From 1941 the United States Navy expropriated about two thirds of Vieques, a municipality of Puerto Rico, evicting families from sugar-growing land into a central civilian strip between a munitions depot in the west and a live-fire training range in the east. The range was used for naval gunnery, aerial bombing and amphibious exercises by the US and allied navies for six decades. Long-running local opposition became a mass movement after a civilian security guard, David Sanes, was killed by an errant bomb in April 1999; sustained civil disobedience and encampments on the range, and a referendum in 2001 in which islanders voted for the Navy to leave, led to the end of training in May 2003. The Navy lands passed largely to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the eastern range was placed on the Superfund national priorities list in 2005; contamination and elevated rates of illness on Vieques remain the subject of dispute and litigation. The atlas contained Guantanamo but no entry for military land-taking in Puerto Rico.
The United States Navy expropriated most of the island of Vieques, evicted its residents into a central strip, and used the eastern end as a bombing and gunnery range for six decades
The 1940 decennial census counted 10,362 residents on Vieques; the Navy took about two-thirds of the island in 1941-1948 and compressed the civilian population into a central strip, and by the 1960 census the municipality had fallen to about 7,200.
One death is directly attributable to the training: David Sanes Rodriguez, a civilian Navy security guard killed by a bomb dropped off target in April 1999. Claims of wider mortality from contamination are contested and have not been established; there was no mass death toll from the expropriations themselves.
Navy expropriation files and Puerto Rican government reporting document the taking of homes and farmland and the eviction of residents in the 1940s.
Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Is.