One of the rusted military tanks abandoned on the beach of Culebra island, few kilometers away from Vieques. As in Vieques, military troops have been conducting test landings and ground maneuvers on the island, and in 1936 the Navy began using Culebra for bombing practice until 1979, when the Navy moved all the training activities and bombing tests to Vieques.
“When the wind came from the east, it brought smoke and piles of dust from their bombing ranges. They’d bomb every day, from 5 am until 6 pm. It felt like a war zone. “You’d hear eight or nine bombs a day, and your house would shudder. Everything on your walls, your picture frames, your decorations, mirrors, would fall on the floor and break”, recalls a Vieques resident.
Diane Rivasy, 61, showing the scar after breast cancer surgery. She had been working in the Camp Garcia base for 13 years as a guard. Diane was a colleague of David Sanes, the young boy who died in 1999 for a bomb accidentally launched on the observatory where he was working by a military aircraft in training. She is one of the many people on the island who have developed cancer after years of presence of the Navy on the island.
The grave of David Sanes Rodriguez in Isabel II, Vieques. David died on Apr 19, 1999 at Camp Garcia, as the result of an accidental bombing by the US Marines in the island. He was a civilian employed to patrol the grounds outside the Observation Post, and his death triggered the growth of peaceful protest movements among the local population.
The commemorative bust of Angel Rodriguez Cristobal in Esperanza, Vieques. Angel, 33, was one of the fisherman protestors and exponent of the socialist party who was arrested for his role in the protest and died in federal prison under suspicious circumstances, where he was serving a sixmonth sentence for trespassing on Navy land while military maneuvers were under way.
Free horses walking in front of the dismissed Municipal Hospital José Benítez Guzmán built in 1912 in the outskirts of Isabel II, Vieques. The island is still lacking proper hospital and medical facilities, causing several problems to the many residents in need of constant medical assistance: more than 2 years after Hurricane Maria (Sept.2017), the Federal Emergency Management Agency has not decided whether to reconstruct Vieques’s only hospital amid conflicting estimates about how much the federal government is required to rebuild.