The Navy's use of Vieques as a live-fire range made the island municipality the independence movement's great unifying cause. The fishermen's blockades of 1978–79 brought the first wave of prosecutions: twenty-one protesters arrested on the range in May 1979 included Ángel Rodríguez Cristóbal of the Socialist League, who was found hanged in his cell at the federal prison in Tallahassee that November — a death the movement has always counted a murder, answered by the Macheteros at Sabana Seca.

After stray bombs killed civilian guard David Sanes in April 1999, civil disobedience became general: encampments on the range, and upon their removal a four-year campaign in which more than 1,500 people were arrested, from Rubén Berríos and island legislators to Al Sharpton and Robert Kennedy Jr., many serving federal sentences at Guaynabo. The Navy left Vieques on May 1, 2003 — the movement's clearest victory, won by filling the jails.