U.S. Navy Exercises May Involve Vieques

A Navy battleship group is planning exercises next month likely to include the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, where exercises last month prompted protests that led to the arrests of more than 100 activists.

The Navy published an environmental impact advisory in local newspapers Saturday notifying citizens that the Harry Truman Battle Group may have ship-to-land and air-to-land exercises with inert artillery on Vieques from Aug. 3 to Aug. 24.

Navy spokesman Lt. Jeff Gordon said Saturday that the advisory did not mean the exercises were definitely to involve Vieques. “If and when it conducts exercises, the Navy will make the appropriate announcements.”

Dozens were arrested in Vieques in June for trespassing on Navy land during exercises by the George Washington Battle Group. Protesters have been demanding that the Navy remove its practice bombing range on the tiny island off Puerto Rico.

Gordon said the Truman group’s exercises in the Caribbean in August would include exercises on the high seas “hundreds of miles away from land.”

Though he could not say yet if they would also involve Vieques, he noted that the Navy’s battleship groups have traditionally conducted exercises on the island. The advisory printed in Spanish in local newspapers said that the Navy has “concluded that this type of training only can be conducted on the island of Vieques.”

Until the Washington group’s exercises, the Navy had suspended training on Vieques since April 1999, when a civilian security guard was killed in an accidental bombing. Demonstrators occupied the bombing range for a year after the accident, demanding that the training area be relinquished, until federal agents removed the protesters peacefully May 4.

The Truman group, with 15 ships, is based in Norfolk, Va.