Vieques: from bombing range to protest movement

The U.S. Navy took control of roughly 80 percent of the island of Vieques beginning in 1941, and used it for live-fire practice for more than sixty years after. Internal Navy documents describe bombing occurring on the island an average of 180 days of every year, a staggering share of Vieques's calendar spent under active gunfire rather than ordinary civilian life.

Islanders had protested the Navy's continued presence for decades, angered by the original land expropriation that made the base possible in the first place and by the environmental damage that weapons testing caused. That resistance echoed the Culebra protests of the 1970s, covered in another lesson on this site, which had already managed to force the Navy out of that neighboring island in 1975, with its operations simply relocating to Vieques.

Protest activity reignited with force in 1999, after Vieques native David Sanes, a civilian Navy security guard, was killed on April 19, 1999 by a jet bomb that the Navy itself said had fallen short. His death gave the long-simmering local grievance an unmistakable human face, and a resurgent civil disobedience campaign followed almost immediately. Local fishermen used their own small boats to physically disrupt Navy exercises at sea, and more than 600 protesters had been arrested by 2001, as the movement drew support from well beyond the island itself, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rubén Berríos, the same lawyer who had led the earlier Culebra protests, and multiple Puerto Rican cultural and sports figures who lent their public profiles to the cause.

This account keeps its focus on Sanes's death and the movement's revival through 1999 and 2000, the true close of this site's era. Readers may already know how the larger story resolves: the Navy would finally leave Vieques for good in 2003, a resolution that belongs to the decade after this one. It is the deliberate closing bridge of this site's history, an echo of the armed resistance that opened it half a century before, this time won not with rifles but with small boats and sustained civil disobedience.

Sources: Vieques, Puerto Rico. See Sources. Freeze 2026-08-22.