On July 4, 1973, residents of Aguadilla on Puerto Rico’s northwest coast gathered to protest plans for a petroleum “superport”—a massive oil transshipment and processing complex proposed to supply Puerto Rican and U.S. consumer markets. The rally, jointly organized by the Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño (PSP) and Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP), and thronged by 20,000 attendees, was the largest ever witnessed in Aguadilla. Against the local and federal officials who described the superport as an economic boon and critical infrastructure for national energy security, rally organizers countered that it could only bring environmental ruin to Puerto Rico. Speakers described the environmental damage caused by existing petroleum industries and decried the proposed export of still more industrial pollution to an overseas colony. They also pitted the superport against the idea of an independent Puerto Rican nation. A written statement sent by incarcerated nationalist Lolita Lebrón from the West Virginia prison where she had been jailed since her armed attack on the U.S. capitol in 1954 assured the crowd that “The superport will not take place on our land because the liberators of this Puerto Rican nation are not dead; we live to remove the yoke of the Yankee oppressor.”Footnote 1
Two years later and 10,000 miles away, on the other side of the U.S. overseas empire, remarkably similar events played out in the Micronesian trust territory of Palau. As in Puerto Rico, a proposal for a Palauan superport dubbed “Port Pacific” animated calls for self-determination for Palau’s indigenous population after it leaked to the public in early 1975. The proposal, devised by an American consultant and supported by U.S. security agencies, outlined a Palauan superport that would supply Japanese consumers and U.S. armed forces in the Pacific with a reliable source of petroleum fuels.Footnote 2 Palauans mobilized, forming the Save Palau Organization (SPO) to lobby against the proposal. Echoing the Puerto Rican dissenters, they attacked the plan for the environmental damage and existential threats that it posed to the people and environment of the archipelago. As one district chief argued with reference to the U.S. record of weapons testing in Micronesia, “bring[ing] oil to our reefs would be just like dropping bombs on them.” “Let [the oil companies] foul their own nests,” another argued. “They will ruin not only the reefs, but also the people of Palau.”Footnote 3
These twinned episodes at opposite ends of the U.S. territorial empire capture the “trans-local” environmental dynamics of the American imperial state.Footnote 4 Viewed from Washington, the superports were crucial pieces of postwar geostrategy; critical instruments of national energy security in an era of uncertain supplies. Their colonial settings folded nicely into this security rationale: in an era marked by both oil supply anxieties and popular environmental skepticism around the petroleum industry, the overseas colonies offered sites simultaneously under the U.S. security umbrella, while removed from domestic environmentalist currents. Above all, Puerto Rico and Palau were thought to accommodate the converging imperial logics of energy security and environmental sacrifice.
The environmental campaigns launched against the superports, meanwhile, capture something else: colonial subjects’ nuanced appreciation for this relationship between empire and environmental violence. Indeed, as this article argues, the Puerto Rican and Palauan anti-superport movements represent a unique convergence of environmentalism and anti-colonialism along the territorial “periphery” of the United States and its mainstream environmental movement. For activists, the superports were not mere issues of the cost-benefit tradeoff between securitization and environmental preservation. Rather, the superports also underscored the larger political relationships that subordinated colonial environmental concerns to U.S. energy demands. The anti-superport campaigns thus took aim not only at the superport themselves but at the colonial political arrangements that abetted the ecological exploitation of the overseas territories for strategic U.S. interests.
This article traces the origins of the superport proposals and colonial subjects’ responses to them. Its central focus is on how activists on the colonial “margins” of the domestic environmental movement developed novel critical frameworks and innovative strategies for fighting the superports. As the following sections will demonstrate, local contexts mattered; specific colonial histories framed how Puerto Rican and Palauan activists understood the environmental violence of empire and articulated responses to it. In Puerto Rico, traditions of anti-colonial nationalism provided the political medium for superport opposition, while in Palau, appeals to native custom, culture, and indigeneity bolstered advocacy for self-determination. Environmental-political critiques of empire were always rooted in local histories of colonialism.
But placing these two movements within the same analytic frame also reveals a shared set of environmental concerns and strategies forged within the crucible of colonial empire. Puerto Rican and Palauan activists agreed, for instance, that the superports represented more than just environmental threats—that they also represented threats to political sovereignty. When Puerto Rican detractors observed, for example, that the superport presented “an issue of life or death for our nation,” they gestured toward the unique resonance between environmental and political issues in the colonial setting. The superport, many maintained, “means environmental ruin and grave and profound economic penetration, which means, more succinctly, profound and grave political penetration.”Footnote 5 Or, as one poster printed by the Committee for Puerto Rican Decolonization succinctly stated: “A superport means… no more Puerto Rico” (Figure 1). In the distant Micronesian trust territory, Palauans were similarly attuned to these twinned ecological and political threats. Prominent advocates for Palauan self-determination linked the superport to the destruction of the entangled cultural, political, and ecological life of the archipelago and its inhabitants. As one Palauan noted, echoing his Puerto Rican counterparts, “Just one accident and that’s it. No more Palau.”Footnote 6
Figure 1. A poster from the Committee for Puerto Rican Decolonization warns of the effects of a superport. Credit: Library of Congress.
At the same time, activists on the colonial “margins” of the U.S. polity developed a common set of strategies for waging their anti-superport campaigns. Above all, Puerto Rican and Palauan activists were not content to wage their contests on local turf; rather, they understood that their colonial status opened opportunities to bring their environmental campaigns to larger national and international audiences. For if colonial formations helped to pattern the distribution of pollution, they also opened different arenas where environmental issues became politically actionable.Footnote 7 Anti-superport activists used their standing as nominal U.S. subjects to bridge the distance between themselves and the domestic environmental movement. Working with established environmental groups, colonial activists mounted national publicity and legal campaigns that drew on the expanding corpus of federal environmental law. Their simultaneous status as subjects not fully incorporated into the U.S. political community meanwhile allowed activists to turn to multilateral international fora, notably the United Nations, to challenge U.S. actions that they viewed as brazenly colonial or out of step with administrative obligations. The United Nations provided a venue where activists could internationalize their campaigns, casting the superports as colonial impositions upon dissenting subject populations. These moves to bring the anti-superport campaigns to national and international constituencies demonstrate how colonial subjects effectively scaled their contests with the U.S. imperial state beyond local settings.
Taken together, the Puerto Rican and Palauan anti-superport campaigns push at the boundaries of the existing historiography on postwar U.S. environmentalism. Over the past three decades, scholarship on U.S. environmental movements has undergone a remarkable diversification. Scholars have explored the popularization of environmentalism among larger segments of the U.S. public, particularly the growing suburban middle class.Footnote 8 Historians of environmental justice have meanwhile captured the environmental movement’s pluralization as frontline communities incorporated analytics of race and class eschewed by mainstream actors.Footnote 9 However, comparatively scant work has followed popular environmentalism to the overseas U.S. colonies or examined how colonial subjects interpolated environmental issues within larger frameworks of anti-colonial critique, advocacy for indigenous rights, or calls for decolonization and self-determination. This article joins a small, but growing, body of historical scholarship that does just that.Footnote 10 By situating these movements within the broader currents of both postwar environmentalism and decolonization, it reveals how overseas U.S. territories emerged as critical sites of political-environmental struggle amidst the more diverse flowering of the environmental movement during the 1970s.
At the same time, joining histories of anti-colonialism and environmentalism helps reveal the political limitations that have confounded modern environmental struggles. For if Puerto Rican and Palauan activists won their environmental battles, they tended to lose the broader political war. Activists imagined that the superport issue would galvanize larger political causes—a unification of pro-independence leftists in Puerto Rico, and electoral support for inclusion in a larger federated Micronesian polity, rather than go-it-alone independence, in Palau. Yet if the controversy of the superports initially augured well for these causes, environmentalist fervor did not easily translate into sustained political support. By the end of the 1970s, Puerto Rican independentistas were riven by inter- and intra-party conflict, while Palauan activists struggled to win voters to their side in a referendum over the path of Micronesian decolonization. Together, the Puerto Rican and Palauan experiences reveal past and ongoing challenges to environmental movements writ large: that of turning environmentalist sentiments into the animating force for larger programs of political change.Footnote 11 While surveying the remarkable achievements of the anti-superport opposition, this article thus concludes by zooming out to consider the role of superport politics within the larger trajectories of decolonization in both territories.
Energy Security, Environmentalism, and the Origins of the Superports
“You realize that there are millions of people in Japan and only 14,000 in Palau,” Naval Commander David Leete Burt asked in 1976. “We may have to sacrifice those 14,000.”Footnote 12
Burt’s comments on the Palauan superport caused a stir. Reported by journalist Douglas Faulkner, they echoed Henry Kissinger’s infamous quote regarding nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands: “You realize that there are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?”Footnote 13 Yet, despite their shared views on colonial “sacrifice zones,” Burt’s comments reflected not so much Kissinger’s logics of Cold War militarism as much as the new geopolitics of energy security during the 1970s.Footnote 14 Declining domestic petroleum production, mounting imports, and steadily rising global oil prices placed major industrial countries in increasingly precarious consumer positions. These trends, further catalyzed by the 1973 Arab producers’ embargo of Israel’s backers in the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent oil price shock, turned energy security into a new policy fixation among the U.S. and its industrial allies.Footnote 15 Confronted with the new energy realities of the 1970s, industrial nations increasingly turned their attention to securing their access to cheap imported fuels.
Within this context, the Puerto Rican and Palauan superports emerged from two complementary ideas. The first was that industrial oil consumers needed their own deepwater oil ports to mitigate foreign supply disruptions and economize petroleum imports. Across the industrial world, they quickly emerged as critical infrastructural elements of the new energy security policies of the 1970s.Footnote 16 Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, for example, both made petroleum ports integral parts of their national energy policies, each pushing Congress to enact legislation that expedited their construction.Footnote 17 Other industrialized oil consumers likewise embraced this shift. In Japan, the other potential consumer of Palauan oil alongside the U.S. armed forces in the Pacific, the impetus for deepwater oil ports grew after the oil shock, as national officials committed to the buildup on a $5 billion, ninety-day strategic stockpile to mitigate against supply disruptions.Footnote 18
The second was that the overseas colonies, unlike domestic communities, would offer little environmental pushback—that they might willingly accept those ecological risks refused elsewhere. Indeed, across the industrial world, people viewed the petroleum industry with growing skepticism. Catastrophic oil spills like those of the Torrey Canyon or the underwater blowout near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 alerted many to the ecological perils of oil.Footnote 19 Many domestic communities balked at the prospect of new petroleum installations. New Jersey and Maine each passed bans on petroleum port construction in the early 1970s, while then-U.S. senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) demurred over their environmental risks to Delaware, stating that a supertanker oil spill “will probably swallow my entire state.”Footnote 20 But when Puerto Rican governor Luis Ferré met with federal officials in the Department of the Interior and the Office of Emergency Preparedness in 1972, he promised them a smoother path to construction. Puerto Rico offered geographic advantages like deep harbors and an easy stopover for Latin American tankers bound for U.S. ports.Footnote 21 But the most important advantage was the presumed willingness of Puerto Ricans to countenance a superport where others had not. The Ferré administration noted that a “deep worry” around superports shadowed domestic proposals. But such a concern “does not exist to the same extent among [Puerto Ricans],” they promised. Puerto Rico therefore presented another “favorable condition that most other areas of the United States do not offer.” Indeed, domestic opposition to petroleum superports was “the decisive factor for promoting those same projects in Puerto Rico.”Footnote 22 The island’s main advantage was therefore political: where domestic constituencies had refused construction, Puerto Rican boosters offered the colony as a means of sidestepping such opposition.Footnote 23
Robert Panero, the U.S. consultant behind Port Pacific, sold the Palau site on similar grounds. Part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, Palau had been administered since 1947 under a United Nations Trusteeship Agreement. The agreement designated Oceania a “strategic trust territory” and granted the United States wide latitude for the pursuit of security objectives, including nuclear weapons testing in sites like the Marshall Islands.Footnote 24 To Panero, a self-styled “superport expert,” this also made Palau a safe site for large capital investments and strategic U.S. energy infrastructures.Footnote 25 His initial reports underscored Palau’s favorable security status and the superport’s role in advancing U.S. and Japanese interests in the western Pacific, which included the region’s further securitization and the creation of strategic oil reserves and processing facilities.Footnote 26 At the same time, Panero noted, a Palauan port would sidestep the environmental issues that made the project nonviable in nearby locations. In Japan, “environmental issues have been heightened by a series of bad tanker accidents,” he conceded.Footnote 27 The resulting environmental and political opposition made it difficult to find potential superport sites. “The fundamental economic potential” of Port Pacific, Panero argued, “lies in the fact that there is no competing location in the western Pacific where… a major primary oil transshipment port can be located and will be welcomed by the local inhabitants.”Footnote 28 As he began meeting with U.S. and foreign officials on the project, Panero discounted the potential for local environmental opposition. Palauans, Panero assured them, were “practically praying for [the superport] to happen.”Footnote 29
Colonial Petro-Development
But what did the colonies themselves have to gain from their embrace of ecological risk? Panero’s comments pointed toward the other presumed benefit underlying both projects: the glimmering (if smoke-shrouded) promise of turbocharged industrialization. Before the superports, Puerto Rico had already been something of a pioneer in petroleum-fueled colonial development. Since the 1950s, Operation Bootstrap, the island’s postwar development program, had deployed the tools of neoliberal economic governance—tax breaks, industrial incentives, light regulation, and federal oil import quota loopholes—to attract foreign investment, particularly from the petroleum refining sector.Footnote 30 Between 1952 and 1958, petroleum and petrochemical firms contributed twenty-seven percent of all investment in Puerto Rican manufacturing, while territorial and federal concessions, above all in the federal oil import quota program, facilitated a “petrochemical boom” during the 1960s that turned Puerto Rico in the Caribbean’s largest petroleum processor.Footnote 31
But for Ferré and his successor, Rafael Hernández Colón of the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), still more seemed possible. Both shared the opinion of Teodoro Moscoso, Hernández Colón’s chief development officer, that “This industry, petrochemicals, has not developed to capacity.”Footnote 32 The superport, they believed, would be critical to realizing its full potential. For the Hernández Colón administration, the petroleum sector would provide Puerto Rico’s future economic “base,” and the superport its cornerstone. The complex—consisting of a deepwater supertanker port, two oil refineries, two power plants, and space for energy-intensive industries like mineral processing—would allow for the importation and manufacture of petroleum derivatives at scale. At the same time, it could help reverse Puerto Rico’s persistent financial dependencies on U.S. assistance. Initial projections based on a daily throughput of two million barrels of petroleum anticipated 10,000 new jobs created directly or indirectly by the superport’s construction and $74 million in net income for the commonwealth government. Upon completion, the government-owned port and terminal facilities would employ an estimated 2,000 permanent workers in high-wage positions and, by 1983, generate more than $116 million in Treasury Department revenue through licensing fees and operating activities.Footnote 33 In addition, PPD officials hoped for an economic domino effect—cheap energy supplies precipitating the growth of heavy and light industries around the superport. For officials, the project promised a “renaissance for Operation Bootstrap.”Footnote 34
This model of industrialization appealed well beyond Puerto Rico. In Palau, territorial and federal officials agreed that Port Pacific represented just the sort of economic stimulus that the territory required. Indeed, despite the UN Trusteeship Agreement’s mandate to develop the territory toward self-sufficiency, what prevailed in Micronesia instead resembled what one reporter described as an “improbable welfare state.”Footnote 35 Congressional appropriations, government funding for capital improvement programs, and public social services compensated for nearly two decades of U.S. underinvestment and maladministration. This economic dependency was even more troubling as Micronesia moved toward potential independence as the continuation of the trusteeship became politically untenable.Footnote 36 Despite their economic dependency on the United States, Palauans plainly favored independence, rather than political federation with the other states of Micronesia. The question for Palau’s political leaders, then, was how to establish the economic foundation for their political aspirations. So, when Panero approached Palauan legislators and U.S. administrators with a proposal for Port Pacific, they saw it as a corrective for the archipelago’s economic predicament. For legislative officials, the superport was a necessary project, and their support was a function of the economic calculus of future independence. Most supported the superport on the grounds that it would provide the necessary revenues to sustain an independent Palau, one that stood freely from the rest of Micronesia. As Palauan senator Roman Tmetuchl argued in defense of the plan, “The most significant threat [to Palau] is time. Unless we achieve a sound political arrangement satisfactory to our people, and unless we provide an economic base to feed and clothe our people, time will destroy our society.”Footnote 37
Federal officials’ perspectives on Port Pacific aligned with those of Tmetuchl and his colleagues in the Palauan legislature. The project would allow the United States to maintain its influence in Oceania while making up for the dereliction of their duty to develop the region toward self-sufficiency. Indeed, although the U.S. government claimed neutrality on the issue, federal officials worked behind the scenes to advance the Port Pacific plan. Because Port Pacific rested on the assumption of a continued U.S. presence in Micronesia, particularly the armed protection of Palau, federal officials could pursue U.S. security objectives while advocating for the project as an instrument of Palauan economic development. Nobody in the federal government did more to support the project than Fred M. Zeder II, the Interior Department’s Director of Trust Territories. A Ford appointee, Zeder made his fortune as a Texas industrialist before entering government. Once appointed, he used his position to act as the federal government’s foremost booster for the Palauan superport. Zeder accompanied Panero, for example, on a three-week “whirlwind trip” to Paris, Holland, Iran, and Japan to secure backing for the proposal from a coterie of international industrialists and Iranian oil concerns.Footnote 38 At the same time, Zeder frequently echoed the developmentalist lines espoused by Tmetuchl and Panero, who often sold the economic prospects of his proposal by glibly suggesting that Port Pacific would “turn [Palau] into a Kuwait,” while the Palauans would “all go off to Monte Carlo.”Footnote 39 Zeder’s economic evaluations were more sober, rooted in his assessment of Micronesian dependency on U.S. aid, but they nevertheless framed Port Pacific as an economic panacea to Palau’s financial woes. “On their own, they are bankrupt,” he said of Micronesia. Existing industries “will not generate enough cash flow to provide present or projected funds necessary to support the government at a level commensurate with past or future demands.” The only alternative was industrial development: “The only viable business opportunity on the horizon is the proposed superport at Palau,” he asserted. “This gigantic oil storage and transfer station funded by Iranian and Japanese interests is of the magnitude that is needed… These are the facts—whether we like them or not. It is about time we faced up to them.”Footnote 40
Challenging the Superports: Local Mobilization
But did the facts of the case necessarily point toward a program of industrialization built around the superports? For the federal and territorial officials marching under the banner of security and development, the answer was a resounding “Yes.” But their enthusiasm hardly translated into public support. Among colonial publics, the purported benefits of the superports scarcely justified their costs. What’s more, these costs were more than just ecological. Coming at critical points in the political history of both Puerto Rico and Micronesia, many saw the superports as threats to the sovereign integrity of both territories. As the superports became public issues, colonial subjects increasingly merged ecological critiques of the projects with admonishment for the forms of colonial subordination that they represented.
In Puerto Rico, opposition to the superport cut across political lines. However, the most vocal critics emerged from the independentista wing of territorial politics—from parties like the Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño and Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño. Forged in the crucible of the postwar independence movement, the PSP and PIP emerged as powerful voices within the social mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 41 By the early 1970s, independentista parties had gained considerable popularity in Puerto Rico and among the diaspora, having gained support through their “participation in labor, student, and other struggles” that made up the terrain of social activism.Footnote 42 As news of the superport began reaching the public, the PSP and PIP saw an opportunity to turn environmental issues into an additional animating force for public mobilization. When Ferré unveiled the superport plans in late 1972, PIP president Rubén Berríos and PSP secretary general Juan Mari Brás immediately came out against the proposal. By early 1973, as the incoming Hernández Colón administration adopted Ferré’s superport plans, the PSP promised “to turn the environmental issue into one of the principal ones of the party.”Footnote 43 Initially, this took the form of parliamentary politics. Berríos, for his part, became a driving force behind legislative attempts to subject superport plans to bicameral consent. In May, he introduced a bill to the Puerto Rican Senate requiring House and Senate approval of government agreements for superport construction, while his colleague in the House, minority leader Carlos Gallisa, introduced a bill demanding an extensive legislative investigation of the Hernández Colón administration’s policy around the superport.Footnote 44
Environmental issues were not new to the independentistas. By the mid-1960s, the mounting impacts of industrialization—above all the rapid expansion of petroleum and other natural resource industries—had spawned a rising “ecological consciousness” in Puerto Rico, one that recognized “the existence of an ecological order and the necessity of conserving Nature” in the face of rapid economic change.Footnote 45 In 1966, for example, the San Juan Star published a “conservation manifesto” by two Puerto Rican scientists who questioned the government’s reluctance to impose environmental standards on capital-intensive industries like the burgeoning petrochemical sector.Footnote 46 And when two U.S. companies launched a copper mining operation in the Puerto Rican interior in 1965, independentista groups became an early vanguard of environmentalist organizing. In a preview of the anti-superport campaign, the Movimiento Pro-Independentista (MPI), the institutional forbearer of the PSP, began a campaign to oppose mining operations. Describing the project as the “theft of the century” and a symbol of colonial resource extraction, the MPI conducted mass demonstrations in urban centers like San Juan and sent out student activists to conduct home visits, educational gatherings, and distribute literature in rural areas adjacent to the mining area. The campaign did not halt the mining operation, but it did win reassurances of stricter environmental oversight from the Puerto Rican government.Footnote 47
For Puerto Rican independentistas, then, the superport represented a heightened manifestation of a familiar colonial relationship: the exploitation of the Puerto Rican environment for the benefit of U.S. economic interests. By 1973, the PSP and PIP had started describing this state of affairs as “environmental colonialism.” In a manifesto published in the PSP newspaper Claridad in February 1973, the PSP described the superport as the latest and most distressing instantiation of environmental colonialism in the commonwealth. Underscoring what Max Liboiron has recently described as the “violence of colonial land relations,” the manifesto defined environmental colonialism as “the use of the lands, air, and water of the colonized as a dump for poisons and other contaminants that the large industries of the colonizer produce”—in essence, the export of U.S. industrial pollution to the colonial periphery.Footnote 48
The concept of environmental colonialism proved a useful tool for pushing the superport controversy out of the bicameral Puerto Rican legislature and into the public consciousness. Armed with a poignant invective and waxing prominence in Puerto Rican political life, the PSP and PIP launched a campaign to discredit the superport in the eyes of the broader public. Claridad proved an effective vehicle for their message. In its pages, commentators described the superport as emblematic of the imperial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, one describing the cooperation between Puerto Rican and U.S. officials as the “brutal mechanism that sustains imperialism at the international level and capitalism at the local level.”Footnote 49 Others decried the subordination of Puerto Rican environmental concerns to the U.S. demand for petroleum and energy security, describing this form of environmental colonialism as a new manifestation of colonial relations, though one based on “the same old premises of the colonial powers: the utilization of all the colonial resources for their wellbeing and enrichment at the expense of the inhabitants of the colonized territories.”Footnote 50
Even beyond Claridad, the superport stirred opposition within the political and artistic milieu of the Puerto Rican independentistas. Above all, popular visual mediums offered effective publicity tools. Socialist artists like printmaker Nelson Sambolín distilled the idea of environmental colonialism into effective visual form through his 1973 silk-screen print Superpuerto, colonialismo, pillaje, veneno (Superport, colonialism, looting, poison), which depicted the entangled threats to human, plant, and animal life posed by the superport (Figure 2). In 1975, meanwhile, Tirabuzón Rojo, a film studio organized under PSP auspices, released a televised documentary on the petrochemical industry and the proposed superport.Footnote 51 An extended exposition on what Rob Nixon has termed the “environmentalism of the poor,” the film documented the water and air pollution spawned by the petroleum industry in cities like Guayanilla and Ponce, and the feelings of Puerto Rico’s coastal residents.Footnote 52 Interviewees expressed their opposition, fearful that the superport would confer economic benefits on a select few while visiting environmental destruction in adjacent communities. “I am against the port of
Figure 2. Sambolín’s print captured the entangled ecological and human threats of the superport, as well as the colonial valences of the project. Credit: Nelson Sambolín, Nelson Sambolín (Salinas, Puerto Rico, 1944), “Superpuerto, colonialismo, pillaje, veneno,” 1972, Taller Baja, serigrafia, Donación SKB, Colección Museo de Historia, Anthropología y Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Rio Piedras.
Aguadilla,” one local mother told the documentarians, “because it is only going to bring calamities. It is going to bring sacrifices.”Footnote 53
Meanwhile, the PSP and PIP looked to go beyond mere publicity by organizing coalitions of opposition within Puerto Rican publics, particularly as legislative opposition faltered. By May, Hernández Colón promised to veto any legislative proposals to intervene against the superport, while PSP members like Mari Brás found legislative hearings stifling for his critiques of the colonial relationship underlying the superport project.Footnote 54 In response, the PSP and PIP announced a new strategy aimed at building a “united front” of citizen opposition outside of government, particularly in potential superport sites. Through this united front, the parties aimed to bring together workers, environmentalists, and professional groups around the superport issue.Footnote 55 Activity during 1973 exemplified this approach. Labor organizations like the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores aligned themselves with the PSP-PIP position and the critical statements of figures like Mari Brás.Footnote 56
Meanwhile, Claridad amplified the grassroots opposition fomenting among frontline communities, notably coastal fisherman who viewed the superport as a threat to their industry.Footnote 57 At the same time, the PSP newspaper highlighted the environmental warnings issued by Puerto Rican scientists and environmental experts.Footnote 58 But it was the July 4 rally in Aguadilla that best represented the broad coalition of support built by the PSP-PIP alliance. In the weeks before July 4, the two parties called Puerto Ricans to the streets, plastering Aguadilla and the pages of Claridad with calls to mobilization. The “indignant mass” or protesters that answered included “students, workers, the unemployed, young and old,” arrayed in defense of “the physical existence of the homeland [la patria].”Footnote 59 A united front, indeed: as PSP commentators noted afterward, the superport demonstration helped elevate pro-independence mobilizations to a scale unprecedented in recent years while providing forceful evidence of the local opposition to the project.Footnote 60
*
Articulated some 10,000 miles away, energy security imperatives produced a Palauan superport proposal remarkably similar to the Puerto Rican iteration. The Palauan superport was a near carbon copy, proposed with the same notions of energy securitization and colonial industrialization in mind. And like the proposals that sparked them, the Palauan and Puerto Rican anti-superport campaigns would share many similarities, above all the movement strategies embraced by activists to oppose the projects. However, despite these similarities, local contexts nevertheless shaped the critical frameworks that developed around the superport. Port Pacific’s place in territorial politics differed from that of the Puerto Rican superport, and local histories, culture, and custom informed Palauans’ environmentalist opposition. Palauans, in other words, shared much with the Puerto Rican activists, but they drew from a different well of historical experience to frame the superport issue and mount their opposition.
One of the most immediate differences between the Puerto Rican and Palauan cases is that Port Pacific developed in secrecy; whereas Puerto Rican administrations had proudly announced their plans, Panero and his Palauan collaborators developed the Palauan superport out of public view. As an engineering consultant, Panero had a flair for the outlandish and the unachievable. His speculative proposals, many devised as a member of Herman Khan’s Hudson Institute, included damming the Amazon River to build a “Great Lakes” system near Colombia.Footnote 61 However, in his idea for Port Pacific, he found willing partners among the young, university educated members of Palau’s district legislature. After pitching several members in 1974, the parties began secret preparations to make it reality. By the time the plans leaked to the public, preliminary steps were already underway. In early 1975, Joan King, a reporter for the Pacific Daily News, received an anonymous tip about Port Pacific. Her subsequent reporting revealed that Panero, a shady U.S. operative, had won the support of the district legislature, and that the parties had wooed two Japanese industrial giants, Nissho Iwai Company and the Industrial Bank of Japan, to provide financial backing.Footnote 62 The legislature was forthcoming with few additional details beyond those captured by King’s reporting, leaving Palauans to speculate on the veracity of her findings.
Another meaningful difference was the countervailing arguments that Palauans used to challenge superport plans. Where anti-colonial nationalism provided the critical lens through which many Puerto Ricans contested the superport, indigeneity, and self-determination furnished the same for Palauans. An emergent ecological force within the environmental politics of the 1970s, indigeneity helped Palauans articulate powerful counterclaims to the stewardship and ownership of their environment.Footnote 63 While rumors swirled in the wake of King’s reporting, Palauans skeptical of an industrial complex used customary land ownership claims to question the project’s compatibility with Palauan culture. Traditionally, the chiefs of each Palauan district, usually fishermen themselves, laid ownership claims to the reefs and waters adjacent to their communities—rights that the U.S. administration partially acknowledged in recognizing Palauans’ rights to “control the use of, or material in, marine areas below the ordinary high water mark.”Footnote 64 And although the U.S. administration officially reserved ownership for itself under Trust Territory law, Palauans used their customary ownership as a counterclaim against the use of their lands for Port Pacific.Footnote 65 In late 1975, still awaiting official communications about the project, residents of the Ollei Hamlet, rumored to be a potential superport site, submitted a petition to the district legislature that deployed traditional claims to land stewardship to oppose superport plans. “We, the people of Ollei, hereby declare and assert our hamlet traditional and customary ownership of Ngkessol Reef located on the northern side of Babeldaob island between Ngcheyangel and Ngerchelong municipalities,” the petition stated. Citing potentially disastrous impacts on “Palau’s environment, culture, and society,” the petition requested a moratorium on the project and made a series of demands, among them public hearings and an open referendum on the project intended to allow Palauans a direct say in determining its future.Footnote 66
Similar perspectives rooted in local custom found articulation through the new groups formed to oppose Port Pacific, where they merged with a younger current of political activism critical of the U.S. record in Micronesia. Nothing captures this convergence better than the Save Palau Organization (SPO) and its two leading figures, the young Palauan activists Moses Uludong, and Yutaka Miller Gibbons, the Ibedul (high chief) of Koror and Southern Palau. The two joined forces to form the SPO in February 1976 in response to the legislature’s approval of a preliminary superport feasibility study. At first glance, they seemed an odd pairing. Gibbons embodied a traditional form of authority in Palau. The Ibedul, “titular head of Palau’s ruling class,” was a mostly ceremonial role by the time Gibbons occupied the position, although the title still placed him at the head of traditional Palauan social hierarchies and commanded considerable deference.Footnote 67 Indeed, Gibbons often spoke on Port Pacific from a place of traditional authority and concern over the preservation of the Palauan culture and environment. He frequently warned that the proposed superport “will affect our traditional land-use system, would cause prostitution, increase the crime rate, and we in fact would become a minority in our own country.”Footnote 68 Gibbons’ involvement in the SPO’s anti-superport movement, combined with his position in Palauan society, would prove a powerful force; as he mounted his campaign against Port Pacific, Gibbons claimed that a U.S. Navy operative offered him a monthly cash retainer to abandon his advocacy.Footnote 69
Uludong, on the other hand, represented a younger generation of Palauans animated by dissatisfaction with the U.S. record in Micronesia and the political prospects of ending the trusteeship. He came to the SPO as a member of the Tia Beluad (This Is Our Nation) movement—a group that he later described as a “political and social organization” whose aim “is to protect the rights and freedom of the people of Palau and the rest of Micronesia from encroachment from within and the outside of Micronesia.”Footnote 70 Uludong had sharpened his political teeth as a university student in Hawai‘i, where he formed a critical perspective of U.S. operations in the Pacific. As student-members of the Young Micronesians, a youth activist group that supported self-determination for the different peoples of Micronesia, he and his brother Francisco uncovered a report in 1971 that laid out U.S. plans to overstay the termination of the trusteeship agreement by maintaining military operations in the region.Footnote 71 As a member of the SPO, Uludong brought a similar political fervency to the anti-superport movement. Where Gibbons was more familiar with the U.S. state and military apparatus, having served for eight years in the Army, Uludong viewed the U.S. administration and armed forces far more skeptically, particularly in their role in shaping American interests in Micronesia.
Yet, for all their differences, Uludong and Gibbons turned the SPO into the leading Palauan organization fighting against Port Pacific. Most active from 1976 to 1978, the SPO launched a local publicity and education campaign aimed at showing Palauans that the superport could “only be a disaster for Palau, environmentally, culturally and perhaps even economically.”Footnote 72 The group issued advertisements, posters, bumper stickers, and radio reports that warned of the superport’s impacts.Footnote 73 Uludong, meanwhile, used his position as publisher of the Tia Belau (This Is Palau) newspaper to keep up a steady drumbeat of coverage on the issue. Headlines warned that Palau would become the “dump of the Pacific” for Japan and the U.S. Navy, which Uludong charged with backing the superport as part of the wider U.S. military aspirations in Micronesia after the termination of the Trusteeship Agreement.Footnote 74 Reviving some of his college tactics, Uludong also used Tia Belau to publish a secret report prepared by the Mitre Corporation that mapped potential sites for storage tanks, moorings, refineries, petrochemical plants, and other superport facilities. The Mitre report confirmed the suspicions of many Palauans that Panero and the district legislature had been making progress on the proposal beyond public view. Uludong could now confidently reveal that Port Pacific’s backers planned to turn Palau into the primary oil distribution point for the entire Western Pacific region.Footnote 75 His local coverage of major superport developments helped maintain public scrutiny on the project even as private and legislative figures pursued it in secrecy.
The SPO also harbored larger political goals. Most Palauans agreed on the superport—they did not want it. What they did not agree on was how this issue fit into larger electoral issues during the 1970s. As the close of the Trusteeship period drew nearer, the SPO hoped the use the superport issue to sway voting on Palau’s future political status. A 1978 referendum presented two choices: assenting to the constitution for a Micronesian federation, which would join Palau with a larger political community in Oceania, or rejecting the constitution, which would allow Palau to pursue independent negotiations with the United States. Many Palauans harbored strong separatist sentiments; what ties, the argument went, did they have to the culturally distinct and geographically distant people of Yap or Chuuk? For many SPO members, however, the Micronesian Federation would provide an alternative economic foundation for independence, and for figures like Uludong, a friendlier framework for negotiating eventual Palauan national sovereignty. The group accordingly urged a “Yes” vote in the 1978 Palau referendum on the Micronesian constitution. Separatism, they suggested, would only aid the superport supporters, while incorporation within wider Micronesia would allow Palau to pursue economic alternatives (Figure 3). This get-out-the-vote campaign was a decisive failure; Palauan voters resoundingly rejected the Micronesian constitution in favor of separate status negotiations with the United States.Footnote 76 If the SPO represented the majority on the superport issue, the group could not claim the same mandate in the realm of electoral politics. As one newspaper headline put it, “In Palau, Even God Is Said to Oppose Micronesian Unity.”Footnote 77
Figure 3. The anti-superport campaign urged Palauans to vote ‘Yes’ to approve the federated Micronesian constitution in 1978. Credit: Trust Territory Photo Archives, Pacific Collection, University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa Library.
Electoral failures aside, the SPO emerged as a powerful voice for environmental preservation and against the harms of U.S. colonial policy in Micronesia. In his seminal study of U.S. development policy in Micronesia, historian David Hanlon confusingly asserts otherwise: that the Palauan superport debate involved “not struggles over colonially directed policies of development but struggles with more global forces of capitalism.”Footnote 78 While Hanlon is correct that industrial capitalism featured in debates, the SPO’s activities around the superport reveal the extent to which issues of colonial development policy, indigeneity, and self-determination intersected with environmental struggle. Indeed, for many SPO members, the superport represented the manifold discrepancies between U.S. development policy and traditional Palauan life. Group member Isaac Soaladaob captured the interplay between U.S. development policy, capitalism, and indigenous erasure in a letter to Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) when he posited that pollution from a superport would push Palauans from “our farms and reefs and into income-generating jobs… Lost forever,” he continued, “would be our reefs, our fish, and our traditional skills which have made Palau independent and self-sufficient for centuries.” Soaladaob went so far as the compare the developmentalist rationality behind the superport as the same that had imposed “tragic consequences” on other U.S. colonial subjects like the Guamanians, Hawaiians, and Native Americans.Footnote 79 Uludong and Gibbons each concurred in a congressional hearing on the issue. “Palau, like the rest of Micronesia, is poorly developed not because of the lack of resources but rather the failure of the Administering Authority to fulfill its obligations under the Trusteeship Agreement,” Uludong told a Senate committee. “The United States should not be misled to think that is can bank on the superport project to accomplish its trusteeship duties in Palau but instead should look into other more relevant and meaningful economic alternatives for Micronesia.”Footnote 80 Gibbons argued similarly, suggesting the disharmony between the superport and the preservation of Palauan society. In a written statement, he contended that the people of Palau “are very concerned that because the U.S. Government has failed to foster the economic development of Palau and Micronesia in 30 years of administration, that it will force the superport complex upon us as economic development without realizing the tremendous, detrimental impact that such a project will have on our traditional, cultural, and social institutions.”Footnote 81 In a longer written statement, Uludong concurred, averring as well that the execution of the superport plan would violate Palauans’ rights of self-determination that the U.S. administration was meant to uphold.Footnote 82 The argument hardly moved U.S. lawmakers, who took no decisive action after the hearings. However, it proved far more effective in the national and international campaigns that the group launched to broaden their anti-superport movements beyond local settings.
Scaling Opposition: National Networks and Strategies
If territorial politics framed the superports for local activists, the broader context of U.S. environmentalism shaped how these activists publicized and battled the superports beyond territorial settings. By the 1970s, the broad-based U.S. environmental movement had coalesced into an institutional network of predominantly non-governmental organizations geared toward lobbying, advocacy, and legal action. The popularity of environmental issues, coupled with the more robust institutional landscape emerging in the United States, provided opportunities for Puerto Rican and Palauan activists to engage domestic groups and audiences on the issue of the superports. Eying opportunities to move the anti-superport campaigns beyond local settings, they worked with environmental groups to fight the superport battles in the courts of the federal state and of domestic public opinion.
The Puerto Rican anti-superport campaign leaned on diasporic networks of political activism to act as the link between territorial environmentalism and “mainland” environmental groups. Diasporic Puerto Rican politics had shifted sharply leftward during the 1960s. In her history of the Puerto Rican political activism in New York, Lorrin Thomas notes a shift from a predominant liberalism toward new registers of left radicalism centered around debates on colonialism and independence for Puerto Rico.Footnote 83 At the same time, Matthew Grandy notes how “mainland” Puerto Rican communities were becoming increasingly attuned to environmental issues in enclaves like New York.Footnote 84 By the early 1970s, these two trends converged around the superport issue, as diaspora political groups took up the environmental colonialism invective to describe Puerto Rico’s most pressing ecological controversy. Foremost among them was the Committee for Puerto Rican Decolonization (CPRD; later renamed the Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee). Founded in 1973, the CPRD immediately seized on the superport issue, becoming its staunchest critic among the groups on the diasporic Puerto Rican left. The year of its founding, the CPRD launched a national educational campaign on environmental colonialism centered around the superport. On September 21, the group hosted Dr. Thomas Morales, a biologist at the University of Puerto Rico, for a conference at St. John the Divine’s Cathedral House in New York, on the environmental and social perils of a superport.Footnote 85 Early in 1974, the CPRD held similar conferences at the University of Dayton and Antioch College in Ohio, with tentative meetings planned in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Maryland, Texas, and California.Footnote 86
The CPRD also helped bring the superport issue to the domestic mainstream of the environmental movement. By 1974, the organization began enlisting support from U.S. environmental groups and prominent environmentalists. In June, for example, the CPRD co-sponsored an environmental conference with the New York Scientists’ Committee for Public Information that was attended by Puerto Rican environmental scientists, representatives of the Sierra Club of New York and New Jersey, the National Audubon Society, the Council on the Environment of the City of New York, and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). There, prominent environmental figures spoke out against the project. Barry Commoner circulated a written statement declaring the superport “an issue of environmental sanity and social justice” that threatened severe environmental damage “reckoned in terms of increased availability of petroleum products in the U.S.,” while the NRDC described the superport as a bald attempt on the part of the United States to “export” its industrial pollution.Footnote 87 Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans and their supporters in the CPRD looked to build opposition to the superport through coverage in different U.S. media outlets. Activists wrote articles condemning the colonial superport in publications like El Malcriado, a Chicano newspaper and unofficial outlet of the United Farm Workers, and The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.Footnote 88
It was the Palauan superport, however, that seemed to saturate mainstream environmentalist circles. Indeed, by the mid-1970s, Palau has become a minor cause célèbre among U.S. environmentalists. A cascade of media coverage began in 1976 as outreach by groups like the SPO engaged prominent organizations like Friends of the Earth (FOE), the National Audubon Society, and the NRDC. Taken in by Palau’s natural beauty and the callous logic behind Port Pacific, U.S. environmentalists authored a deluge of articles and essays covering the issue in outlets like Christian Science Monitor, Science, and the Sierra Club Bulletin.Footnote 89 Pilgrimages to Palau, meanwhile, became “very high fashion in American conservation circles.”Footnote 90 Prominent environmentalists like Kenneth Brower—son of FOE founder David Ross Brower—traveled to Palau in 1976 to cover the superport controversy for Audubon Magazine. Brower consulted environmental experts, Palauan residents, and Panero himself for the article, which cast Panero as a calculating, dispassionate outsider hoping to sacrifice a small archipelagic society on the altar of industrial development.Footnote 91 Brower also took this moving story to the airwaves, summarizing his findings on the conjunction of Japanese and U.S. security interests around the superport for listeners of Berkeley’s KPFA radio station in 1977.Footnote 92 Brower and other U.S. environmentalists helped keep up a steady drumbeat of coverage of Port Pacific in the environmental press, eventually turning the issue into fodder for major national outlets. The spillover of Port Pacific coverage from the environmental press reached some of the journalistic pillars of United States, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times.Footnote 93
Beyond publicity, the more litigious environmental groups also worked with activists to mount legal challenges to the superports. To do so, they drew on a growing corpus of federal environmental law that allowed them to challenge the superport projects on substantive and procedural violations. Above all, the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), a watershed in U.S. environmental law, introduced the most wide-ranging changes to federal policies.Footnote 94 Passed into law in 1970, NEPA’s ambiguous territorial scope also permitted its application to U.S. activities carried out beyond domestic frontiers, including in the overseas territories.Footnote 95 By 1976, the NRDC and EDF were both preparing a round of litigation against Port Pacific as their opening salvo in the superport battle. Citing NEPA’s proscriptions for environmental impact reports, these groups charged Panero and other superport backers with violating the procedural requirements compelled by recently enacted environmental law.Footnote 96
Legalistic tactics did not end there. In fact, Palauan activists and their domestic allies readied a bevy of maneuvers to erect legal hurdles to the superport. In 1976, the groups sought protection for Palauan ecosystems under the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Marine Sanctuaries Act. The NRDC also lobbied for Palau’s inclusion under the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme and the World Heritage Trust Convention, both of which would have turned Palau’s littoral environs into heavily protected conservancy areas off limits to industrial development.Footnote 97 The EDF, meanwhile, moved beyond their usual areas of legal expertise to sue the U.S. administration not for violations of environmental law, but for violating the terms of the Trusteeship Agreement. The EDF’s case contested the terms of the contract for the superport feasibility study signed between the Palauan government and the two Japanese industrial firms financially backing the study. More specifically, the EDF alleged that a clause granting the two firms exclusive permission to conduct the study, without soliciting bids from other parties, violated the trusteeship mandate requiring the United States to act in the best economic interest of the Palauans.Footnote 98
Collaboration with mainstream environmental groups bore fruit for Puerto Rican and Palauan activists, particularly in the form of publicity for their causes and resources for waging legal battles. However, it was not without notable downsides. Legal challenges could prove incomplete and sluggish, as they did for both the Puerto Rican and Palauan superports. EDF lawyers noted, for example, that their suit over the violation of the Trusteeship Agreement represented a “limited and technical issue,” one “attacking not the project itself but only the government approach to it.” They recognized that such suits would not stop the project, but only delay it and open it to greater public scrutiny.Footnote 99 Legal approaches were also time-consuming. One suit brought by the NRDC against the Puerto Rican superport for potential air quality violations never reached a conclusion before the commonwealth government eventually abandoned the proposal, prompting the presiding judge to discard the case without a decision.Footnote 100
At the same time, local activists bristled at the demeanor of U.S. environmentalists. In Palau, environmentalists’ and Palauans’ interests usually aligned, though at times they could also be sources of friction. One report from the Los Angeles Times relayed how Palauans questioned the self-serving elements of U.S. environmentalists’ involvement. “What will these people do when they return to the United States?” one Palauan asked. “They will get in their big cars and drive to their big houses and talk of saving Palau.” “We need their help, we admit that,” said another. “But they have this way of taking over. They seem so sure of themselves.”Footnote 101 The collaborative relationship thus had its drawbacks. Legal tactics were not foolproof, and U.S. environmentalists’ interests sometimes seemed paramount to Palauans’ concerns. However, the alliance between local and national actors became an important dimension of both anti-superport campaigns. Puerto Rican and Palauan activists not only developed their own movement strategies but also learned from and adapted those of the mainstream U.S. environmentalism as they challenged the superports in the domestic arena.
The International Arena
The legal strategies pursued by the anti-superport activists and their environmentalist allies adopted fairly narrow juridical terms. Protective reclassifications of colonial environments, procedural hurdles, and violations of contamination thresholds established through federal environmental law furnished the primary means through which they contested the projects in domestic courts. However, activists and environmentalists alike recognized that the superports represented something much larger. In the words of one EDF staffer, the Palauan superport battle captured the “world-wide problem of international transfer of pollution,” or, more bluntly, of the “eco-imperialism” of corporations and developed nations.Footnote 102 In the Puerto Rican and Palauan cases, this eco-imperialism was aided by the different colonial statuses of both territories—their formal incorporation within the U.S. empire, though gradated exclusion from the national community as such. However, if this colonial status exacerbated issues of eco-imperialism, it also opened distinct possibilities for the colonial anti-superport movements. Above all, it made the superports questions of the U.S. colonial administration—questions that the anti-superport activists aimed to bring to international audiences. As they looked to scale their anti-superport campaigns, Puerto Rican and Palauan activists used this to their advantage by turning to the international for a where issues of colonialism and decolonization were debated during the postwar period.
For the PSP and PIP, the international dimension of the anti-superport movement focused primarily on the United Nations (UN) Special Committee on Decolonization, a group formed in 1961 to accelerate the process of global decolonization and issue recommendations on ongoing colonial administration. As the foremost specialized institutional body addressing questions of colonialism and decolonization, it was the perfect audience: for Mari Brás and Berríos, the superport was a colonial imposition that threatened “territorial integrity, national unity, and the sacred right to independence and self-determination held by the Puerto Rican people.”Footnote 103 Both party leaders made frequent appeals to the body to intervene in the issue on the basis of the UN’s role as a protector of normative commitments to self-determination and a moral arbiter of international issues. In June 1973 they traveled to New York as the heads of a pro-independence delegation and presented the superport issue as evidence of Puerto Rico’s ongoing subjugation to the colonial interests of the United States. Mari Brás and Berríos also authored a report, which they submitted to the head of the Decolonization Committee, laying out the case against the superport. The report argued that the proposed facilities violated several UN resolutions, including one barring irreversible action taken by colonial powers during the decolonization process. At the same time, the report requested that the Decolonization Committee formally demand that the United States halt the superport project and that UN representatives travel to Puerto Rico to conduct public opinion surveys among local populations.Footnote 104
No such mission visited Puerto Rico, but the Decolonization Committee did revisit the superport issue at the renewed request of the Mari Brás and Berríos. By August, the pair sought to escalate the international dimension of the superport fight by prompting direct condemnation of the project by the Decolonization Committee. That month, the PSP-PIP delegation planned another visit to the Decolonization Committee, which had agreed to hold a vote on a resolution related to the superport. On August 23, Mari Brás delivered a speech at the United Nations at the invitation of the committee. There, he reissued accusations of environmental colonialism, framing the superport as the new phase of an old colonial phenomenon of land and resource exploitation, and an attempt to turn the island into a modern “coaling station” and “dump of pestilences where oil is disembarked and re-shipped to the United States.” Relating the Puerto Rican situation to other colonial struggles, he warned that the Puerto Rican superport provided a startling example of the environmental policies that industrial nations would pursue throughout the rest of the formerly colonized world.Footnote 105 Berríos reinforced Mari Brás, asserting that the superport would issue a death blow to Puerto Rican self-determination.Footnote 106
The stunt irked the U.S. delegation, which moved to contain the situation behind the scenes. Diplomats warned that supporting the Puerto Rican position bore consequences, writing in a telegram to foreign U.S. embassies that “criticism, explicit of implicit, of US-Puerto Rican relationship” would be considered a “gross intervention in US and Puerto Rico’s internal affairs with inevitable consequences for bilateral relationship[s].”Footnote 107 The delegation also initiated a series of “high-level” overtures to convince representatives thinking of abstaining from the vote to cast a “no” vote instead.Footnote 108 Despite U.S. maneuvering, however, the PSP-PIP pair left with what they considered a considerable victory: following their addresses, the Decolonization Committee issued a resolution on the superport issue. The resolution reaffirmed Puerto Ricans’ right to self-determination; asked the United States to abstain from adopting a project that would impede the exercise of this right; and instructed the Decolonization Committee to continue monitoring the superport issue through the following year. The Puerto Rican activists understood that this action was largely symbolic; the Decolonization Committee could not stop the superport project. However, the committee understood its international strategy as one element of a larger project of multitiered opposition. Asked if the Decolonization Committee had the power to stop the superport, Berríos replied that it “could help to stop it.”Footnote 109 Mari Brás, meanwhile, emphasized that condemnation by the UN carried “a great moral weight,” and he characterized the resolution as a steppingstone toward further “diplomatic triumphs” against the superport.Footnote 110
For Palauan activists, however, the United Nations theoretically offered greater leverage. The United States largely acted with impunity in Micronesia, where the special designation of the “strategic trust territory” afforded it practically unincumbered power to act in the name of national and international security. However, the United Nations formally retained a supervisory role, one that Palauans hoped to use to their advantage. Early overtures appealed to the international body to intervene in the superport. The first appeal came in 1976 from the people of Palau’s Ngaraard district, who submitted a petition asking a visiting United Nations mission to intervene in the superport project.Footnote 111 Afterward, the Palauan superport became a recurring issue at meetings of the Trusteeship Council, reappearing, in the words of one French representative, like “Oscar Wilde’s Canterville ghost.”Footnote 112 U.S. representatives often defended Port Pacific as a necessary development measure, while critics characterized it as a Trojan horse for U.S. military interests. Trusteeship council representatives from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), for example, excoriated the U.S. record in Micronesia and charged the government with forcing the superport on Palauans at the expense of the local environment and rights to self-determination.Footnote 113 In another instance, the USSR representative accused the United States of turning Palau into a “sacrificial lamb” for its military policy.Footnote 114 The Palauan superport even appeared in a political cartoon published in Pravda, the official USSR Communist Party newspaper, in 1977.Footnote 115
More importantly, however, the United Nations furnished Palauan activists with a conspicuous podium from which to inveigh against the colonial excesses of the U.S. administration. In this regard, the United Nations provided publicity for the Palauan campaign more so than direct institutional capacity to stop Port Pacific. Above all, it was Ibedul Gibbons who best utilized the UN as a lightning rod for public attention. In June 1976, a Palauan delegation flew to New York to testify on local issues before the Trusteeship Council. Gibbons accompanied the group and ostensibly planned to address the council on the separatism issue as a member of Palau’s traditional leadership. However, when he rose to deliver his address, Gibbons instead presented a petition on Port Pacific.Footnote 116 Gibbons appealed to the Trusteeship Council to be the ultimate protector of Palauan interests where the U.S. administration had failed. Although a local Palauan project, he framed the superport controversy as inherently international. “We are seeking from the Council because this project involves international issues and three powerful rich countries in the world and their multi-national corporations,” he told the Council. “We request the Council and United Nations to see to it that the people of Palau District do not get overwhelmed by and become victims of powerful nations in their drive for their own profit and expansion.” Gibbons criticized the U.S. economic record in Micronesia, speculating that the Palauans would be “sacrificed” to a project like the superport in service of the U.S. administration’s reputation. He called on the Trusteeship Council to intervene to protect the land, waters, and culture of Palau.Footnote 117
Palauan activists found the United Nations useful not so much for its powers of intervention, but for the moral and symbolic weight that the organization conferred. The Trusteeship Council did not halt Port Pacific. Despite its recurring appearance on the organization’s docket, it took no decisive action. However, Gibbons’ speech there proved effective in another manner. His description of the embattled archipelago facing overwhelming international forces won considerable coverage in national and international media. Hawaii Business magazine, for example, noted that Gibbons’ address was a major victory in the publicity battle over the superport. His David-versus-Goliath narrativization of the contest moved a range of outlets to cover his speech and dedicate print space to the Palauan issue.Footnote 118 Alongside the media blitz orchestrated by U.S. environmentalist organizations, then, Gibbons made use of the international arena to generate his own coverage of the Palauan struggle. He, like his Puerto Rican counterparts, drew on international fora not so much for their direct sway over the superport projects, but for the legitimacy and widespread recognition that they helped confer on the anti-superport movements.
Conclusion
The Puerto Rican and Palauan anti-superport movements share one final commonality: both were successful. The multi-scalar strategy of activists makes it difficult to ascribe a single causal mechanism to the defeat of the projects, but it makes clear that the bulwark of opposition constructed across local, national, and international contexts proved remarkably effective at halting the superports. In Puerto Rico, the commonwealth government abandoned the project in late 1975 after public opposition, instability in global oil markets, and the lack of a long-range U.S. energy policy dissuaded officials from construction. Although Governor Hernández Colón claims in his memoirs that this was a purely economic decision, contemporary and retrospective accounts note that his office was likely responding to mounting environmental pressures to abandon the project.Footnote 119 The fortunes of the Palau project, meanwhile, changed dramatically when Tmetuchl, the principle legislative backer of the superport, made an abrupt about-face on the issue in 1978. Tmetuchl, who only months before defended the superport as Palau’s only economic hope, changed his tune before the UN Trusteeship Council in May, when he asserted that Palau’s state of dependency due to U.S. underdevelopment could be remedied without Port Pacific. Instead, Tmetuchl outlined a vision of U.S. assistance to Palau to promote economic self-sufficiency through alternative forms of economic development. Internal correspondence registered the State Department’s surprise by Tmetuchl’s quick about-face, which officials had no forewarning of. However, they understood perfectly well its implications: without the support of Palauan lawmakers, the superport proposal was dead.Footnote 120 Later that year, the project’s Japanese financial backers withdrew.Footnote 121
But it is worth qualifying the nature of these successes, because if the anti-superport coalitions won their respective environmental battles, they tended to lose the larger political war. The Puerto Rican independentistas, for example, saw the superport as the galvanizing issue for a new “united front” of left-wing parties and citizens, and hoped to forge strong interparty bonds around the issue. Yet, by the end of the 1970s, this united front had crumbled. Independentista parties remained practically irrelevant in electoral politics (Berríos and Mari Brás combined for less than seven percent of total vote share in the 1976 gubernatorial election) while internal ideological differences increasingly divided the PSP and PIP from within and without. By decade’s end, the uniformity of opinion and popular support around the superport seemed a far cry from the crisis of the left that prevailed among pro-independence parties.Footnote 122 In Palau, meanwhile, the SPO hoped that Port Pacific would push voters to their side in the 1978 referendum on status negotiations with the United States. The group urged Palauans to ratify the constitution for a Micronesian Federation that most members saw as the economic and political alternative to continued dependency on the United States—a position that few in Palau ultimately supported.
That environmental triumphs did not translate to larger political mandates points toward one of the challenges of modern environmentalism writ large. Scanning the past sixty years of environmental politics, historians and social scientists have noted the difficulty of transmuting environmental concerns into broad-based and popular politics. From the moderation of the environmental movement’s more progressive tenets during the 1960s and 1970s (histories recently explored by scholars like Paul Sabin and Pollyanna Rhee) or the more recent defeat of policy frameworks like the “Green New Deal,” the challenge remains constructing a more robust, popular, and transformative politics around core environmental concerns.Footnote 123 The same holds true in the overseas colonies, where support for a specific set of anti-colonial politics did not follow naturally from engagement in environmental mobilizations like the anti-superport movements. If there is a “usable” past in the histories explored here, then, it is twofold.Footnote 124 First, the Puerto Rican and Palauan anti-superport campaigns provide remarkable models of environmentalist tactics and advocacy. Activists in the overseas colonies formed novel critical frameworks for yoking issues of environmental violence and colonial subordination, and they developed remarkably effective tactics for fighting environmental battles beyond immediate territorial settings. Second, both movements underscore an ongoing challenge for environmental movements: bridging the divides between environmental and popular politics and turning environmentalist concerns into durable engines of political change.
Open access
