Problems with current U.S. policy.

Key Problems

* Bases represent a commitment of resources that could otherwise be used for constructive social and environmental programs.

* U.S. military installations operate in a legal limbo; military personnel are not accountable to local law, and there is little transparency. The United States is using its base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to circumvent international law regarding prisoners of war.

* Military bases overseas often leave behind ecological damage, since there are no mechanisms to require environmental cleanup.

The soldiers and contract employees that the U.S. military deploys to bases in Latin America and the Caribbean far outnumber the staffs of U.S. civilian agencies in the region. The presence of more than 10,000 U.S. personnel on military missions abroad sends a message that the United States prefers force over diplomacy to settle the region's problems, including problems that involve conflict with the United States. In addition to their role in facilitating military operations, U.S. bases are a symbol of Washington's history of armed intervention and of its use of local armies to control the region's people and resources. Several U.S. bases in the Caribbean were explicitly acquired, not by mutual agreement but through conquests in the 1898 Spanish-American-Cuban War.

Besides evoking the past, the bases are contracted into a future beyond any articulated military mission. Plan Colombia was originally envisioned as a two-year push into guerrilla-occupied southern territories, with vague plans for subsequent years. In contrast, the Pentagon has ten-year leases in Ecuador, Curacao, and Aruba and a presence in perpetuity at its naval base in Guantanamo. This permanent infrastructure generates inequitable relations and invites intervention instead of negotiation in a crisis situation, as it did in Panama and Puerto Rico (historically, the sites for other long-term U.S. bases in the region).

The cooperative security locations, purportedly created to monitor drug traffic, have no mechanism for transparency or monitoring by civil society in the host countries and are thus subject to other missions. This is especially disturbing in light of the expansion of U.S. objectives in Colombia to include "counterterrorism." As early as 1999, a State Department official said that "the new counternarcotics bases located in Ecuador, Aruba and Curacao will be strategic points for closely following the steps of the [Colombian] guerrillas." Aircraft from the Manta base were even used to locate and detain a fishing boat carrying Ecuadoreans who were suspected of planning to enter the United States.

Similarly, the mission for troops at Guantanamo Bay has morphed from orchestrating counterdrug operations to providing an off-shore jail for migrants and, since late 2001, prisoners of war. These operations have no accountability under U.S. or international law and undermine Cuba's sovereignty.

The dramatically increased U.S. military involvement in Colombia and the spillover of conflict in the border region have generated alarm among broad sectors of Ecuadorean society--including the military--over the potentially destabilizing role of the Manta base. One Ecuadorean officer points out that the base's electronic intelligence capability provides information that can be used by Colombian counterinsurgency units trained by the United States. Other opponents of the U.S. presence note that Ecuador's Congress never considered or approved the base agreement, as the Ecuadorean Constitution requires. Many also object to provisions exempting U.S. on-duty military personnel from Ecuadorean criminal jurisdiction.

The cooperative security location in Comalapa, El Salvador, operated by the Navy since 2000, has no limit on the number of U.S. personnel, who have access to ports, air space, and unspecified government installations considered pertinent. In 2001, the opposition FMLN party argued that the agreement affects Salvadoran sovereignty and thus requires more than a simple majority vote by the legislature for ratification, but this claim was rejected by Salvadoran courts.

In Puerto Rico, the remaining military bases have additional political functions. On an island where the FBI has compiled 1.8 million documents based on surveillance of independence proponents and other political activists, the presence of U.S. military bases plays a significant role in enforcing Puerto Rican identification with Washington, thus contributing to continued colonialism.

Similar problems of sovereignty dog the proposed International Law Enforcement Academy, which--despite its name--is designed to be completely under U.S. control. Costa Rica would have to give diplomatic immunity to academy staff at a time when the United States is aggressively opting out of the International Criminal Court. As Gustavo Cabrera Vega of Service for Peace and Justice, a Costa Rican human rights group, asks, "If the United States doesn't recognize the universal human rights conventions, with what authority will it train and give skills [to others] to combat international crime?" With Costa Ricans balking at agreement, Washington is considering other sites, including El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.

The outsourcing to private companies of air transport, base construction and maintenance, the host-nation rider program, and other military activities overseas diminishes the information available to those who would monitor such activities and decreases the accountability for U.S.-sponsored actions abroad. Only after an enterprising reporter discovered an Internet-posted request for proposals did Panamanian civil society learn that the Pentagon had been using airstrips in Panama for "transportation services" into and out of Colombia, even after U.S. troops had left Panama. The 1997 contract tapped Evergreen Helicopters, a company with clandestine experience in the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama.

Many military bases in Latin America--like those in the United States and elsewhere--are leaving a devastating environmental legacy. In Vieques, studies have found high rates of cadmium, lead, mercury, uranium, and other contaminants in the soil, food chain, and human bodies of the island's inhabitants. These toxins have lead to elevated rates of disease among Vieques residents, who have a 26.9 percent higher incidence of cancer than other Puerto Ricans. Despite Superfund designation, Vieques remains a very contaminated island. In Panama, the military left behind more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance on firing ranges in the canal area, despite a Canal Treaty provision for removing such dangers. Nearby construction of a new bridge and road will bring an influx of workers and occupants, who will be exposed to these hazards.

Yet U.S. bases abroad present special problems for environmental cleanup, because sovereignty is always at issue. Once the Pentagon is gone, the United States abandons jurisdiction, thereby shirking responsibility for the contamination its military has caused.