Vieques, Puerto Rico : from devastation to conservation, and back again

Abstract

The donning of camouflage gear by military forces is uniformly understood to be an attempt to dissolve into a background matrix in order to deceive an enemy in combat, or in a combat simulation. This thesis examines the landscape of Vieques, Puerto Rico, to disprove such notion and move towards proving the opposite: that the military assembled the background matrix according to its own set of interests. Through different communication channels and agents, the military arranges the retrospective gaze into the landscape, recasting the past in the service of its future stratagems. The military communicates to visitors that they gaze at original, primeval nature, when in fact it is a successional vegetation misrepresented as primordial. This scenography proves nearly unquestionable when it is adopted by corporate tourism marketing at the end of the 20th century, but does not appeal to the leisure audience only. It also seduces all those that opposed the military, perpetuating an idea of Vieques without people in the process.