WHEN US President Donald Trump announced that the CIA had been authorised to conduct operations inside Venezuela, just as US drones struck another small boat off Venezuela’s coast, few people in the United States realised that much of this militarisation begins on the soil of a land denied its own sovereignty: Puerto Rico.

The island that has lived under US rule since 1898 is once again being used as a staging ground for US militarism, this time for Washington’s latest “war on drugs” narrative, masking a campaign of coercion against Latin America’s independent governments.

After invading Puerto Rico in 1898, the United States quickly turned the island into a strategic military outpost: the “Gibraltar of the Caribbean,” with naval bases in Ceiba, Roosevelt Roads and Vieques designed to dominate the eastern Caribbean and protect the new artery of empire: the Panama Canal.

From World War I onward, Puerto Ricans were drafted into every major US war, fighting and dying for a flag that still denies them full citizenship rights. Meanwhile, the island’s lands and waters were expropriated for bombing ranges, naval training, and intelligence operations.

For six decades, the US navy used Vieques as a live-fire testing ground, dropping millions of pounds of explosives and munitions, including napalm and depleted uranium. The result was environmental devastation and one of the highest cancer rates in the region. It took a mass civil disobedience movement to finally force the navy out in 2003.

That victory proved Puerto Ricans’ capacity for organised resistance, but the structures of empire never disappeared.

Two decades later, those same bases and runways are being reactivated. In 2025, Washington quietly expanded military operations on the island, deploying F-35 fighter jets, stationing P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, and rotating marine and special operations units through Puerto Rican ports and airfields. The official justification is “counter-narcotics operations,” but the timing and scale point to something far larger: a regional military build-up aimed at Venezuela.

The aggression has now extended to Colombia, where Trump has cut off all US aid and accused President Gustavo Petro of being a “drug leader.”

The announcement came just days after Colombia’s president denounced the US drone strikes off Venezuela’s coast, one of which, he warned, hit a Colombian vessel and killed Colombian citizens. Instead of accountability, Washington answered with insults and economic blackmail.

The Trump administration’s designation of a “non-international armed conflict with drug cartels” gives legal cover for drone strikes and covert missions far from US territory.

Puerto Rico’s colonial status makes it the perfect staging ground: a place the Pentagon can operate freely without congressional debate or local consent.

For Puerto Ricans, this militarisation is not an abstract issue. It means more surveillance, more environmental risk and a deeper entanglement in wars they never chose. It also signals a return to the same imperial logic that made Vieques a bombing range: using occupied territory to project power abroad.

Puerto Rico remains the oldest colony in the modern world, a US “territory” whose people are “citizens” but not sovereign. They cannot vote for president, have no senators and possess only a symbolic representative in Congress. That absence of sovereignty is what makes it so useful to the empire: a grey zone of legality where wars can be prepared without democratic consent.

This is not the first time Puerto Rico has been used as a military springboard. Its bases have served as logistical hubs for interventions across the hemisphere, from the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, to Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989.

Each of these operations was justified through cold war rhetoric, the defence of “freedom,” “stability” and “democracy,” while systematically targeting governments and social movements seeking independence from US control.

Puerto Rican-born Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez has warned that history is repeating itself. In a Newsweek op-ed, she reminded Washington of the lesson of Vieques: that the island’s people have already paid the price for US militarism through contamination, displacement and neglect.

“Our people have already suffered enough from military pollution and colonial exploitation. Puerto Rico deserves peace, not more war,” she said.

Her call aligns with that of Caribbean and Latin American nations in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), which have declared the region a “Zone of Peace.”

The build-up around Venezuela follows a long-standing pattern in US foreign policy: when a nation asserts control over its own resources or refuses to obey Washington’s dictates, it becomes a target. Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua are punished for exactly that. Sanctions, blockades and covert operations function as mechanisms of domination to keep the hemisphere open to US capital and military reach.

Puerto Rico’s place in this strategy reveals Washington’s core hypocrisy: it wages wars abroad in the name of freedom while denying that freedom to the colony it still holds. Its people are governed without full representation, its land is used for war and its economy remains bound to Washington’s dictates.

Puerto Rico’s demand for independence is the same demand made by Venezuela, Cuba and every nation that refuses to live on its knees: the right to determine its own future.

The struggle for peace, sovereignty and dignity in Nuestra America runs through Puerto Rico’s shores. When US drones take off from Caribbean airstrips to strike Venezuela, they fly over the ghosts of Vieques, over the land where Puerto Ricans once stood unarmed against an empire.

Puerto Rico deserves a future of peace, environmental healing and sovereignty, and Venezuela deserves the same: the right to live free from siege, to defend its independence, and to build its own destiny without fear of US bombs or blockades. To defend Puerto Rico’s right to peace is to defend Venezuela’s right to exist.

Michelle Ellner is the Latin America campaign co-ordinator of Codepink. This article is republished from peoplesdispatch.org.