Squatters Take On The Navy
Ramirez, Deborah
Squatters Take on the Navy Palm trees sway in the gentle Caribbean breeze, waves roll over miles of unspoiled beaches, and cattle graze undisturbed on open fields. It is Vieques, an...
...She was recently laid off from a plant that sews military uniforms...
...On past occasions, the Navy has gone to court to get eviction orders or turned over land to the local government...
...The island is home to about 8,000 people and is part of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico...
...Squatter leader Antonio Figueroa says most of the squatters have no quarrel with the Navy and are simply "rescuing" their land...
...The Navy is continuing to review the situation," says Lieutenant Richard Boyle, a spokesman for Roosevelt Roads Naval Base on Puerto Rico, repeating the military's official statement over the past few weeks...
...Navy and the local people has flared into confrontation...
...Dependency on U.S...
...Vieques has been discovered in recent years by stateside Americans, who have built beachfront and hilltop vacation homes, driving the price of real estate beyond the reach of most locals...
...But paradise is an illusion on Vieques, where tension between the U.S...
...About 200 Vieques families seized 800 acres of unused Navy land a few months ago...
...The squatters know they are breaking the law...
...census showed the average annual income as $5,900...
...Ten years ago, an acre of Vieques land sold for as little as $3,000...
...If something happens to me," he says, "I won't leave anything to my family...
...Mendez and his wife and two children live in a home that belongs to his mother and brothers...
...Government is the largest landowner on Vieques...
...They erected barbed-wire fences and scribbled their family surnames on signs...
...She joined the squatters, she says, because she is tired of living with relatives...
...And critics say the Commonwealth has done little to encourage housing construction or transfer land to poor Vieques residents...
...the Navy uses two-thirds of the island—some 22,500 acres—for bombing practice and training exercises, an arrangement that dates back to Navy acquisition of the land during World War II...
...The U.S...
...Some have begun to build rustic wooden homes...
...Jose Manuel Mendez, a Vietnam-era veteran, has begun building a one-room wooden home, which he plans to expand later...
...I want to have something that no one can take away from me," says Becky Soto, a thirty-three-year-old mother of two teen-age sons...
...local real-estate agents say the same land is now worth between $15,000 and $20,000...
...food stamps and other Federal aid sources, in Vieques as in Puerto Rico as a whole, is high...
...Seeking to improve its public image on Vieques, the Navy in 1983 signed an agreement with the Puerto Rican government to help spur development through military contracts for private industries...
...Deborah Ramirez (Deborah Ramirez is a writer for the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico...
...Navy land extends in from the east and west ends of the island, leaving the civilian population squeezed in the middle...
...There is 60 per cent unemployment...
...Stored a few miles beyond the fence are vast supplies of ammunition magazines that fuel the Navy bombing ranges...
...These incidents are the latest chapter in a sometimes angry struggle between the Navy and Vieques natives over land...
...The Navy says the squatters are trespassing but so far has been reluctant to take action...
...A couple of weeks before, an angry mob had burned two Navy trucks after authorities tried to evict a squatter family from another Navy property...
...The Puerto Rican government is the second largest landowner on Vieques, holding about 5 per cent of the land-mostly land yielded by the Navy over the years...
...The cost of land has also increased, making it more difficult of a local family to afford private property...
...The 1980 U.S...
...Poverty and underdevelopment are at the heart of Vieques's housing problems...
...The land, which borders the sea, also runs into a ten-foot-high cyclone fence...
...Some new industries did get started, but most either failed or soon cut back production, leaving their employees out of work...
...It is Vieques, an eighteen-mile-long island off the east coast of Puerto Rico, and it may seem like paradise to outsiders...
...A sign says the land is U.S...
...Government property and warns that the immediate area is part of an ecological resources conservation zone...
...The squatters have settled in an area known as La Hueca (the Hollow), one of many unmarked Navy properties used as a buffer zone between military installations and the population...
Vol. 53 • September 1989 • No. 9
