Navy Arrests Vieques Activists

Reuters
Friday , June 2, 2000
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, June 1
Navy guards arrested 31 people who sailed small boats to a disputed military firing range on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques today, military officials said.
Most of those detained went to the firing range to protest the resumption of Navy exercises on the island, but six journalists were among the group, said a Navy spokesman, Commander Scott Bassett.
The group was removed without incident except for one person who resisted arrest and was restrained, Basset said.
"We intercepted them as they came ashore," Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon told reporters at the Pentagon in Washington. "The Navy is responsible now for security of the range. And they're doing a wonderful job."
He said those arrested would be turned over to U.S. marshals to decide whether they would face trespassing charges, based on their past protest records.
Among those detained was Lolita Lebron, 80, a Nationalist Party member who served 20 years in federal prison for participating in the 1954 armed attack on Congress, in which four lawmakers were hurt. She was pardoned by then-President Jimmy Carter.
The Vieques Women's Alliance said it led the incursion onto Navy land today to "denounce the unjust, unnecessary suffering to which our people have been submitted ever since our beaches and seas were usurped by the Navy of the United States."
The arrest of the 31 by Navy Shore Patrol guards brought to 316 the total number arrested during and since the federal recapture of the bombing range from protesters on May 4.
Bombing range protesters had occupied the site since the April 19, 1999, death of Vieques resident David Sanes Rodriguez, a civilian security guard who was employed by the Navy and was killed by an errant bomb.
His death unleashed pent-up resentment against the Navy in the Spanish-speaking U.S. commonwealth and sparked a drive to oust the Navy from Vieques, an island off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico.