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ACTION ALERTS PANAMA: Call the environmental-issues staffers at the Washington, D.C., offices of your three Congressional representatives. Ask them to contact Secretary of State Colin Powell to urge that the United States (1) assume responsibility for cleanup of the more than 100,000 munitions left by the U.S. military and (2) comply with a Chemical Weapons Convention obligation to destroy chemical munitions left on the island of San José. Call the Congressional switchboard, 202-224-3121. VIEQUES: Call and fax the White House to voice opposition to the Vieques bombing. Urge President Bush to order the U.S. Navy’s immediate withdrawal. Contact Andrew Card, his chief of staff, 202-456-6797, 202-456-1907 (fax); and Joshua Bolten, deputy chief of staff, 202-456-6594, 202-456-6703 (fax). RESOURCES Basel Action Network: This project of Seattle-based Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange Global works to end free trade in toxic wastes. Secretariat members Isabel de la Torre, Ann Leonard and Jim Puckett. 206-720-6426. Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques: Provides U.S. supporters with films, stickers and t-shirts for organizing. Contact Robert Rabin. 787-741-8651. International Action Center: The organization, founded by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, runs the Depleted Uranium Education Project. 212-633-6646. Fellowship of Reconciliation: The group’s Latin America campaign, based in San Francisco, publishes the newsletter Panamá Update. Coordinator John Lindsay-Poland. 415-495-6334. Military Toxics Project: For cleanups, safe transportation of hazardous materials and preventive solutions. Interim Director Tara Thornton. 877-783-5091 (toll free). People’s Task Force for Base Cleanup: A Philippines network of 50 organizations and individuals in the Manila, Clark and Subic areas. National Coordinator Myrna Baldonado. 632-435-0387. Vieques Libre: Extensive information on the movement to stop the bombing. MORE LINKS Environment Panama Puerto Rico

  
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MARCH 2001

Collateral Damage

At military bases around the world,
the United States refuses to clean up its mess

By CARMELO RUIZ-MARRERO
Guaynabo, Puerto Rico

I’ll never forget what I saw on the U.S. Navy firing range in eastern Vieques. I was visiting the island, a few miles east of Puerto Rico, to report on a protest camp set up after an April 1999 bombing exercise killed a civilian there.

The beaches bore violent contrasts. On the white sand along the gorgeous turquoise ocean, seashells and crustaceans competed with missiles, shrapnel, shell casings and bullets. The debris included all calibers at all different stages of corrosion. Venturing inland, I saw a vast field of decommissioned military junk—jeeps, tanks and even airplanes—used as targets for bombardment from sea and air. From a hilltop in the middle of the 900-acre range, I saw what had been a lagoon until the bombing turned it into a lifeless ditch, dotted with craters and rusty bullet-riddled military vehicles that resembled decomposing corpses.

These are some of the sources of TNT, RDX, tetryl, depleted uranium and other toxins suspected of traveling downwind to the middle third of Vieques, where the island’s inhabitants have been sandwiched since the U.S. military moved in six decades ago. Scientists and health officials say the pollutants explain the population’s alarming rates of cancer, asthma, lupus, scleroderma and other diseases.

Vieques is not unique among more than 800 overseas U.S. military installations. “The military bases are creating dangerous problems around the world, including toxic drinking water and harmful explosives abandoned on firing ranges,” says John Lindsay-Poland, who is authoring a Duke University Press book on the history of the U.S. military in Panama.

As Puerto Ricans push the United States toward a ceasefire on Vieques, experience from other parts of the world suggests that an even tougher battle will be getting the mess cleaned up. In Panama, U.S. military efforts to clean up firing ranges lacked diligence and didn’t begin until 20 years after President Carter and Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos signed a 1977 treaty for the U.S. to withdraw from the country. In the Philippines, after the U.S. military evacuated two giant bases in 1992, dozens of nearby communities discovered toxic chemicals buried in uncontrolled landfills and water bodies. In Japan, frustration with the U.S. military’s environmental record boiled over last year when a ship failed in two attempts to export a huge load of the military’s PCB-laden garbage.

“From Panama to the Philippines,” Lindsay-Poland says, “the U.S. Department of Defense hides behind a veil of secrecy and refuses to clean up most contamination generated by its activities.”

ANCHORS AWAY

The 9,400 inhabitants of Vieques live between two military installations, one on each end of the 18-mile-long island. The United States and its NATO allies use the eastern end for the bombing and for amphibious landing maneuvers. The western end is a munitions depot. The installations, covering more than two-thirds of the island’s 33,000 acres, are part of the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, the world’s largest naval base, headquartered on Puerto Rico’s mainland.

Since 1941, Vieques residents have had the indignity of seeing their land barraged on a daily basis. They have endured tragedies such as the 1999 incident, in which a U.S. Marine Corps jet pilot fired off course, killing security guard David Sanes Rodríguez. They have withstood countless hair-raising close calls. They have defended themselves against drunken soldiers marauding through town, looking for women. Amid the bombing, they have struggled in vain to develop their fishing and tourism industries.

But the most deadly burden has been the environmental disaster. A Puerto Rican Health Department study found that the 1990–1994 cancer rate in Vieques was almost 27 percent above Puerto Rico’s average. The likely cause is the bombing, which infuses toxic chemicals and heavy metals into the soil, air and groundwater.

“Vieques is the best example of destruction and environmental injustice in the Americas,” wrote a coalition led by the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques in a 1998 letter to President Clinton. The Navy, the coalition added, has “destroyed coral reefs, thalasia beds, lagoons, mangroves, coconut groves, beaches, endangered species, fish and other marine organisms.”

Studies by the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez and the grassroots organization Casa Pueblo suggest that the Navy has made Vieques unfit for farming. The research suggests that the island’s plants, both wild and agricultural, are polluted with heavy metals. Crabs in the firing range, according to one of the studies, have up to 80 times more cadmium than do crabs studied by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service along the eastern U.S. seaboard. The Vieques level is 1,000 times more than what the World Health Organization considers safe for human consumption, and it takes decades for the human body to rid itself of the metal. “Cadmium causes hypertension and kidney damage in humans, and is carcinogenic,” notes Arturo Massol-Deyá, a biologist at the university.

After denying it for years, the Navy admitted in 1999 to firing 24 napalm bombs onto Vieques in 1993. The highly flammable toxic chemical gained notoriety when the United States used it to defoliate parts of Vietnam.

And the U.S. military has fired munitions made of depleted uranium on Vieques (see sidebar).

Filing a $100 million class-action lawsuit this year, a Mississippi-based law firm has brought together 3,600 Vieques residents suffering from illnesses it says are linked to the decades of bombing and the depleted uranium. The firm, John Arthur Eaves, specializes in class-action cases involving industrial pollution.

Casa Pueblo Director Alexis Massol, describing the island as “a human and ecological catastrophe,” calls on the Puerto Rican and U.S. governments to take “immediate responsibility regarding the consequences of 60 years of military practice on Vieques.”

But Washington is in no such hurry. Last year, President Clinton convinced then–Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Rosselló to sign an agreement allowing the Navy to maintain a Vieques base and continue the bombing practice for at least three more years. (In exchange, the United States is supposed to turn over the island’s western end to local authorities, invest $40 million in Vieques development projects, and give the island’s residents a chance to vote on whether they want the Navy to remain on the eastern end. The United States has scheduled the referendum for November 6.) With Rosselló’s blessing, U.S. authorities swept the protesters off the firing range last May and quickly resumed the bombing.

Rosselló’s agreement contributed to his November reelection defeat to Sila María Calderón, who ran on a pledge to renegotiate the pact and expedite the Navy departure. Calderón, who took office January 2, has threatened to enact noise regulations that would ban the shelling. After she met privately with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on February 27, he ordered the Navy to call off training scheduled for Vieques in March.

Amid the wrangling over halting the bombing, little attention has focused on cleanup. Rosselló’s agreement says the federal government would remove debris according to standards set for Noman’s Island, a 628-acre islet three miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. After decades of strafing and bombing by the Navy and Air Force there, the military hired a private contractor for a 1998 cleanup. But the effort focused only on Noman’s surface, leaving unexploded ordnance, munitions fragments and toxic chemicals underground. The lax cleanup went with a plan to turn the island into a bird sanctuary, off limits to humans, frustrating Wampanoag indigenous people who were pressing for access based on their summer encampment there, a tradition until the 18th century.

“This place is never going to be safe for people,” said Bud Oliveira of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, quoted in the Boston Globe. “There’s always a threat of a bomb coming to the surface. Ten pounds of black powder have been found in some of those bombs.”

UNINHABITABLE

Vieques residents can learn much from the U.S. record in Panama. The United States ended its 96-year occupation of that country in December 1999, withdrawing from a 10-mile-wide strip straddling the Panama Canal as required under the 1977 treaty. The occupation zone, totaling 360,240 acres, included three military firing ranges.

U.S. officials estimate that the United States cleaned up about 80 percent of the ranges, removing more than 8,500 pieces of unexploded ordnance and 2.1 million pounds of scrap metal. The Pentagon admits that at least 110,000 pieces of undetonated mines, mortar shells and bombs may be scattered along the ground or buried under forest cover. U.S. officials say dense jungle and steep slopes made the task of clearing the ordnance too difficult and dangerous and that further work could have damaged the canal’s watershed. Before leaving, the military recommended that “high-impact” areas, totaling more than 8,000 acres, remain permanently closed to humans.

To assess the cleanup, Panama hired the Washington law firm Arnold and Porter. The firm’s report, including more than 60 photographs, contested the U.S. position that most of the land was ready for civilian use. The photos showed unexploded mortar shells and rocket warheads on the firing ranges. And they showed grenades and mounds believed to contain undetonated munitions outside the high-impact areas.

Even some U.S. officials say the cleanup was superficial. Members of cleanup crews told the Washington Post they were often instructed to look for unexploded munitions only at ground level and that they were not equipped with metal detectors. Rick Stauber, a former Army bomb disposal expert sent to assess the problem, told USA Today that the Pentagon wasn’t interested in removing deadly debris and that his superiors hid information from him and barred him from inspecting sites.

The administration of Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso claims the cleanup fell short of a provision in the treaty requiring the United States “to take all measures to ensure insofar as may be practicable that every hazard to human life, health and safety is removed.” Environmentalists say clearing the forests without destroying them is only a matter of spending time and money.

With unemployment exceeding 50 percent in parts of the country, Panamanians see a thorough cleanup as vital to their economy. The firing ranges sit near real estate that Panama wants to use for housing, industry and ecotourism and for widening the canal to allow more shipping. In February, a backhoe dug up a live anti-aircraft round at a construction site in Pedro Miguel near the canal’s east bank. The 40-millimeter projectile was the eighth military explosive found in Panama outside the ranges since 1997.

Many of the 60,000 people living in shantytowns near the ranges scavenge for scrap metal. The size of this population is expected to double in coming years as Panamanians move closer to the capital in search of opportunities. U.S. military explosives on or near the ranges already have killed at least 21 Panamanians in the last two decades. Last year, Moscoso issued a decree making it illegal to enter the ranges, but Panama can’t afford to fence off the land or guard it.

The United States left behind more than unexploded munitions. Stauber told the Christian Science Monitor that when he helped prepare the Defense Department report on leftover ordnance in Panama he saw documentation that 120-millimeter projectiles made with depleted uranium had been fired. At first, U.S. Ambassador William Hughes denied Stauber’s claim. When the Fellowship of Reconciliation alerted Panamanian newspapers, U.S. officials admitted that the military had stored the uranium shells in Panama to test their deterioration in tropical climates. Stauber said the alleged test-firing would have been necessary to assure that the shells would function in battle.

The United States conducted secret tests of Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides in Panama during the 1960s and 1970s, according to a Dallas Morning News report. The defoliant, used by the United States in Vietnam, contains deadly carcinogens known as dioxins.

The U.S. chemical weapons program in Panama ran for more than 40 years, according to a 1998 report by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund and the Chemical Weapons Working Group. The tests began in the 1920s and included live munitions training, says Lindsay-Poland, director of the fellowship’s Latin America program, who authored the report. The United States sent three tons of a lethal nerve agent called VX for testing in Panama in 1964, he says.

The United States didn’t report the tests to Panama, even after ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997. (The convention requires a member state that has used chemical weapons on foreign territory to declare whether it has abandoned the weapons within 30 days of ratification.) “At contaminated chemical weapons sites in the United States, the U.S. government has been prepared to clean up those sites,” Lindsay-Poland notes. “Clean-up is not technically impossible and the United States should make sure that chemical-weapon test sites in Panama are cleaned up.”

Panamanian officials say the biggest long-term threat is that toxic chemicals and heavy metals will seep into groundwater. Water samples last year near buildings at a former Army base, Fort Kobbe, and the former Howard Air Force Base showed high levels of petroleum distillates, according to the Panama News.

Pushing for a thorough cleanup, Panama has turned to the United Nations. In September, Panama’s U.N. ambassador, Ramón Morales Quijano, said he had asked the U.N. General Assembly to take up the dispute in debates on the environment and on land mines, chemical weapons and biological weapons.

NEW WORLD ORDER

The U.S. military hasn’t limited its environmental havoc to the Americas. Philippines officials say chemicals from the former Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Station have caused at least 100 deaths since 1995 and endangered thousands of lives. In 1999, the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights gathered evidence indicating that chronic exposure to nitrates and heavy metals had led to miscarriages, stillbirths, birth defects and neurological disorders in 13 communities near Clark.

Last July, a Philippines government task force confirmed contamination in 26 areas inside the former bases. The pollutants included petroleum hydrocarbons, organochlorine, organophosphate, pesticides, benzene, arsenic, unexploded ordinance, asbestos and metal-contaminated ash and sand.

More than 100 plaintiffs who say they have suffered from the poisons filed a class-action lawsuit in August, seeking $102 billion in damages from the United States and $1.1 billion from the Philippines government. The United States insists it has no legal obligation to clean up the former bases, which were the largest U.S. air and naval facilities on foreign soil.

In Japan, the U.S. military faces complaints and lawsuits about soil, air and water contamination and about noise pollution. A planned U.S. helicopter base in Okinawa threatens coral reefs and could wipe out Japan’s last population of dugongs, an endangered marine mammal related to the Florida manatee.

In March last year, a ship carrying 90 tons of military waste full of toxins known as PCBs left Japan toward a recycling plant in Kirkland Lake, Ontario. But Canada refused the waste, as did dockworkers in Seattle. When the ship returned with its cargo to the port of Yokohama, it met political protests and daylong TV news broadcasts.

U.S. military installations overseas harbor more than 1,700 tons of PCB wastes, according to Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, which fights free trade in toxic refuse.

Patricia Hynes, a Boston University environmental health professor, says the Pentagon generates a ton of toxic waste per minute, more than what the five largest U.S. chemical companies produce combined. “Worldwide, the military is the most secretive, shielded and privileged of polluters,” she wrote in Dangerous Intersections (South End Press, 1999), a collection of essays by environmentalists.

Military activities are responsible for 6–10 percent of global air pollution, according to the Washington, D.C.–based Worldwatch Institute. The Research Institute for Peace Policy, a German organization, estimates that military activities cause 20 percent of global environmental degradation.

University of Vermont geographer Joni Seager explains why military bases are hazardous. “In addition to the more conventional materials—such as propellants, oil, solvents, paints and preservatives—military facilities often also house deadly chemical and radioactive substances (chemical weapons, bomb components, metal solvents), most of which are secret and almost none of which are subject to environmental oversight controls,” she wrote in Dangerous Intersections. “The more dangerous, complex and secret military activities are, the more grim and dangerous is the environmental fallout. Militaries routinely generate waste end products, including cyanides, acids, heavy metals, PCBs, phenols, paints and contaminated sludges.”

The contamination begs for an alliance between the peace and environmental movements. Toward that end, an October 1999 conference in Washington, D.C., brought together 70 grassroots activists from 54 nations and colonies, including Puerto Rico, Panama, the Philippines and Japan. Organized by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Arc Ecology and the Institute for Policy Studies, the conference focused on environmental problems caused by military installations. The activists met with ambassadors, Congressional members and Pentagon officials, and they adopted an “Environmental Bill of Rights.” In a statement upon returning home, the eight-member Puerto Rican delegation noted that the “toxic legacy that the U.S. government has left all over the world is contrary to the policy of global environmental leadership that the U.S. pretends to follow.”

The conference has led to better communication between grassroots groups around the world. And public awareness of U.S. military environmental destruction is slowly increasing. But the movement still lacks legislative proposals, court cases and resource bases for a unified global campaign.

The movement does have a model, a cleanup on the uninhabited Hawaiian island of Kaho’olawe, just south of Maui. The military took over the island’s 28,800 acres in 1941 for training exercises. In 1976, native Hawaiians began protests, occupations and lawsuits aimed at booting the military. They got help from one of their U.S. senators, Daniel Inouye, a disabled World War II veteran who chaired the powerful defense appropriations subcommittee. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush yielded to Inouye and directed the Pentagon to halt the bombing practice. In 1993, Congress authorized $400 million for a 10-year environmental restoration, the largest cleanup of a military installation in history.

An investment of this magnitude for a tiny, uninhabited island bolsters demands for cleaning up deadly U.S. military messes around the world.