The US Military Has Polluted Guam for Decades. This Year, It Could Get Even Worse.

Naek Flores’s day-to-day life in Guam has always been shadowed by the U.S. military.

The U.S. military owns about one-third of Guam, where it stations three important bases in which about 10,000 military personnel are located.

For the Pentagon, Guam is one of its most strategic locations in the Pacific, while the CIA credits military operations as being “the island’s most important source of income and economic stability.”

However, Flores — whose grandparents lost their land to military buildup following World War II — paints a different picture: one in which Guam’s native inhabitants, the Chamorro people, are kept trapped in a cycle of dependency and disempowerment, while the U.S. military continues to exploit the island’s resources, leaving environmental destruction in its wake.

And with the expected relocation of 5,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam’s Camp Blaz later this year, Flores and other activists are worried about how the move will exacerbate harm to the island’s already numerous environmental and sociological problems. Flores, who works with Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian — an organization dedicated to protecting natural and cultural sites that have been targeted for military buildup — has helped stage ongoing direct action protests outside of military bases.

“Our relationship with the military is one that is based on consultation, not consent,” Melvin Won Pat-Borja, executive director of the Commission of Decolonization, told Truthout. “They have no legal responsibility to gain our consent for whatever they want to do. All they really have to do is inform us.”

The popular imagination in the U.S. tends to depict Guam as an island paradise with clear waters and lush green forests. But in reality, the island has been subject to a massive military buildup since colonial powers designated it a U.S. territory in 1898. Because of this, Guam — just 30 miles long and 9 miles wide — now hosts two Superfund sites, a designation given to only the most polluted areas in the nation.

For decades, the Andersen Air Force Base in the northern part of the island leached numerous hazardous substances, from gasoline and PCBs, to metals and paint thinners, from unlined landfills into Guam’s sole source aquifer that supplies drinking water to over 70 percent of the island’s population. Cleanup of the site is still ongoing.

Another Superfund site, the 23-acre Ordot Landfill in central Guam, was a military-operated landfill for industrial and municipal waste. Investigations into the site revealed leachate flowing into the nearby Lonfit River. In September 2023, the federal government agreed to pay Guam nearly $50 million for costs associated with the site’s cleanup, the total cost of which is estimated at over $160 million.

Activists stress that these Superfund sites are just two examples in a long litany of environmental harms caused by the U.S. military in Guam, and the health consequences associated with them.

“Hearing about people getting sick and dying close to these areas since I was a child — I grew up with this stuff in the news,” Flores told Truthout. “It’s something that has been in my periphery my whole life and the anxiety around it has definitely been something that’s been palpable my whole life.… It’s just relentless. How much more are they going to destroy, poison, take, desecrate, erase? It feels like they want to wipe us off the face of the Earth.”

Recently, in preparation for the arrival of the Marines, more than 1,000 acres of limestone forests were destroyed in order to expand Camp Blaz, where a live firing range was built specifically in order to train the new arrivals.

Ammunition from this firing range contains harmful heavy metals, such as lead, that have the potential to accumulate in soil and contaminate the island’s sole source aquifer located right below the firing range — the same aquifer that is still recovering from the impacts of the contamination from the Andersen Air Force Base.

To make matters worse, the firing range complex has been built in Litekyan, a sacred cultural and ancestral area for the Chamorro people. The area is also a nature reserve that is home to many of Guam’s endangered species.

In a statement, the U.S. Marine Corps said it was committed to “prioritizing environmental and cultural stewardship” and that “building on the established relationships with the people of Guam remains integral in all aspects of development of this installation.”

But according to Pat-Borja, the military’s decision to build on such a culturally and environmentally significant site is indicative of how so-called “national security” always takes first priority for them — the firing range was “non-negotiable.”

“This is the challenge for us as a people and as a territory: at no point in this engagement do we have the right to say, ‘No, we don’t want you to do that,’” Pat-Borja added. “It’s always, well if you don’t like this then tell us another way that we can build a firing range.”

“Geopolitical tensions with China, I would say, are the main reasons the U.S. military is justifying these buildups,” Kieren Rudge, co-founder of the Critical Pacific Island Studies Collective at UC Berkeley, told Truthout. “And so it’s not just in Guam. Also in the Philippines, there’s going to be more bases. They’re bolstering some presence in Australia. So there really is a larger buildup going on throughout the region.”

As a U.S. territory, Guam does not have any meaningful representation in the U.S. government. The island only has a non-voting representative in the House, no Senate representation at all, and moreover, its residents are unable to vote for president.

For Pat-Borja and the Commission on Decolonization, fighting against the military’s stronghold on the island means working toward a future in which the people of Guam can self-govern, and decide their destinies for themselves — but this work is not easy.

“There’s a deep narrative that with this military buildup, it will promote more jobs, it will promote more businesses to stay in business after having something as disastrous as Typhoon Mauer, which just happened a year and some months ago,” Cami Diaz Egurrola, director of communications at the Micronesia Climate Alliance, told Truthout. “So, the idea that thousands of people will come to the island for some has this really positive connotation of it’s going to reinstate and rehabilitate our economy.”

However, Egurrola emphasizes that this perspective misses the bigger picture of Guam’s housing crisis. The average price of a one-bedroom rental in Guam in 2024 is $1,326 per month. The oversaturation of the island’s limited housing market by military buildup, according to Egurrola, is an undeniable contributor to Guam’s housing affordability crisis.

Yet, because of its connection to military buildup, Egurrola says the housing crisis remains an incredibly polarizing economic conversation on the island. In fact, despite all of Guam’s ongoing social and environmental injustices that are clearly a result of military activity, activists say that it is oftentimes extremely difficult to organize their community. “In some circles in Guam, decolonization is a dirty word, but demilitarization is even dirtier,” Pat-Borja explained.

Patriotism in Guam runs high. In fact, the island has the highest rate of military service out of the entire United States. One out of every eight adults in Guam has served in the military. Flores’s dad served in the military, as did their brother, in addition to two brothers-in-law and an uncle.

“The way that we have to approach it is that we have to just be very clear that decolonization is not … anti-American,” Pat-Borja said. “We are doing this because of the injustices perpetrated on our brothers and sisters who served in the military. It’s ironic that we serve at such a high rate and yet we don’t have equal representation and participation in the system of government…. What about our freedom and democracy and liberty and justice?”

Part of this patriotism, according to Pat-Borja, comes from Guam’s deep historical ties with the United States, especially from World War II, when the American military helped liberate the island from Japanese occupation. However, Egurrola argues that widespread skepticism about decolonization also reflects the disempowering effect of the internalization of colonial discourses.

“Who doesn’t want self-government? Who doesn’t want to be in charge of their own destiny? I’ll tell you who: a people that have been colonized for 500 years,” Pat-Borja said. “Because now we’re over here looking at ourselves and questioning whether or not we can govern ourselves.”

For activists, part of their work is having these difficult conversations about how the U.S. military is polluting Guam. The Micronesia Climate Alliance, for instance, is focused on educating people on why it is important to preserve their land and protect their water, especially in light of the climate crisis in which the U.S. military is one of the world’s biggest polluters. “For folks on Turtle Island who don’t know much about the situation or who are willing to learn: supporting grassroots communities and really uplifting them is so important,” Egurrola said. “Keeping our communities in the conversation when talking about the Land Back movement is important as well.”

Flores, too, is working to educate their community on what self-governance in Guam could look like, while continuing to protest in front of the military’s bases. Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian is also resisting through the law, filing a lawsuit with the Center for Biological Diversity against the U.S. Navy and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service with regards to the endangered species being threatened by Camp Blaz’s construction and operation.

“Don’t you ever question or challenge an Indigenous person’s resistance to their own colonization and militarization,” Flores said. “Don’t you ever tell them that what they’re doing is not worth their time and energy. We’ll never stop resisting. We can’t ever stop resisting.”