Chamorros, whose history on Guam and the rest of the Mariana Islands dates to between 1500 and 2000 BCE, have not enjoyed the right to self-determination in nearly five hundred years. The Spanish arrived in 1521, claiming Guam and the Marianas as a Spanish possession four decades later. Like the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Chamorros were decimated by disease and violence.11 Spain ruled Guam as a colony for more than two hundred years until the U.S. Navy seized the island and its small military garrison as a prize of the 1898 war.

David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Milit…, loc. 236