A fragile island
By Rafael Matos Posted Sat, Sep 1 2001
In the midst of covering one of the most difficult news events in Puerto Rican media history, reporters, editors and publishers have locked themselves in a debate over how best to report the David-vs.-Goliath struggle of Vieques residents to stop U.S. Navy’s use of their small island home as a bombing range. The issue facing news managers and reporters is how to cover the Vieques event without breaking legal and ethical rules and how much emotion a reporter is allowed without infringing correct professional conduct.
Most reportersA and photographers assigned to the Vieques story have been very critical of their editors. They want to go all the way and cover the story inside restricted Navy land, where environmental activists and political civil-disobedience militants have trespassed to protest the use of the pristine island as a firing target. But media executives say their news people should not break the law and must stay on the civilian side—legal side—of the fence and cover the story from the sidelines.
The Navy-Vieques story began to gain heat and worldwide attention on April 19 of 1999. That day an E-6 Hornet took off from the deck of its battle group aircraft carrier, swung east and, flying low over the Vieques firing range, dropped two 500-pound bombs.
Just 20 nautical miles away, in the coral-reef-rich and emerald-green waters off Vieques, U.S. Navy warships shot more than 200 high explosive shells into the talcum-white shores.
These live ammunition exercises are usually followed by landings by U.S. Marine contingents at the so-called Blue, Red and Green beaches where amphibious crafts crush reefs and destroy small sand dunes that line the shore. Vieques is a small, lush island just 11 nautical miles east of Puerto Rico and has been the site of the U.S. Navy bombing, naval artillery and land maneuver practices for the last 60 years. Vieques is home to 9,100 U.S. citizens, mostly fishermen, government service employees and a small contingent of tourist-industry workers.
That day in April, one of the bombs missed its target and accidentally killed civilian guard David Sanes, who was standing at a military observation post inside the range.
When the bomb from the fighter plane went off, the percussive shock wave reached the White House, the Pentagon, Congress, La Fortaleza—the official residence for the Puerto Rican governor—and U.S. political parties. Eventually environmental and human-rights groups all over the world became involved. It took the shock wave two years to travel that far as these international organizations became aware of the Vieques situation and then began to throw their support behind political, religious and civic organizations in Puerto Rico, which demanded that the U.S. Navy immediately stop its bombing in Vieques. The local story now took on an international scope.
The Navy insists Vieques is vital to its battle group training before sending armed contingents to real-life battle. Its official line is that no study presented scientific proof of damage to human life and the environment in Vieques. So, the war games would continue in spite of the Sanes accident. The Pentagon, with help from conservative members of the U.S. Congress, says it will try not to abandon the Vieques range although President George W. Bush has already established May 2003 as the cutoff date for the Navy presence there.
Before the Vieques news story unfolded to a world scale because of the Sanes death, only the Puerto Rican media fully covered the issue, always fighting for more and more access to the other side of the fence. Newspapers and newscasts focused almost daily on mounting evidence of the Navy’s use of depleted-uranium bullets and the ensuing contaminated topsoil in Vieques farmlands, unexploded ordnance in the island’s west portion where the Navy has kept munitions dumps since World War II, loaded shells still encrusted in reefs, vibroacoustic damage to humans and fauna alike, use of illegal water connections to feed the naval water supply at the nearby Roosevelt Roads base, a whole myriad of environmental issues that captured the attention of the media.
The Puerto Rican government then stepped in and faced off with President Clinton during his last administration to help get the Navy out.
As the confrontation between the Puerto Rican government, island civic groups and the top military brass took on heat in Washington and on Puerto Rican streets, the international media began to take note of the Vieques issue. The New York Times, CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox News, The Miami Herald, the Orlando Sentinel, The Boston Globe, the Australia Public News Service and a Japanese news crew, to name a few, focused on the tension caused by the arrests and jailing of protesters and on expansive public rhetoric generated by Vieques. Soon cries of foul surfaced as local reporters began to complain that the Navy was giving fuller access and more detailed explanations to the visiting media. The U.S. Navy has never been shy about saying that most Puerto Rican journalists are biased on the Vieques issue.
Former CNN news producer Félix Jiménez is one Puerto Rican journalist who, while not agreeing with the Navy cry of bias, insists island reporters have been too emotional on the Vieques story.
“Most journalists here want in their hearts for the Navy to stop bombing Vieques, but you just can’t let that emotion show in your news copy or graphic reporting,” says Jiménez.
He adds that while working as a CNN producer, he had to shun much Vieques video footage supplied by freelance island reporters because it was too emotionally charged in favor of what the island media refer to as the “pro-peace for Vieques” activists.
Puerto Rican television newswoman Daisy Sánchez rejects such criticism, saying the Navy is a difficult news source and it’s difficult to get anything from them except the official spiel.
“It blatantly lies to reporters, misinforms, is secretive and just plainly despises news people,” she said during a recent panel in San Juan over Vieques coverage. “You can’t play soft with this type of source.”
Independent reporter Leila Andreu says the Navy held back reporters for hours the day of the Sanes accident, and the media gained access to the site only with pressure from island government authorities and after the Navy spruced up the scene. Andreu has been very critical of Puerto Rico’s news managers who have threatened their reporters with sanctions if they enter the restricted zone to cover arrests.
“You can’t cover a conflict of this nature from the sidelines and from the little corner far from the real news scene” where the Navy assigns reporters, she says.
While Puerto Rico Public Broadcasting Corporation (Channel 6 News) president Linda Hernández allows reporters to enter restricted military areas as necessary to cover the Vieques story, Luis Ferré Rangel, editor of El Nuevo Dia, Puerto Rico’s largest daily, says he will not authorize his news crews to break the law.
“The courts have been clear on this, and no one can break the law as a requisite for freedom of expression” says Ferré Rangel.
Island media also began to lose grip on the Vieques story on another front. That happened when politicians stepped into the fray in pursuit of limelight as the international media focused in more and more on Vieques. Suddenly, Vieques became a different story. Local and national politicians, Republican and Democrat, soon began to visit Vieques almost weekly. The grass roots and almost romantic struggle conducted by the religious, civic and environmental groups now became a political twelve-ring circus with the media making mad dashes from one side to the other and trying to keep abreast of what each politico was expounding at every moment. Politicians from Washington, New York, Chicago, Spain and France made pronouncements on Vieques. So did the Comandante himself, Fidel Castro.
During many evening television newscasts, news directors for the four major commercial channels in Puerto Rico let politicians push aside from the public eye the bona fide civic and religious protagonists of the civil-rights campaign against the Navy. Front-page stories in El Nuevo Día refocused from Vieques toward La Fortaleza and the island’s legislature. El Vocero instilled fear into its conservative readers by putting out story after story on how the controversy with the Navy would bring military wrath against Puerto Rico in Washington. This would result, El Vocero editorialized, in Washington imposing on Puerto Rico its independence, something 90 percent of Puerto Rican voters have rejected. The San Juan Star brought out front-page headlines saying many of the 12 military bases in Puerto Rico could be closed because of the government’s anti-Navy stance, bringing on economic woes.
So, by the summer of 2001, the Vieques news story had lost its civil-rights essence and acquired a political armature. Along the way the media lost its grip on the main issue: the people of Vieques, their well-being and their future with or without the U.S. Navy. This story began to be told but was abandoned in the quagmire of ethical, legal and political motives. At least, for now and perhaps until 2003, when the Navy packs up and leaves.