For months, she has watched as F-35s fighter jets and Osprey transport aircraft take off, especially before the capture of Maduro in Venezuela, and has noticed an increase in the number of planes at the base.
Many Viequenses are still grappling with the trauma of naval occupation, Rios says.
"Band-Aids are getting ripped off; wounds that were healing little by little have been reopened," she said.
"You can’t heal from something when you’re being actively harmed by it, and we need to be able to heal from all of this and try to restore our community."
Dissatisfaction is growing over Puerto Rico’s status as a US “colony”, existing as American territory but lacking any real representation in Congress.
For years, members of the group Vidas Viequenses Valen (Vieques Lives Matter) have worked to support the self-determination of Vieques residents.
Last month, the group’s president, Alexandra Connelly, testified to the United Nations’ special committee on decolonisation about the island’s health crisis and the open detonation of explosives as part of the navy’s “cleanup” process.
"We’re an island within a colony, forced for generations to endure decisions made about our land, our health and our future," she said.
"What are we going to leave [future generations]?
A contaminated, displaced island or an island where children can be born, can grow up and decide their own future?"
This question is on Zaida Torres’s mind. She recently joined Connelly at the UN as a petitioner.
In 1999, after the navy killed Sanes Rodriguez, Torres helped form the Vieques Women’s Alliance, a group that was instrumental in ousting the military from the island in 2003.
The group was among the first to inform residents about the link between their cancer diagnoses and the military’s munitions training.
Now Torres mentors a new generation of the alliance who are fighting to support women’s health and oppose further militarisation.
Despite everything, Torres remains in her home and refuses to be moved. "This is my land.
I was born here, and I’m not leaving," she said. "I’ll die here, I’ll be buried here.
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I’ll stay here."
