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2 February 2003
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VIEQUES, Puerto Rico - Carmen Valencia points to each marker, reads the name, tells a story. Manolin Portella owned the little market in town. Varo Comas moved back here after retiring on the mainland. Minerva Bermudez, just married, was raising two small children. (One of the last brgades of civil disobidents was name in her honor. Viequense remember her well. She diede when she was 22 and was one of the most beautiful women of Vieques). All are dead now, felled by the cancer that stalks residents of this offshore island at a higher rate than in the rest of Puerto Rico. Each is remembered here with a simple white cross outside the chain-link fence that surrounds the Navy firing range at Camp Garcia. The Navy last month confirmed the end of training here by May 1, but plans for the land remain far from resolved. While the carrier battle group USS Theodore Roosevelt conducts what officials say will be the last round of exercises on Vieques , both the Navy and the activists who campaigned against the practice bombing are bracing for the next phase of the dispute: the cleanup. Under current legislation, the Navy is to turn the land over to the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the agencies are to work together to address environmental contamination. Gov. Sila Calderon has appointed a commission to represent Puerto Rico . Activists are demanding a role in the discussions. "There is a plethora of deadly military toxins here," says Roberto Rabin, a leader of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques . "If there's no decontamination, even if the Navy didn't drop another bomb, they would go on killing us for decades." The Navy says periodic exercises at Camp Garcia have not endangered public health on this island of 9,100 mostly poor inhabitants. Studies have indicated both elevated levels of several contaminants in the water, food chain and population and higher- than-normal rates of cancer, but direct linkages are difficult to prove. Studies by the commonwealth government have indicated a higher- than-normal rate of cancer on Vieques . Islanders say they also suffer abnormally from asthma, skin conditions and birth defects. The government is planning more studies. After training ends, the 15,587 acres used by the Navy will be turned over to the Department of the Interior. Details of the planned environmental study, cleanup, schedule and costs have yet to be determined. During a visit to Puerto Rico in December, EPA Administrator Christie Whitman said the agency would oversee a thorough cleanup of the range at Vieques . "We are going to make sure that it is safe," she said. "We're going to do it right, and we're going to do it as fast as we can."
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