Navy goes out with a bang

last updated 8 January 2015

Vieques

U.S. fighter jets this week began dropping inert bombs on Vieques Island for the last time. The Navy has announced it will abandon a controversial bombing range on the Puerto Rican island and begin training instead in Florida and North Carolina. Local protesters launched a campaign in 1999 to drive the military out, after an errant bomb killed a civilian guard. Activists held sit-ins on crater-pocked beaches to keep ships and planes from firing. The Navy stopped using live explosives to quell charges that contaminants from the site were driving up local cancer rates, a claim the Pentagon refuted. Luis Angel Torres of the Socialist Workers Movement gloated a bit as activists protested the final month of exercises. “The people’s struggle has forced them out.”