Qualla: Vieques, Puerto Rico

Vieques, Puerto Rico: Introduction

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rar285, CC BY-SA 3.0. Paddle a kayak through Mosquito Bay on a moonless night and every stroke of the blade sets the water on fire -- trails of electric blue swirling behind you, fish darting in luminous streaks beneath the hull. Guinness World Records declared this the brightest bioluminescent bay on Earth in 2006, and scientists credit a particular irony for its brilliance: when Spanish colonizers first encountered the glow centuries ago, they believed it was the work of the devil and dropped boulders into the bay's narrow channel to choke it off from the ocean. Instead, they sealed in the very conditions -- warm, sheltered water thick with nutrients from surrounding red mangroves -- that let the dinoflagellate Pyrodinium bahamense flourish. The devil's light only grew brighter. It is a fitting origin story for Vieques, an island whose defining experiences have been attempts at control that ultimately failed.

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Image: Rar285 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Vieques, Puerto Rico: Sixty Years Under the Crosshairs

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jay Sturner from USA, CC BY 2.0. In the early 1940s, with World War II expanding across the Atlantic, the U.S. Navy expropriated more than two-thirds of Vieques -- an island just 21 miles long and 4 miles wide, home to roughly 10,000 people -- to use as a training range and ammunition depot. Families were displa...

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Image: Jay Sturner from USA | CC BY 2.0

Vieques, Puerto Rico: The Death That Broke the Silence

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rar285, CC BY-SA 3.0. On April 19, 1999, a Marine Corps F-18 dropped two 500-pound bombs that struck a security post on the range, killing David Sanes Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican civilian employed by the Navy as a security guard, and injuring four others. His death transformed decades of simmering resen...

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Image: Rar285 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Vieques, Puerto Rico: What the Bombs Left Behind

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Department of Defense. American Forces Information Service. Defense Visual Information Center. 1994, Public domain. The Navy's departure did not end the reckoning. Researchers documented that Vieques' cancer rate from 1995 to 1999 was 31 percent higher than on the Puerto Rican mainland, though the small population makes statistical certainty difficult. Surveys of a target ship in a shallow bay...

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Image: Department of Defense. American Forces Information Service. Defense Visual Information Center. 1994 | Public domain

Vieques, Puerto Rico: An Island Reclaimed

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Kst447, CC BY-SA 3.0. Where bombs once fell, wild horses now graze among the ruins of military bunkers. The former Navy lands were transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local authorities, and today the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge encompasses stretches of palm-fringed beaches, mang...

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Image: User:Kst447 | CC BY-SA 3.0