By a better than 2-to-1 margin, voters on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques demanded that the U.S. Navy immediately stop its decades-old practice of using the island for live bombing and shelling exercises.

The July 29 nonbinding referendum came a little more than a week after some 1,500 union members, Latinos and religious and community activists marched in Washington, D.C., chanting a message to President George W. Bush: “Stop the bombing now.…U.S. Navy out of Vieques…Paz Para Vieques” (Peace for Vieques).

Many Vieques residents believe that the decades of bombing and shelling have caused serious human health problems and environmental damage for the residents and their children. They say that the island’s cancer rates, infant mortality and overall mortality rates—the highest in the commonwealth of Puerto Rico—are linked directly to the bombing.

“The people of Vieques made their decision and spoke clearly. This is the people speaking with a united voice,” Gov. Sila María Calderón of Puerto Rico told The New York Times.

Eighty percent of the island’s 5,893 eligible voters cast ballots and 68 percent backed an immediate halt of the bombing and the departure of the U.S. Navy from the island. Some 30 percent voted to let the Navy remain indefinitely. Just 1.7 percent backed Bush’s decision, announced in June, to allow the Navy to continue its bombing and shelling exercises until 2003. A Navy spokesperson said the nonbinding vote would have no impact on the Navy’s plans, which include a resumption of the exercises Aug. 1.

“If they start bombing on Aug. 1, we will make the call we always have for civil disobedience,” Vieques Mayor Damaso Serrano told the Times.

Protests and civil disobedience over the Navy’s actions intensified in 1999 when a Navy bomb missed its target and killed a civilian guard. Since then, more than 700 protestors have been arrested, mainly for trespassing on the Navy range. The most recent arrests stemmed from an April protest and just this month a federal judge handed out stiff jail terms to several people charged with low-level misdemeanors, including 30 days each to Dennis Rivera, president of SEIU 1199, New York’s Health & Human Service Employees Union, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But most of the protestors have been working family members, teachers, truck drivers, students, fishers, doctors, nurses and others.

At the Washington, D.C., march, the Rev. Jesse Jackson led protestors down Constitution Avenue to the Ellipse behind the White House.

“This is about self-determination,” Jackson told fellow demonstrators. “We cannot have two more years of bombing, two more years of cancer, two more years of environmental degradation. Stop the bombing now.”

Aníbal Acevedo-Vilá, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner and the commonwealth’s nonvoting representative in Congress, said, “President Bush must understand that every bomb that falls on Puerto Rico is an affront to the people….The environment has been poisoned. The economy has been severely curtailed. My constituents have sacrificed their health….Two more years of bombing is unacceptable.”

The AFL-CIO has urged a stop to the Vieques bombing since 1999 and the union movement has rallied to the cause.

“This is everyone’s fight, this is a union fight. Stop the bombing now,” SEIU President Andrew Stern told the Washington, D.C., rally.

Learn More
Learn how unions are mobilizing in Puerto Rico to stop the bombing.
Statement by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.
Statement by AFL-CIO Executive Council.