment I got from the US Navy in Vieques. In the MDC I better understood that this system is about making money and dehumanizing those who are already oppressed. It is not about improving this society of ours.
I was arrested for civil disobedience-entering the restricted area the US Navy calls a bombing range necessary to maintain world peace and national security. I entered because of a moral obligation and willingly became a prisoner of conscience because I peacefully oppose war. I despise it from the depths of my soul. I also despise dehumanization, military expansionism and neo-liberalism. Of all of this I am proud. Today I am freer than yesterday as I join more than 1,800 Puerto Rican civil disobedients who desire peace above all things. We join thousands of others who, like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, love peace.
Why do we engage in civil disobedience? Because this system gives us no alternative. The citizens of Vieques who suffer from high rates of cancer and have high concentrations of heavy metals in their blood, demand demilitarization, decontamination, devolution of the lands, and sustained development.
Now the US Navy says it will leave Vieques. If they do leave it is because we forced them out, not because they simply decided to leave. It was, and it continues to be, the civil society that has fought this battle. And after we force them out, we still have three more demands to accomplish: decontamination, devolution of the lands, and sustained development. Until all these demands are met you will see more civil disobedience.
- Rafael A. Torruella, a native Puerto Rican now in graduate school in New York City, gave this presentation at the VI Congress on Liberation Social Psychology in Guadelajara, Mexico, in November of 2002.
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