When the ferry docks in Vieques, a small island about 6 miles (10km) off Puerto Rico, the first person many tourists see is José Belardo, known as “Gato”, a retired police chief who now drives a taxi. Driving to Esperanza, a town on Vieques’s southern coast, he points to Sun Bay, a popular beach, and to large cleanup tents behind a barbed-wire fence. Gato notes the wildlife preserve, riddled with unexploded munitions, and the health centre, recently built but without doctors. He mentions a woman walking by, whose husband recently died of cancer.
Cancer rates soar on Vieques
A 2003 study by the Puerto Rican department of health reported that the cancer rate in Vieques was 27% higher than the rest of the archipelago between 1990 and 1994, 35% higher between 1995 and 1999, and 18% higher from 2000 to 2004 – with the increase for males being even higher at 40%. Experts suggest that the main cause of the surge may be contamination of the soil and water with carcinogenic metals in part of the island that was occupied by the US military until 2003. From the 1940s until 2001, the US navy practised bombing and shelling techniques in Vieques, expanding its control to more than 70% of the island.
Ever since then, thousands of bombs and smaller explosive devices remain scattered across the island’s east side and in the surrounding waters, leaving about a third of the island off-limits to its own residents. The navy is overseeing the cleanup under the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund programme, which is projected to continue until at least 2032, according to the US Department of War. Despite the navy’s withdrawal and ongoing cleanup, residents face persistent health crises and inadequate medical provision, amid fears that statistics on the island’s cancer rate do not reflect the true extent of the contamination.
Fears of military reactivation
Meanwhile, after the Trump administration attacked Venezuela in January to depose and kidnap the president, Nicolás Maduro, and stepped up its blockade and threats towards Cuba, some Viequenses fear that the military reactivation of their home is imminent. Last November, the Roosevelt Roads military base in Ceiba, on the main island, was reopened 21 years after it was shut down. Dr Lorena Estrada-Martínez, of the University of Massachusetts, has been assessing since 2020 the effect of the navy’s presence, funded by an EPA grant after years of advocacy from Viequenses. The project lost funding in 2025, at the start of the second Trump administration, but Estrada-Martínez still hopes to complete it despite the lack of support.
Viequenses have for years supplemented the statistics with stories of personal tragedy. One was of five-year-old Milivy Adams Calderón, who died of lymphoma in 2002. She had above-average levels of uranium in her blood. Carlos “Prieto” Ventura, 65, a local organiser, is straightforward and unsentimental when he talks about cancer in his home in Esperanza. “In our neighbourhood, our community, almost everyone has died of cancer, one house after another,” he says. “Although the navy continues to deny any kind of connection with them, we don’t see how we can have some [other] elements that could justify so many deaths on our island from cancer. We supposedly live in almost a paradise.”
Residents struggle for medical care
A lifelong fisherman, Ventura was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma in 2024, a rare form of cancer that attacks the lymphatic system. During his chemotherapy, he lost 19kg (42lb). His whole body felt hot, he says, even inside his mouth. At 71, Ventura’s neighbour Zaida Torres is recovering from a double mastectomy. Despite her health challenges, she appears cheerful. Every three weeks, she takes the island’s ferry to Ceiba, a trip that can take 35 minutes to an hour depending on the weather, for medical appointments. Her son usually picks her up at the dock before driving her to the hospital in Fajardo. There she will have radiation therapy that can take between four and six hours. Often, she would leave Vieques at 6am, arriving back as late as 1am. “After a day of chemotherapy, I am devastated, but it is what I have to do,” says Torres.
She and other Viequenses have been left with no other option than to seek life-saving medical care on the main island since their hospital was obliterated by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Three years later, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) approved $39.5m (£30m) in funds to build a replacement, but it took another six years for the new health centre to open. Residents allege that its facilities remain barely functional, as many services that were once available, such as a kidney dialysis unit and a birth centre, still lack staff. One resident described it as an “emergency room”, rather than a hospital equipped to provide everyday care.
Ferry tragedy and protests
To complicate matters, the ferry’s schedule is not just unreliable but deadly, says Torres. In early February, protests erupted when a Viequense woman, Sheila Sanabria, died after suffering a heart attack while waiting for the ferry at Ceiba. A day before her death, she had appeared on the local TV news network NotiCentro while waiting to board the ferry. The medication she needed was six miles away on Vieques, she told the broadcaster.
Residents also remember that the US military’s deadly presence went beyond environmental contamination. In 1999, the navy killed a civilian security guard, David Sanes Rodriguez, during a bombing practice. His death ignited years of protests in Vieques. In April 2001, the navy began transferring 17 sq km (4,250 acres) of the former Naval Ammunition Support Detachment. In 2003, when the then-president George W Bush withdrew US forces from the island, all 59 sq km of the former Vieques naval training range were transferred.
Trauma and ongoing harm
When a plane takes off from the Roosevelt Roads base, Monisha Rios’s home in Ceiba goes through what she likens to the aftershock of an earthquake. There are cracks spidering across her ceiling that were not there when she bought the home in 2022 – before the view from her bedroom window became a military airstrip. Rios is a US army veteran who spent years in Vieques before moving to Ceiba, where she wanted to live closer to hospitals and set up a place for people to stay when travelling to health appointments. For months, she has watched as F-35s fighter jets and Osprey transport aircraft take off, especially before the capture of Maduro in Venezuela, and has noticed an increase in the number of planes at the base.
Many Viequenses are still grappling with the trauma of naval occupation, Rios says. “Band-Aids are getting ripped off; wounds that were healing little by little have been reopened,” she says. “You can’t heal from something when you’re being actively harmed by it, and we need to be able to heal from all of this and try to restore our community.”
Colonial status and UN testimony
Dissatisfaction is growing over Puerto Rico’s status as a US “colony”, existing as American territory but lacking any real representation in Congress. For years, members of the group Vidas Viequenses Valen (Vieques Lives Matter) have worked to support the self-determination of Vieques residents. Last month, the group’s president, Alexandra Connelly, testified to the United Nations’ special committee on decolonisation about the island’s health crisis and the open detonation of explosives as part of the navy’s “cleanup” process. “We’re an island within a colony, forced for generations to endure decisions made about our land, our health and our future. What are we going to leave [future generations]? A contaminated, displaced island or an island where children can be born, can grow up and decide their own future?,” asked Connelly.
This question is on Zaida Torres’s mind. She recently joined Connelly at the UN as a petitioner. In 1999, after the navy killed Sanes Rodriguez, Torres helped form the Vieques Women’s Alliance, a group that was instrumental in ousting the military from the island in 2003. The group was among the first to inform residents about the link between their cancer diagnoses and the military’s munitions training. Now Torres mentors a new generation of the alliance who are fighting to support women’s health and oppose further militarisation. Despite everything, Torres remains in her home and refuses to be moved. “This is my land. I was born here, and I’m not leaving,” she says. “I’ll die here, I’ll be buried here. I’ll stay here.”
