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Puerto
Rico Update, February 2002
The Second Invasion of Culebra
By Carmel Ruiz Marrero
From Claridad, 23 November 2001
In Culebra, the Puerto Rican island near Vieques
that was used as a bombing range until 1975, the U.S. Navy left,
but foreign millionaires — actually, billionaires — have
taken their place. It is a second foreign occupation that serves
as a warning for planning the future of Vieques.
Ariel Lugo, director of the International Institute
of Tropical Forestry, and Culebra residents who were interviewed
warned that the town is the object of an uncontrolled invasion of
development, a true construction blitzkrieg that threatens to convert
the island paradise into an ecological disaster zone unfit for human
habitation.
The small island is full of luxurious mansions
with satellite antennae, irrigated gardens, pools and controlled
access. With each year that passes, the population of Culebra is
less Puerto Rican and more foreign, and Spanish is becoming a secondary
language. Most of the foreigners are from Europe, not the United
States, including Swiss, Germans, and French.
Some of the new mansions are valued in the millions
of dollars. One source assured us that some of the residents are
not only millionaires, but billionaires, who only come to their
palaces on Culebra for vacations a few weeks per year. The rest
of the year there are custodians, gardeners and security guards
occasionally patrolling the mansions.
The majority of these prosperous immigrants do
not know Puerto Rico apart from Culebra, since they come and go
from the island by private airplane or yacht, and have never been
in the San Juan airport. For them, Vieques and Culebra are the Spanish
Virgin Islands.
Yet more and more mansions and villas come. Heavy
construction vehicles are visible all over, and the ferry from the
big island barely makes a trip without carrying trucks full of landfill
material.
The environmental impact of this urban explosion
is monumental. The developers remove the earth’s skin and build
without considering the topography, causing severe erosion problems.
The soil ends up as sediment on the beaches, where it ruins the
marshes and coral reefs. What is more, according to one source,
those soils are contaminated with herbicides and other agro-chemicals,
since some residents and landscape gardeners have no ecological
awareness when they maintain their yards.
According to Lugo, the anti-erosion measures taken
by builders are pathetic and laughable, in many cases applied too
late when the damage is already done. With reason, he calls Culebra
the fast track paradise.
All of this is happening on the watch of Puerto
Rico’s Departments of Natural Resources and Tourism and the
Planning Board. The federal authorities also share responsibility,
since Culebra has a federal wildlife refuge that is endangered by
uncontrolled development.
The environmentalists who have watched this destruction
fear that Culebra cannot tolerate the situation for many more years
or decades, or the island will become an arid land of rock with
a ruined ecology. If that day comes, the wealthy foreigners will
simply move somewhere else and leave in their memory abandoned palaces
surrounded by weeds.
Some of those interviewed expressed concern that,
if there is no preventive action, the same panorama will be repeated
in Vieques once the Navy leaves there.
©2002 Fellowship of Reconciliation
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