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puerto rico
Puerto Ricans Continue Protests Against US Militarism and War Threats
“We are against any type of military intervention in the country of Venezuela, and above all we are against the vile and terrible assassinations of our fishermen brothers," said one protester.
Nov 12, 2025
Protests continued Tuesday in Puerto Rico against the US military buildup and attacks on alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean Sea, as well as the Trump administration's warmongering toward Venezuela.
Since September, Puerto Ricans have been protesting the reactivation of former US bases like Roosevelt Roads in Ceiba, increased operations at Muñiz Air National Guard Base and other sites, airstrikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, and Trump's deployment of warships and thousands of troops to the region for possible attacks on Venezuela. Trump has also authorized covert CIA action against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“We are against US imperialism, we are against any type of military intervention in the country of Venezuela, and above all we are against the vile and terrible assassinations of our fishermen brothers that have happened with the pretext that they are boats for drug traffickers," explained protester Enrique Rivera Zambrana, a resident of the southeastern town of Arroyo. "We condemn those killings, and terrible actions. We are in favor of peace.”
En Puerto Rico se siguen llevando a cabo protestas contra los entrenamientos militares que el Gobierno de Trump está realizando en las playas de Arroyo, una localidad situada en el sureste de la isla.
En las últimas semanas, los residentes de Puerto Rico han revelado haber visto… pic.twitter.com/cT2QMiHNxN
— Democracy Now! en español (@DemocracyNowEs) November 12, 2025
Tuesday's protest was also held in honor of Ángel Rodríguez Cristóbal, a Puerto Rican revolutionary who was found dead in a Florida prison—where he was serving a six-month sentence for opposing the US Navy occupation and bombing of Vieques, Puerto Rico—on November 11, 1979. While US authorities said Rodríguez killed himself, many critics believe he was assassinated.
US Marines began large-scale amphibious warfare exercises involving hundreds of troops at the end of August as part of Trump's remilitarization of the region amid his military buildup against Venezuela. There are currently around 10,000 troops on the island—which was conquered from Spain in 1898—as well as weapons including F-35 fighter jets, MQ-9 Reaper drones, surveillance aircraft, and support equipment.
The US buildup has evoked memories of the fight to kick the Navy out of Vieques, a picture-postcard island whose residents lived downwind from a US bombing range for six decades. Tens of thousands of tons of bombs were dropped. Deadly chemical weapons were tested and stored. Toxins polluted the land, air, and sea, including Agent Orange, depleted uranium, and so-called forever chemicals.
There was little that Puerto Ricans—who were denied political representation in Washington, DC—could do about it. When the Navy finally left in 2003, it left behind a legacy of illness including cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, as well as an infant mortality rate 55% higher than in the rest of the territory.
Vieques octopus fisher José Silva recently told Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) that the new buildup "is like bringing back the monster of the bombings" of the island.
Another Vieques resident, Yamilette Meléndez, said the renewed US presence brought back childhood memories of hiding under her bed whenever warplanes flew overhead.
“The trauma comes back,” she said. “It comes back because for years we lived with the sound of bombs, planes at all hours, while sleeping, at school."
"I thought of my children, of the anxiety," she added. "It’s something you can’t control, because I grew up with it. And I was just a girl then. Imagine how it feels for the older folks who lived through the real struggle.”
The US military brings other forms of violence to Puerto Rico.
“Some of the soldiers who were recently working at the airport approached local businesses and several people, asking if there were sex workers in Vieques," Judith Conde Pacheco, co-founder of the Vieques Women’s Alliance, told CPI. "It’s one of the most brutal forms of violence… women’s bodies are seen as part of the occupied land."
Some Puerto Ricans dismissed the idea that the buildup on what's often called the US' "unsinkable aircraft carrier" signaled any sort of resurgence in the colonizers' presence.
“The idea that the US military is no longer present in Puerto Rico is a myth," former Puerto Rico Bar Association president Alejandro Torres Rivera told CPI. "They never left, they merely scaled back their presence, or the intensity of it, for a time in their colony."
Condemning the buildup and the acquiescence of the territorial government in a Newsweek opinion piece last month, US Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez (D-NY)—the first Puerto Rican woman to serve in Congress—wrote: "The potential remilitarization of Puerto Rico is not progress; it is regression. It marks a step backwards in the struggle for Puerto Rico’s sovereignty."
"To those who celebrate this militarization, or remain complicit, I say: There is no worse bet than one made against your own people, your own land, your own future," she added. "If only someone would dare to bet on Puerto Ricans, and their right to decide their destiny. After generations of allowing others to exploit Puerto Rico, and abandon it without justice, we have had enough."
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Bad Bunny vs. MAGA’s Bigoted Vision of America
The hatefulness and histrionics of Trump's allies exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves.
Nov 08, 2025
The selection of musical megastar Bad Bunny to headline the Super Bowl’s halftime show has ignited a storm of controversy among conservative circles. The ostensive reason is that Bad Bunny (born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) is a Puerto Rican who sings in Spanish, and thus according to his MAGA critics, he does not represent “America.”
For the new form of conservativism known as MAGA, the vision of America and Americans is narrow, and does not include the likes of Bad Bunny. Newsmax host Greg Kelly, for instance, claimed Bad Bunny “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE, [and] hates the English language!” Fox News host Tomi Lahren, meanwhile, claimed Bad Bunny is “Not an American artist.” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson not only mislabeled Bad Bunny as “Bad Bunny Rabbit,” he argued Bad Bunny was not a role model, calling for replacing him with someone with “broader Appeal,” like 82-year-old Lee Greenwood.
The Bad Bunny controversy raises the question: what is America and how should it be represented?
The histrionics of MAGA leaders exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves. For instance, the trope that Bad Bunny is not American demonstrates profound ignorance. Bad Bunny was born in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. As such, he was a United States citizen at birth. Puerto Rico has been a US possession since its conquest in 1898, and its residents have been US citizens since the passage of the Jones Act in 1917.
As for Bad Bunny hating America, this claim is nothing short of odd. Though Bad Bunny did not support candidate Trump in 2024, and disagrees with ICE roundups, 75 million Americans did not vote for President Trump (something that residents of Puerto Rico cannot do), and we suspect millions of others, including the authors here, do not support mass ICE roundups. Such free speech stances, which are at the core of the First Amendment of the Constitution, in no way reflect any disdain for this country. As James Baldwin poignantly taught decades ago, and is the case for millions of others today, it is our love for this country that leads us to question it in order to push it towards our laudable goals of freedom and equality.
Further, Bad Bunny singing in Spanish in no way means he hates this country or its dominant language, English. Bad Bunny is fluent in English but prefers to sing in his native tongue of Spanish. While Trump proclaimed English as the country’s official language, such a declaration does not carry the weight of law. That edict also appears to run afoul of a host of US Supreme Court decisions embracing our multicultural and multilingual country, including Meyer v. Nebraska, which held invalid efforts to forbid teaching foreign languages, and Lau v. Nichols. holding that failure to provide non-English instruction violated students’ civil rights.
The United States of America is a multicultural, multiracial nation made up of the descendants of immigrants from all over the world, as well as Indigenous nations and other lands that were conquered during a period of US imperial expansion in the 19th century. Puerto Ricans have fought bravely and died valiantly in America’s wars since WWI, and they contribute in numerous ways to make America great. So, why being a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican makes of Bad Bunny less of an American in MAGA cohorts?
For months now, we have been witnessing a whitewashing of the American experience spearheaded by the Trump administration. Museums, colleges and universities, and even our very diverse military have all been forced to scrub references to the valuable contributions made by women, people of color, and immigrants (except for white ones).
Puerto Ricans, a Spanish-speaking, Latin American people of color (who also happen to be US citizens), do not fit the MAGA mold, and Bad Bunny’s fame is a reminder that our nation, based on the principle of E pluribus unum (Out of many, one) can be proudly represented by many people in many ways.
Previous Super Bowl halftime performers, many of them foreign-born, have reflected our nation’s best (and diverse) talents, but suddenly, a Puerto Rican is not American enough? Turning Point USA’s “All American” alternative halftime show is quite revealing of MAGA’s cultural whitewashing attempts by promising “Anything in English.”
This piece was first published in the Miami Herald.
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The Oldest Colony, the Newest War: Puerto Rico as a Launchpad for War on Venezuela
The island that has lived under US rule since 1898 is once again being used as a staging ground for US militarism, this time for Washington’s latest “war on drugs” narrative.
Oct 22, 2025
When President Donald Trump announced that the CIA had been authorized to conduct operations inside Venezuela, just as US drones struck another small boat off Venezuela’s coast, few people in the United States realized that much of this militarization begins on the soil of a land denied its own sovereignty: Puerto Rico.
The island that has lived under US rule since 1898 is once again being used as a staging ground for US militarism, this time for Washington’s latest “war on drugs” narrative, masking a campaign of coercion against Latin America’s independent governments.
After invading Puerto Rico in 1898, the United States quickly turned the island into a strategic military outpost: the “Gibraltar of the Caribbean,” with naval bases in Ceiba, Roosevelt Roads, and Vieques designed to dominate the eastern Caribbean and protect the new artery of empire: the Panama Canal.
From World War I onward, Puerto Ricans were drafted into every major US war, fighting and dying for a flag that still denies them full citizenship rights. Meanwhile, the island’s lands and waters were expropriated for bombing ranges, naval training, and intelligence operations.
Puerto Rico’s place in this strategy reveals Washington's core hypocrisy: It wages wars abroad in the name of freedom while denying that freedom to the colony it still holds.
For six decades, the US Navy used Vieques as a live-fire testing ground, dropping millions of pounds of explosives and munitions, including napalm and depleted uranium. The result was environmental devastation and one of the highest cancer rates in the region. It took a mass civil disobedience movement to finally force the Navy out in 2003.
That victory proved Puerto Ricans’ capacity for organized resistance, but the structures of empire never disappeared.
Two decades later, those same bases and runways are being reactivated. In 2025, Washington quietly expanded military operations on the island, deploying F-35 fighter jets, stationing P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, and rotating Marine and Special Operations units through Puerto Rican ports and airfields. The official justification is “counter-narcotics operations,” but the timing and scale point to something far larger: a regional military buildup aimed at Venezuela.
The aggression has now extended to Colombia, where Trump has cut off all US aid and accused President Gustavo Petro of being a “drug leader.” The announcement came just days after Colombia’s president denounced the US drone strikes off Venezuela’s coast, one of which, he warned, hit a Colombian vessel and killed Colombian citizens. Instead of accountability, Washington answered with insults and economic blackmail.
The Trump administration’s designation of a “non-international armed conflict with drug cartels” gives legal cover for drone strikes and covert missions far from US territory. Puerto Rico’s colonial status makes it the perfect staging ground: a place the Pentagon can operate freely without congressional debate or local consent.
For Puerto Ricans, this militarization is not an abstract issue. It means more surveillance, more environmental risk, and a deeper entanglement in wars they never chose. It also signals a return to the same imperial logic that made Vieques a bombing range: using occupied territory to project power abroad.
Puerto Rico remains the oldest colony in the modern world, a US “territory” whose people are “citizens” but not sovereign. They cannot vote for president, have no senators, and possess only a symbolic representative in Congress. That absence of sovereignty is what makes it so useful to the empire: a gray zone of legality where wars can be prepared without democratic consent.
This is not the first time Puerto Rico has been used as a military springboard. Its bases have served as logistical hubs for interventions across the hemisphere, from the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, to Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989.
Each of these operations was justified through Cold War rhetoric, the defense of “freedom,” “stability,” and “democracy,” while systematically targeting governments and social movements seeking independence from US control.
Puerto Rican born Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) has warned that history is repeating itself. In a Newsweek op-ed, she reminded Washington of the lesson of Vieques: that the island’s people have already paid the price for US militarism through contamination, displacement, and neglect.
“Our people have already suffered enough from military pollution and colonial exploitation. Puerto Rico deserves peace, not more war,” she said.
Her call aligns with that of Caribbean and Latin American nations in CELAC, which have declared the region a “Zone of Peace.”
The buildup around Venezuela follows a long-standing pattern in US foreign policy: When a nation asserts control over its own resources or refuses to obey Washington’s dictates, it becomes a target. Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are punished for exactly that. Sanctions, blockades, and covert operations function as mechanisms of domination to keep the hemisphere open to US capital and military reach.
Puerto Rico’s place in this strategy reveals Washington's core hypocrisy: It wages wars abroad in the name of freedom while denying that freedom to the colony it still holds. Its people are governed without full representation, its land is used for war, and its economy remains bound to Washington’s dictates. Puerto Rico’s demand for independence is the same demand made by Venezuela, Cuba, and every nation that refuses to live on its knees: the right to determine its own future.
The struggle for peace, sovereignty, and dignity in Nuestra América runs through Puerto Rico’s shores. When US drones take off from Caribbean airstrips to strike Venezuela, they fly over the ghosts of Vieques, over the land where Puerto Ricans once stood unarmed against an empire.
Puerto Rico deserves a future of peace, environmental healing, and sovereignty, and Venezuela deserves the same: the right to live free from siege, to defend its independence, and to build its own destiny without fear of US bombs or blockades. To defend Puerto Rico’s right to peace is to defend Venezuela’s right to exist.
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