Grassroots protest campaigns forced the Navy off Culebra and Vieques

Evidence

On Puerto Rico’s neighboring island Culebra, the Navy seized 1,700 acres in 1948 for a bombing range. By 1950, the island’s population, which had numbered four thousand at the turn of the century, had shrunk to just 580. The Navy controlled one third of the island and its entire coastline, encircling civilians with the bombing range and a mined harbor. In the 1950s, the Navy drafted plans to remove the rest of Culebra’s inhabitants. Although those plans were never executed, in 1970 it tried to remove the islanders again. When the issue became a cause célèbre for the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Navy stopped using the range. Bombing increased in Vieques as a result, until a campaign of civil disobedience stretching from Puerto Rico to New York City finally forced the Navy to leave Vieques in 2003. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 203

Categorization

• XREF: Documents that local resistance can force base closures against US military intent, connecting to themes of base opposition in Japan, Ecuador, and elsewhere in the book.
• SEED: Angle: civilian resistance as an under-appreciated brake on base expansion, quantifying what it took to force the Navy out.