In 1534, Spanish officials urged the Crown to garrison Mona Island as La llave de las Indias — the key to the Indies. Madrid refused, allowing French corsairs to exploit the unprotected mesa and repeatedly sack San German.
Centuries later, German submarine U-156 shelled Camp Cofresi, treating a civilian camp as a military target. Eventually, Washington leased Mona to the Air Force but ultimately walked away, leaving a strategic vacuum for smugglers to inherit.
Mona’s 22 square miles of 300-foot cliffs dominate the Mona Passage, an 80-mile choke point serving as the Atlantic gateway to the Panama Canal. This corridor remains dangerously exposed — Coast Guard crews intercepted 2,941 migrants here over a recent 15-month stretch, while cartel go-fast boats run cocaine along these same lines. Alarmingly, CSIS ranks Chinese-linked Jamaica as Latin America’s highest-risk port because it commands this very passage. Yet, despite creating the Shield of the Americas to secure hemispheric chokepoints, Washington still lacks an American watchtower on the key itself.
Puerto Rico currently categorizes Mona as a nature reserve, but environmental conservation does not require an unmonitored security corridor. Thus, three decisive executive orders can close this historic gap.
First, the White House must execute a Dual-Status Amona Compact, maintaining the reserve across the mesa while assigning the lighthouse spine, Sardinera camp, airstrip, and a cave cluster to a joint Interior-Defense bastion. Puerto Rico retains the land title, but Washington assumes physical control of the landing points. Because Mona is sovereign U.S. soil, Southern Command requires no foreign status-of-forces agreements to build a secure facility in the rock. This bastion should land fiber from Mayagüez, submerge a passage hydrophone line, and host a Shield fusion intelligence watch under U.S. law. Here, partner nations will share one operational picture and sign pre-approved pursuit authority. Crucially, the initiative must legally bar non-allied research vessels before Beijing exploits the vacancy as “science.”
Second, U.S. Southern Command must certify Mona as the official Passage Qualification Range and treat that certificate as a weapon. Shield navies and coast guards must qualify quarterly in this live alley — mastering unmanned interceptors, night go-fast hunts, and cave-to-beach boardings — by leveraging the existing Sardinera camp and its airstrip.
In tandem, security cooperation must be strictly transactional. Partners who pass retain premium U.S. targeting and, when requested, American shooters — partners who fail sit on the bench. No qualification, no missiles. Furthermore, the range should publish a hot-pursuit box modeled after a NORAD air-defense identification zone with fixed coordinates and clear rules. Bureaucrats in Miami do not catch incoming yolas (small, illegal boats that predominantly take people from Haiti and the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico) — crews who have already hunted the grueling Mona swell do.
TRUMP IS TREATING A HEMISPHERIC WAR LIKE STREET CRIME — ISRAEL KNOWS BETTER
Third, the Trump administration should seat the Amona Targeting Board inside that cave, funding operations with a fixed cut of forfeited cartel hulls, cash, and aircraft. Every Shield government seeking the feed must station a named liaison officer on the mesa under U.S. command; failure to provide an officer will trigger an immediate cutoff of data feeds and American strike support in that nation’s waters.
Cheap alliances buy nothing but cheap talk. While a comfortable chair in Doral produces mere paper promises, a rugged bunk on Mona welds a lethal kill chain that Washington can pull. President Donald Trump must restore an American garrison in the key Spanish-speaking country, and Washington forgot.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American–Israeli scholar specializing in international security policy. A multilingual veteran of the IDF special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C., area.