Abstract
For over 60 years, the U.S. Navy used the island of Vieques, a municipality of Puerto Rico, as a bombing range and munitions depot, squeezing its population in the middle and affecting every aspect of the community’s everyday life. After the death of David Sanes Rodríguez, a viequense security guard who was killed when two errant bombs missed their target inside the range, a broad-based coalition of church, community, government, the political left and other groups joined the “peace for Vieques” drive, demanding an end to the use of Vieques as a bombing range. On May 1, 2003, the activists obtained the avowed goal when the Department of Defense transferred its land to the Department of the Interior, which in turn declared it a wildlife refuge.
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Notes
For more on neo-nationalism, please see Carlos Pabón, Naciôn Postmortem: ensayos sobre los tiempos de la insoportable ambigüedad (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2002).
Here we consider the state, following Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, as a “National Security State Corporate Complex,” which comprises a closely knit web of media, corporate, military, and political power relations in which the private and “public” spheres of interests are mainly indistinct. Please see Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, “Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex (NSSCC) in the Long Twentieth Century,” in The Modern/Colonial World-System in the Twentieth Century, ed. Ramón Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez (Westport: Praeger, 2003).
See Gilles Lipovetsky, L’ethique indolore des nouvaux temps democratiques (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992).
See Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina,” in La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales, ed. Edgardo Lander (Caracas: UNESCO, 2000).
Guy Debord, La societé du spectacle (Paris: Éditions Buchet-Chastel, 1967).
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© 2007 Frances Negrón-Muntaner
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Winter, J.D. (2007). Vieques: Protest as a Consensual Spectacle. In: Negrón-Muntaner, F. (eds) None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604360_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604360_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-6246-1
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