Word: puerto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Friday, President Clinton disappointed the Puerto Rican nation when he refused to order the withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. It is no wonder that the people of Puerto Rico rejected Clinton's decision to continue bombing in Vieques for at least five more years. Clinton's refusal to permanently stop Navy bombardment let down the thousands of people who have been waiting for decades to reclaim the land they lived on before they were forcibly moved out by the U.S. Navy...
...limited to the relatively far past of the '40s; all of the 9,300 people living in Vieques have experienced the negative effects of Navy occupation of the island. The people of Vieques live in a place where the cancer rate is 27 percent higher than the rest of Puerto Rico; 50 percent of the people are unemployed and 70 percent of the people live under the official poverty line. Vieques, where fishing has been an essential livelihood for hundreds of years, is greatly affected when most of its waters are kept off-limits during 250 days of the year...
When the Navy's incompetence resulted in the April 19 death of David Sanes, the struggle of the Vieques people caught the eye of international journalists all over the world, and all political parties and civic groups of Puerto Rico joined under the slogan "Not a single bomb dropped in Vieques." Viequenses saw that for once in three generations they had a fighting chance to rid themselves of a Navy that had totally disregarded their well-being for 58 years...
...margins of a letter written to the president by Puerto Rican Senator Ruben Berrios demanding the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from Vieques, President Clinton wrote "This is wrong." In view of the president's agreement with the unanimous position of all political groups in Puerto Rico, his decision to permit bombing in Vieques to continue for the next five years is tantamount to a judge who tells a wife-beater: "Beating your wife is wrong, it is detrimental to your marriage and to her health, I recommend that you stop beating her by the year...
...Professor Coatsworth said yesterday that the protestors' action would someday yield a result that meets the demands of the Puerto Rican people...