A New Century, and New Work

March 2000

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With this newsletter, we inaugurate a new five-year campaign of the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s (FOR) Latin America program. After consultation with our colleagues in Latin America and the United States on the re-militarization of the Americas and an internal reflection in the FOR, we have committed ourselves to support the process for the withdrawal of US military troops and activities from Puerto Rico, the environmental cleanup of contamination generated by those activities, and the economic conversion of these sites to uses decided by Puerto Rico’s people.

The newsletter will report on that campaign and related developments in Puerto Rico. We will also continue to follow other aspects of militarization in Latin America, such as the escalating U.S. military involvement in the war in Colombia. The Task Force is adapting an exposition on the war in Mexico produced by Service for Peace and Justice in Cuernavaca, and we continue to place volunteers with collegial grassroots organizations in Latin America.

The Puerto Rico Campaign will work from the knowledge and contacts we developed during our Panama Campaign. While attention now is focused on the struggle to ensure the U.S. Navy’s departure from Vieques, we will work with those looking at the long-term process of community-based economic conversion and environmental cleanup in Vieques, as well as the U.S. military’s other operations in Puerto Rico.

These activities distort the choices available to the people of Puerto Rico, but they also have an impact beyond Puerto Rico’s shores. The Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH), formerly based in Panama and now in Roosevelt Roads on the eastern end of Puerto Rico, includes hundreds of soldiers who train other armed forces throughout the hemisphere in combat techniques which are frequently used in counterinsurgency wars. The US Army South (USARSO), which moved from Panama to Fort Buchanan in San Juan last year, coordinates Army operations and relationships throughout Central and South America.

Our activities will range from research into the military’s activities and publishing resources for activists, to organizing delegations to Puerto Rico and speaking tours by Puerto Rican activists in the United States, to participation in national and international networks on military base cleanup.

The FOR’s decision to focus on demilitarization in Puerto Rico has a history. In 1992, we published a booklet, Puerto Rico: The Cost of Colonialism. In 1998 and 1999, we organized together with the Caribbean Project for Justice and Peace and other groups two international delegations that visited Vieques, Roosevelt Roads, Fort Buchanan and sites where the Navy planned to install a powerful and highly unpopular radar for use in regional surveillance.

The Puerto Rico Campaign also follows naturally from our Panama Campaign. That campaign was initiated with Panamanian groups in 1993 and sought the withdrawal of US troops and military bases from Panama, the economic conversion of the bases, and the cleanup of contamination produced by more than 80 years of bombing and other military uses. We foresaw negotiations for the permanence of troops in Panama beyond 1999, and that is what happened. We achieved what we never expected, revealing a history of contamination by “conventional” munitions as well as chemical weapons and depleted uranium. In the context of a popular movement in Panama that mobilized against a post-1999 military presence, information on military contamination influenced the breakdown in negotiations that led to the U.S. departure from Panama — even though the United States has still not assumed responsibility for cleanup of abandoned chemical munitions or thousands of conventional explosives left behind in Panama.

Most of the U.S. forces stationed in Panama moved to Puerto Rico, even as the movement in Puerto Rico against the U.S. military’s presence gathered steam. We aim to contribute what we can that is useful to that movement. We will continue to follow events in Panama, especially as they relate to former US military bases and cleanup of explosives, chemical weapons and other contamination left by the military’s activities. As you will see in this issue of the Update, we also will cover other aspects of U.S.militarization, such as the escalating U.S. military involvement in Colombia, though our principal focus here will be Puerto Rico. We invite you to join us in this effort.

Purposes and Objectives of
FOR’s Puerto Rico Campaign

Purposes:

• Contribute to the decolonization of relationships between the United States and Puerto Rico, through demilitarization and the development of people-to-people relationships based on mutual respect for the aspirations of grassroots communities.
• Help to limit the United States’ capacity to wage offensive war through the closure of combat training facilities in Puerto Rico, thereby encouraging efforts to solve international conflicts through negotiation instead of violence.
• Support the implementation of drug policy that focuses on “harm reduction” rather than military means for addressing drug addiction and consequent harms.
• Strengthen the mechanisms (political, legal, popular) to hold the U.S. military accountable for cleanup of environmental destruction caused by its operations and training.

Objectives (Five Years: 2000-2004):

• Contribute to the withdrawal of Navy troops, termination of all military operations, and return to civilian use of lands and waters currently used by the Navy at Vieques and Roosevelt Roads Naval Station.
• Ensure the United States commits itself to fund the environmental cleanup of lands and waters in Vieques contaminated by the military’s activities.
• Support community-based development of all lands, waters and property returned by the military to the people of Puerto Rico, including the establishment of a land trust in Vieques and the creation of community-controlled entities with decision-making power over the returned properties.

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Fellowship of Reconciliation
Puerto Rico Campaign
Produced by the Fellowship of Reconciliation Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean

©2001 Fellowship of Reconciliation