25 years ago: Clinton prepares crackdown in Puerto Rico

This week in 1999, the Clinton administration was making preparations to send 300 federal marshals to Puerto Rico to quell protests over live-fire military exercises on the 20-mile-long island of Vieques, located about 8 miles from the island colony. east coast

US government agents were concerned about the potential for massive organized protests. During live-fire exercises the previous April, a stray bomb exploded that killed a Puerto Rican civilian, Navy recruit David Sanes, and wounded four others. Popular anger forced Governor Pedro Rosello to form a commission of inquiry, which recommended the immediate and permanent cessation of military exercises on the island.

The Pentagon formed its own commission and recommended to the Clinton administration that military exercises be phased out over the next five years, but that any immediate respite from training would endanger “national security.” A meeting between Governor Rossello’s chief of staff and Defense Secretary William Cohen did not resolve anything because USS Eisenhower battle group ready to start firing live ammunition. While the talks continued, the protesters refused to leave the occupation of the bombing range.

Popular sentiment against US government militarism resonated deeply with working-class residents on the island of Vieques and, more broadly, in Puerto Rico. The US Navy has used Vieques and the neighboring island municipality of Culebra as military areas for the past six decades as training for invasions against Latin American countries.

During its military training sessions, the Navy used radioactive shells tipped with depleted uranium. A Navy spokesman confirmed that a month before the fatal “accident” in Vieques, a fighter jet accidentally fired 236 shells, only 57 of which were later recovered. The shells, which take years to degrade, have threatened the island’s water, atmosphere, soil and people. The cancer rate on Vieques was double the average rate on the mainland of Puerto Rica, and it had a higher infant mortality rate.

According to the report issued by the Puerto Rican governor’s commission, US military exercises on the island “restricted the residential area and commercial activity of the civilian population to a strip of territory approximately three miles long in the center of the island.” It also imposed restrictions on fishing, the main industry of the islanders.

50 years ago: States of siege declared in Argentina and Bolivia

On November 7, 1974, the governments of Argentina and Bolivia declared a “state of siege” to combat the uprisings and threatened coups against the US-backed dictatorships ruling both countries. In the coming weeks, the crackdown on left-wing political organizations with state-backed fascist violence would be stepped up.

In Bolivia, an attempted coup by sections of the military against President Hugo Banzer triggered the declaration of siege. Soldiers of the 12th Infantry Regiment and US-trained anti-guerrilla rangers briefly took control of the town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra before being ousted by forces loyal to Banzer.

The coup was politically led by dissident members of the National Revolutionary Movement and the Bolivian Socialist Falange party. Both parties were far-right organizations that were part of Banzer’s ruling coalition and that supported him in the 1971 coup that put Banzer in power as dictator for the first time.