As the expansion continues, the US began building a new military base in 2023, the construction of which requires clearing a thousand acres of land and restricting key parts of a national wildlife refuge.
It’s already difficult for Guam’s Chamorro medicine women, or yo’åmte, to gather medicinal plants from traditional lands, which are now considered US military property. The new base, constructed on yet more traditional lands, will only make it harder. This affects the medicine women’s ability to heal their community and realize the Chamorro’s right to health and to pass on their medicinal knowledge to a new generation of yo’åmte.
As the US military operation on the island grows, yo’åmte are increasingly subjected to restrictions, preventing medicine women from realizing the right to health for themselves and for the Chamorro people they serve.
Drawing on the work of Harvard University academic Rob Nixon, policy experts characterize these restrictions and ongoing threats to the physical and mental health of Chamorro people as a form of “slow violence” that takes place gradually and often in full view. The Chamorro people of Guam have long experienced slow violence at the hands of the US military. For the yo’åmte, slow violence includes restrictions on access to medicinal plants, which the Chamorro experience as the erasure of Indigenous identity, culture, and knowledge systems on the one hand, and the promotion of hegemonic Western beliefs centered on militarism, capitalism, and biomedical conceptions of health instead.
As the US military expands its already-significant footprint on the island through what some activists call “settler colonialism,” years of colonization have left a legacy of unaddressed human rights challenges. These include land seizure, toxic contamination, and serious health harms that are coming to a head because of the military buildup on Guam.
Approximately 28 percent of the island is occupied by the US military, but the extent and impact of their presence, including environmental contamination stemming from the military’s open burn and detonation activity, is far greater. Recently, the US military announced plans to invest billions of dollars in missile defense systems on Guam and build a new shooting range over a wildlife refuge.
The US is also constructing a new military base, Camp Blaz, which is expected to house 5,000 marines and their dependents, who will be relocated from Okinawa, Japan. The camp’s construction will require clearing a thousand acres of land and restricting key parts of a national wildlife refuge at an area called Ritidian Point. This includes clearing native limestone forests that take hundreds of thousands of years to develop naturally and are an important carbon sink.
As a result of the US military expansion, Prutehi submitted a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples on October 14, 2024, alleging various human rights violations committed by the US government against the Chamorro people. The complaint details the ongoing US colonization of Guam, one of the last formally recognized colonies in the world.
The United States, as the colonial administrator of the territory, is obligated under international law to respect the right to self-determination of the people of Guam. Despite being US citizens, Chamorro people have no meaningful representation within the US political system as colonial subjects; they have no representation in Congress and no right to vote in US presidential elections.
The UN has consistently raised concerns to the US about Guam’s status as a colony, and in a 2021 resolution the General Assembly noted that “in the process of decolonization of Guam, there is no alternative to the principle of self-determination, which is also a fundamental human right.” Continued US colonial occupation of Guam constitutes a denial of the right to self-determination and gives rise to violations of other human rights of the Chamorro people.
Source: HRW