Serrano was arrested by U.S. cops on April 30 together with other protesters carrying out civil disobedience on land used by the Navy for military training exercises. In August a U.S. judge sentenced him to four months in prison, a stiffer sentence than that given to other, more prominent figures who have been arrested in Vieques.

In his message Serrano compared the U.S. warplanes bombing Afghanistan today with the U.S. Navy planes dropping bombs on Puerto Rican soil "that have taken the lives of so many residents of Vieques over 62 years."

"We can describe those attacks on Vieques as terrorist too," Serrano continued, adding that U.S. government officials are conducting both the war on Afghanistan and the U.S. bombing practices on Vieques "in the name of that much-proclaimed democracy."

He said, "Those bombings, which are no different from those against Afghanistan or the terrorist actions against the Twin Towers, have killed flesh-and-blood human beings."

Serrano, elected mayor last November on an anti-Navy platform, belongs to the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), one of the two main parties in Puerto Rico. Before his arrest this year, he was one of the hundreds of demonstrators detained and evicted from the Navy bombing range in eastern Vieques by U.S. marshals and FBI agents in May 2000.

The U.S. military have been using Vieques for war training since the beginning of World War II. The current protests against the U.S. Navy have been going on since April 1999, when a warplane dropped an "errant" bomb that killed David Sanes, a civilian guard and Vieques resident.
 
 
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