Five years after Kelly AFB closed its doors, leaving behind years of chemical contamination and worried neighbors, local activists met with about two dozen counterparts from around the world who face similar concerns about U.S. bases on foreign soil.

The politically tinged conference, "Movement-Building Against Military Contamination & Militarism," was organized by the Southwest Workers Union, which as a group has been perhaps the most persistent and angry critic of the Kelly cleanup process.

The conference began Thursday and ends Saturday with a public march to the former Kelly main gate, followed by a rally.

"We're addressing problems they face with the U.S. military and, specifically contamination," said Jill Johnston, a union leader.

"They're coming in solidarity with the struggle we have here around the former Kelly AFB," she said at a news conference kicking off the forum. "With the U.S. military being the largest polluter in the world, we find it really important to converge our struggles to build power, so we can build a movement from the grass roots to achieve justice, to achieve health and to achieve a real cleanup for our community."

Among the polluted bases under discussion is the former Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

"The U.S. Embassy says cleanup is a non-issue, and the Philippines government has stopped negotiating for it," said Myrla Baldonado, the Philippines-based president of the Alliance for Bases Clean-Up International.

Baldonado said residents around Clark are suffering health effects they believe are related to the widespread contamination left behind by military operations.

Elizabeth Crow with the Chemical Weapons Working Group, an international group advocating the safe disposal of chemical warfare and toxic material, said there are solutions to the problems that activists are complaining about, many of them simply technological, such as cleaning up pollutants.

"At the root of all these solutions is the need for the military and our corporations to take accountability for their actions," she said. "One of the things we're working on here is to try to uncover the accountability."

Pollutants that were leaked or dumped at Kelly contaminated a shallow unused aquifer up to five miles from the former Air Force maintenance depot's boundaries. The plume's potentially cancer-causing chlorinated solvents at one time had spread under more than 20,000 homes.

Federal studies have found higher rates of certain cancers and other illnesses in ZIP codes around the former base, on the city's South Side, but have been unable to link those illnesses to any specific cause or exposure, particularly Kelly pollutants.

Sonja Coderre, public affairs officer for the Air Force Real Property Agency, which is in charge of the cleanup at the former Kelly, said the Air Force is doing everything necessary to clean up the pollution while looking into its neighbors' health concerns.

The Air Force, she said, has funded studies looking for potential problems from the neighborhood plume and has committed $10 million over five years to fund health tests at the neighborhood's Environmental Health and Wellness Center.

The Air Force through December had spent $320.4 million on environmental investigation and cleanup at the former Kelly AFB, which now is an industrial center known as Port San Antonio.

Federal and state regulators say that 475 of 687 potentially contaminated sites at the former base have been cleaned up.