The Navy leaves Vieques

For six decades the United States Navy held roughly two-thirds of Vieques — about 22,000 acres — acquired in parcels between 1941 and 1950. Part of that land became a real bombing range at the eastern end of the island, and for generations Vieques residents lived beside training exercises over which they had no voice.

The fight over that arrangement had been growing for years, but it reached mainland attention in 1999, after a bomb dropped in an exercise killed David Sanes Rodríguez, a civilian security guard who worked at the range. His death set off a sustained campaign of civil disobedience — protest camps inside the range itself, arrests, and pressure that kept growing through the early 2000s.

That pressure produced results in stages. On May 1, 2001, the Navy returned the 8,000-acre western ammunition depot to the Municipality of Vieques — a first partial concession. Military exercises on the island stopped later that year, and by 2003 the Navy had completed its full withdrawal, closing a presence that had marked Vieques since World War II.

It is worth remembering how that land was acquired. In the 1940s the Navy bought parcels from landowners at a fixed price, while smaller landholders were often not compensated, were relocated, or were thrown off the land they worked. The two eras do not cancel each other out: the injustice of the original taking and the movement that eventually removed the Navy are part of the same story.

Leaving did not mean the land came back clean. The cleanup of unexploded ordnance, depleted uranium, and other contaminants continued into the mid-2010s and ranks among the most expensive military site cleanups the United States has undertaken. The former munitions range remains heavily contaminated today: a two-decade coda to a withdrawal that, on paper, ended in 2003.

Sources: Marina de los Estados Unidos en Vieques, Puerto Rico. Freeze 2026-08-22.