A Struggling Island Disguised as a Tropical Paradise

 

 

Guam: A Struggling Island Disguised as a Tropical Paradise

February 8, 2015 · by Matthew Taitano · in Culture. ·

 

After my first semester at Princeton University, I was excited to return home to Guam for winter break. However, instead of being happy to be back in what most people deem as a “tropical paradise,” I was reminded of something sobering: I am poor. Compared to the comforts provided at Princeton, the living conditions of my family seemed dismal. While some students complain about their dorm beds being too lumpy or the water pressure in the restrooms being too low, I was grateful for these things after having to sleep on the couch and floor for my entire life and to use a bucket to flush the toilets at home.

And my family is not the only one.

Many in Guam suffer from poverty and a lack of resources both at home and school. Last year, around 95 percent of students in Guam’s public high schools scored below the national average in the reading, writing, and math sections of the Stanford Achievement Test, Tenth Edition (SAT-10).

When I visited my old high school, I was instantly reminded about the difficulties I faced as a student. Constantly damaged facilities and scarce resources in the classroom were the norm at my school. The conditions to which the students are subjected are so poor that, recently, one of Guam’s senators Michael San Nicolas tried to set up a visit to the school accompanied by news media members to show that its conditions represent that of Guam’s prisons.

In addition to the inadequate infrastructure, my high school is indifferent toward academics. What frustrates me is that the students receive most of the blame for it. Attending an institution that does not possess the proper resources for academic achievement makes it difficult for students to care about striving for it.

My acceptance to Princeton was a rare incident at my school; some even called it a “miracle.” Although this was supposed to be a compliment for me, I barely took it as one. In fact, I became sadder the more people talked about it because that is exactly what it was: a form of “miracle.” And I hated that because I wanted to be able to say that many people who attended my school have gone to top colleges and universities and that I was just following in their footsteps. But that is not the case. Aside from one or two students in the past two decades, I was the only student accepted into a top school.

And that is unfair.

It is unfair because my high school has many students who have the potential to attend prestigious colleges and universities but lack the means to get there. Although I was able to do it, I could see why people would not want to go down that path because my college application process was extremely lonely and discouraging; none of my teachers and counselors were prepared to guide me through it, which forced me to do my own research on the entirety of the college application process.

I began to link these hardships to the things I have experienced during my time at Princeton. Last year, after the decision of the grand jury not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown, over 300 Princeton students engaged in a spontaneous protest on campus. As I participated in this protest, I thought of my family and friends back home because I wanted to see how my participation in this protest connected to them.
And I realized something important.

My participation in protests like these designed to combat the devaluation of black lives in America is more than an indication of my solidarity for the black community; it is also necessary in order to combat the issues on my island. How could I expect support for my people if I do not show my support for others?

As a U.S. unincorporated territory, Guam is both indirectly and directly at the clutches of American control. When laws change in America, Guam’s laws usually follow suit with those changes. For example, when the drinking age in America changed to twenty-one, Guam quickly reflected that change.

American control of Guam can most clearly be seen through the example of American military. A lack of resources and options strongly influences many people on Guam, especially those from low-income households, to join the military. Guam’s public high schools, which have a majority of poor students, require all students to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), “a multiple-aptitude battery that measures developed abilities and helps predict future academic and occupational success in the military.” However, tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, commonly known as the SAT, which help students get into U.S. colleges and universities, are ignored. This reflects America’s influence on Guam because the island is used for its strategic military position. Although there is nothing wrong with joining the military, people should not feel that joining is their only option.

Under Title 8 of the U.S. Code, the people of Guam are born as U.S. citizens. However, at times, they are not treated as such. Because of racial biases inflicting damage onto certain communities in America, as seen through the cases of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and others, there is a certain extent to which our statuses as American citizens is beneficial to our lives. Being an American citizen did not save Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice from police brutality. Similarly, the citizenship granted to the people of Guam only supports and protects them to a limited extent. The racial predominance that stems from the imperialistic idea that the American Anglo-Saxon supersedes other races continues to place limitations upon the people of Guam. Like many black people, as well as other people of color, in America, the people of Guam are not given the full range of opportunity that many white Americans are given.

And this needs to stop.

When I turned eighteen but could not vote for the U.S. President even though I was a U.S. citizen, I did not say anything. When I flew out to Princeton through Hawaii and did not receive meals because a flight to Guam is considered “domestic,” even though I was a U.S. citizen who could not vote for the President, I simply brought snacks from home onto the plane. When I heard that my island might undergo a military buildup, which would close off public land for military facilities, I did not question it. When one day I went to a place that I have been jogging at for years and saw that it was closed off by a gate for the military, I just went to another place.

Now, attending an institution like Princeton that has bred some of America’s greatest leaders, I have an implicit obligation to educate those around me about issues on my island. Instead of merely returning after getting my degree, I know that I have to stay in America to work my way into a system, which I am still trying to figure out, that was never built to support my people.

And I hope more of my people will be able to join me.



Matthew Taitano is a freshman at Princeton University from Guam. He can be reached at mtaitano@princeton.edu


http://thestripesblog.com/2015/02/08/guam-a-struggling-island-disguised-as-a-tropical-paradise/

Poisons In The Pasifik

Poisons in the Pacific: Guam, Okinawa and Agent Orange

by Jon Mitchell

The day after 19-year-old Sgt. Leroy Foster arrived on Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base, one of America’s largest Pacific military installations, in 1968, he was assigned to what his superior officers called “vegetation control duties.”

“I mixed diesel fuel with Agent Orange then I sprayed it by truck all over the base to kill the jungle overgrowth. None of the older service members wanted to do the work so because I was the low man on the totem pole, it was left to me,” Foster told The Japan Times.

Within days of starting the assignment, Foster developed pustules and boils all over his body that were so severe he bled through his bed linen. Then during the following years he fell ill with a litany of sicknesses, including Parkinson’s and ischemic heart disease, that he believes were caused by the highly toxic herbicides he was ordered to spray. Foster also contends that Agent Orange’s dioxins — long proven to damage successive generations’ health — have also affected his daughter, who had to undergo cancer treatment as a teenager, and his grandchild, who was born with 12 fingers, 12 toes and a heart murmur.

But Foster could be considered one of the lucky ones. While hundreds of other American veterans claim they were sickened by Agent Orange on Guam, Foster is one of only five people known to be receiving U.S. government compensation for exposure on the island. The rest have been denied any help due to Pentagon assertions that its data “does not show any use, testing or storage of tactical herbicides, such as Agent Orange, at any location on Guam.”

These denials will be familiar to readers following The Japan Times’ investigations of the U.S. government’s alleged usage of these toxic chemicals on another American military outpost: Okinawa. Over the past 18 months, dozens of former service members have spoken out about herbicides on Okinawa during the Vietnam War. These veterans, and in some cases their children, are sick with illnesses consistent with dioxin exposure, yet the U.S. government has only acknowledged the poisoning of three of them — and it persistently denies that Agent Orange was ever kept, buried or used on Okinawa.

The parallels between the U.S. military’s poisoning of Guam and Okinawa are disturbing, and the reasons why it brought Agent Orange to these islands in the first place lie in their similar histories. Located 2,200 km from one another in the Western Pacific, both Guam and Okinawa witnessed some of the most vicious battles of World War II. Guam, a former U.S. shipping station, had been seized by the Japanese in December 1941 and subjected to a brutal 2½-year occupation before its liberation by U.S. forces in July 1944. The Japanese prefecture of Okinawa was captured by the American military in the spring of 1945 during fighting in which 12,000 U.S. service members were killed and almost 40,000 wounded.

The heavy loss of G.I. blood on both islands imbued in many U.S. leaders a sense of entitlement to the hard-won territories. Following the end of World War II, the islands were gradually transformed into two of the most militarized places on the planet — Guam became the “Tip of the Spear” and Okinawa the “Keystone of the Pacific.”

Although much-loved by martial pundits, these nicknames belied the peripheral status foisted upon the islands’ residents. In 1950, Guam was declared an unincorporated organized territory, which granted the island a civilian government but left residents without the right to vote in presidential elections — a system that persists today. Between 1945 and 1972, Okinawa existed under the gray zone of American administration, protected by neither the U.S. nor Japanese constitutions. Such policies enabled the military to get away with actions on the two islands that might have been difficult elsewhere — including the usage of toxic herbicides.

According to the Pentagon’s own records, it first stored these defoliants on Guam in 1952 with the delivery of 5,000 barrels of Agent Purple. One of several so-called “rainbow herbicides,” which took their names from the color-coded stripes around the barrels, Agent Purple was a forerunner of Agent Orange and today is known to be even more toxic. The U.S. military had brought the herbicides to Guam for use in the Korean War. But the conflict ended before they could be deployed and, according to the U.S. government, the chemicals were subsequently removed from Guam.

Ralph Stanton, a leading researcher of military herbicide usage who also believes he was exposed on the island while stationed there from 1969 to 1970, is skeptical of the government’s version of events. “The Department of Defense has no records of the barrels being returned to the U.S. so I think their statement is a myth or a lie. In the 1950s, the cost of shipping would likely have been more than the herbicides were worth.”

Regardless of the final fate of that initial stockpile, what is clear from Stanton’s research is that during the 1960s and ’70s, as the U.S. waged war in Vietnam, military herbicides were routinely sprayed on Guam and shipped via the island on the way to Southeast Asia, where they were used in massive quantities to kill enemy crops and jungle cover. In Vietnam alone, the Red Cross estimates that 3 million people are still suffering from the effects of these chemicals.

According to Edward Jackson, a sergeant with the 43rd Transportation Squadron assigned to Guam in the early 1970s, these herbicides were a common sight. “Andersen Air Force Base had a huge stockpile of Agent Orange and other herbicides. There were many, many thousands of drums. I used to make trips with them to the navy base for shipment by sea,” Jackson told The Japan Times.

Knowing what we do now about the toxicity of these chemicals, it is easy to imagine that service members handled them wearing protective clothing. But for years the military and manufacturers suppressed the research on their dangers. “They told us Agent Orange was so safe that you could brush your teeth with it,” says Stanton.

Not only did this lackadaisical attitude apply to the usage of these herbicides, it also applied to their disposal. Just like on Okinawa, where veterans have claimed Agent Orange was buried on Hamby Air Field (current-day Chatan Town), Kadena Air Base and Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, former service members on Guam say they engaged in similar practices.

According to Jackson, the barrels of herbicides were sometimes damaged during transit so they were dumped on Andersen Air Force Base. “I would back my truck up to a small cliff that sloped away towards the Pacific Ocean. I personally threw away about 25 drums. Each individual drum was anywhere from almost empty to almost full,” Jackson explains.

In the 1990s, the U.S. government cracked down on such methods, and after conducting environmental tests on the site where Jackson dumped the barrels, the area was found to be so severely polluted that it was listed for urgent cleanup by the Environmental Protection Agency. Across the tiny island, almost 100 similarly tainted sites were identified, including one where dioxin contamination in the soil of 19,000 parts per million (compared to a recognized safe level of 1,000 parts per trillion) made it one of the most toxic places on the planet. Further alarming residents was the proximity of many of these sites to the Northern Guam Lens, the aquifer that supplies the island with its drinking water.

In 2007, Luis Syfrez, an outspoken former University of Guam professor, warned that islanders were living “in a virtual omnipresent mist of the rainbow herbicides.” His assertions were seemingly supported by skyrocketing rates of nasopharyngeal (upper throat) cancer and diabetes among Guam residents.

Today, the U.S. government claims to have cleaned up the majority of its toxic sites on the island, but University of Guam associate professor Lisa Natividad doubts these assurances. “Often their definition of what is clean is not accurate. So we need to commission independent researchers to cross-examine their claims,” she told The Japan Times.

However, people on Guam are in some ways better off than Okinawa residents, who have been kept deliberately ignorant about the extent to which their island’s earth and water have been contaminated by U.S. military dioxins. On repeated occasions, both the Japanese and U.S. governments have rejected calls for an investigation into Agent Orange contamination on the island — notably in November 2011, when Nago City residents demanded an environmental investigation on nearby Camp Schwab after The Japan Times published an article suggesting that large stockpiles of Agent Orange were kept on the base during the Vietnam War.

Left in the dark, current residents of Okinawa — including U.S. service members and their dependents stationed on the islands’ bases — can only speculate about potential contamination. Futenma Air Station merits particular concern due to its similarities to Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. Both installations have been in operation for more than six decades, during which time they have been subject to the daily flow of dangerous chemicals — not limited to Agent Orange — necessary to keep the military machine running smoothly. Andersen’s EPA reports revealed 32 so-called “contaminants of concern” including lead, PCBs and arsenic. Futenma, like Andersen, is situated atop a network of caves and fresh water springs. More worryingly, while Andersen is located in a lightly populated area, Futenma is in the crowded center of Ginowan city — home to 94,000 residents.

Wrangling over the closure of Futenma has been going on for the past 16 years, straining U.S.-Japan relations and testing the patience of the Okinawan people. But if comparisons with Andersen are accurate, even after its closure, Futenma’s cleanup will likely run into billions of dollars. The U.S.-Japan Status of Forces Agreement places the full financial burden of this cleanup on Japanese taxpayers. With such costs at stake, is it any wonder that Tokyo has allowed Futenma’s closure to flounder for so long?

The fates of Guam and Okinawa have been entwined in the Gordian knot of the planned relocation of thousands of U.S. Marines within the Pacific theater. Associate professor Natividad believes that this plan has made Guam’s leaders reluctant to push the Pentagon for full disclosure about its poisoning of the island. “Our former governor was too afraid of making waves with Washington for fear of jeopardizing the realignment. Our current governor is more confident but even if he pressured Washington for an admission, they’d just send him a letter saying that they’ve cleaned up the contaminated sites.”

While it now seems clear that America’s reasons for bringing Agent Orange to Guam and Okinawa were rooted in the Cold War past, Washington’s increasingly implausible refusals to admit to the presence of these toxic substances on either island are tightly interwoven with its 21st century military strategy for the region.

“We veterans have become a political pawn between the U.S. and Japan,” says Jackson, the former air force sergeant. “We’re an army waiting to die.”

More information about Agent Orange on Guam is available at Ralph Stanton’s comprehensive website: www.guamagentorange.info. In May, Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting aired “Defoliated Island,” a documentary featuring The Japan Times’ coverage of Agent Orange on Okinawa. Nominated for the best documentary award by the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters, the final results will be announced in September. Send comments and story ideas to community@japantimes.co.jp

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2012/08/07/issues/poisons-in-the-pacific-guam-okinawa-and-agent-orange/#.VNgBpMZWL5i