For more than 60 years, the military facilities in the island of Vieques were part of the US Navy’s Atlantic Fleet Weapon Training Facility (1941-2003), on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. The US Navy and the Marine Corps trained their military forces by simulating war situations that included amphibious landings, naval gunfire, and air-to-ground bombings, some of which were conducted with live explosives. The US Navy occupied 79% of Vieques’s territory, condemning Viequenses to live between two military bases in a mid-island civilian zone. Hunger, unemployment, military abuses, environmental degradation, and lack of health services came to characterize the life of Viequenses for decades.
Vieques: A Living Archive explores the memory of the Vieques’s social movements against the presence of the US Navy. The Vieques Fishermen (1978-1983) organized a movement against the US Navy for their right to fish. The Vieques land rescue movements (Villa Borinquen in 1976 and Monte Carmelo in 1989) claimed land and housing while challenging the territorial control of the US Navy. In 1999, the death of a local security guard, David Sanes, killed by a US Navy bomb dropped near the Camp Garcia observation point, ignited a new cycle of civil disobedience in Vieques. Through acts of defiance inside the US Navy target range, the civil disobedience camps (1999-2003), supported by a coalition of social movements, demanded demilitarization, decontamination, healthcare, development, and return of federal lands.
As a result of this struggle, on December 3, 1999, President Clinton “ordered a halt to live-fire military training on the Puerto Rican Island of Vieques and an end to all exercises there.” Although bombing ended, demilitarization has not resulted in a process of just recovery. While the US Navy finally ended training exercises on the island the land was not transferred to the islanders but to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in 2003.
This documentary examines how a demilitarized community confronts social, economic, and environmental challenges. The film focuses on the environmental and health costs of the US military presence while looking at the dilemmas of post-Navy Vieques. Tensions with the FWS underscore the colonial dilemmas created by federal lands in Vieques. Tourism and gentrification present a threat to the prospects of a community-driven path to sustainable development. The toxic waste of the US Navy has compromised the future, leaving Viequenses with all the uncertainties of an irreversible ecological crisis. Limited access to health services poses a risk for Viequenses, a population with a higher cancer rate than the rest of Puerto Rico.
This ecological and public health crisis has been aggravated by the loss of the only hospital after Hurricane Maria, transforming Vieques’ situation into a prolonged disaster. A case-study of military training as slow-violence, the story highlights the problems created by using Vieques as a bombing site, as well as the challenges of cleaning up vast areas of an island polluted with toxic waste. It is an intimate meditation on the paradoxes of war, memory, historical change, and social justice in the 21st Century.
The filmmaker and the community develop a closer relationship over the course of the film. The film has three main characters:
- The Vieques community: a choral narrative, the collective protagonist of the demilitarization process.
- The filmmaker: the main narrator of the film, a traveling activist turned educator, a witness of the demilitarization process who builds a long-lasting relationship with the Vieques community.
- The archive: the guardian of memories, an ongoing and evolving process, a repository of pending and unexpected questions.
The film is a travel documentary divided in three parts, each covering the history of Vieques in three different periods: 1998, 2004, and 2018-2022. Each period portrays the situation of the Vieques people in a very specific context and the overall film represents the evolution of this collective protagonist. The film highlights the traumatic experiences, solidarity networks, and resistance strategies of the islanders, as well as the ambiguities, conflicts, and challenges among themselves.
The film itself is also conceived as the making of a multilayered archive (personal memories, community dreams, collective action, and internal conflicts), underscoring the role of an audiovisual collection built over two-decades as a living archive of testimonies of the past, present, and future. Despite their vulnerable situation, Viequenses are a resilient people: they build their own archives and memories of their struggle.