BY John CAVANAGH

JANUARY 26, 2023

The following article taken from inequality.org is by John Cavanagh, a Senior Advisor at the Institute for Policy Studies. We meant to include it in previous additions to The Violence of Development website, but it was missed for a variety of reasons – apologies. We are grateful to John for granting us permission to include the article in the TVOD website.

Key words: metal mining ban; El Salvador; detention of water defenders; mining-related assassinations; Association of Economic and Social Development (ADES); Pacific Rim / OceanaGold.

Protestors demanding the release of the five water defenders. Credit: Association of Economic and Social Development (ADES).

Human rights and environmental activists across the globe are mobilizing in support of five men detained in El Salvador on charges that appear aimed at silencing opposition to mining. The arrestees — Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco, and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega — were among the leaders of a campaign to block mining activities in El Salvador that would have enriched a few while endangering the nation’s water supply.

In 2017, their campaign shook the rapacious global extractives industry to its core by winning the world’s first ban on metals mining. Robin Broad and I chronicled this thrilling victory in our book, The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed [published by Beacon Press, Boston, in 2021].

But now it’s clear this David versus Goliath struggle is not over. El Salvador’s Attorney General claims the January 11 arrests are related to an alleged murder over 30 years ago during El Salvador’s brutal civil war. These charges are beyond dubious.

As more than 250 organisations from 29 countries point out in a joint statement, the government has never bothered to prosecute members of the military responsible for dozens of civil war-era human rights violations. These include a 1981 massacre that left 30 dead and 189 disappeared in the arrestees’ community in northern El Salvador.

“This further raises questions about whether the Attorney General’s true motivation is to attempt to silence these Water Defenders, especially in light of the current administration’s crusade to criminalize, persecute, and demobilize its political opponents,” reads the international statement.

Through my 14 years of collaboration with the water defenders of El Salvador, I’ve got to know one of the five men arrested — Antonio Pacheco — particularly well. His story reflects the courage, creativity, and perseverance of a movement that has inspired fellow activists around the world.

For over two decades, Pacheco has led the Association of Economic and Social Development (ADES), the organisation that anchored the fight against mining in the northern province of Cabañas.

The mining corporation that had come to Cabañas was the Vancouver-based Pacific Rim. What they wanted was to extract the rich veins of gold buried near the Lempa River, the water source for more than half of El Salvador’s 6.2 million people.

Pacheco initially thought mining might be good for this economically poor province. But then he learned about the dangers for public health and agriculture from popular educator Marcelo Rivera. They and others, including tireless community leader Vidalina Morales, began informing their impoverished, rural community about the issue. They also raised funds to bring in outside experts, including a leading international hydrologist who issued a devastating critique of the mining company’s environmental impact statement.

In time, the activists built up a National Roundtable on Metals Mining that won over a strong majority of the public and rallied the Catholic Church, farmers, small businesses, and labour and environmental groups to oppose mining.

Then the company struck back. In 2009, Pacific Rim (a Canadian firm later bought by Australia-based OceanaGold) filed a lawsuit against the government of El Salvador, eventually demanding $250 million in compensation for the loss of profits they’d expected to make from their mining project there. For the cash-strapped country, that was the equivalent of 40 percent of the national public health budget.

This legal blackmail occurred amidst an explosion of violence against anti-mining activists, including the murder of Pacheco’s fellow campaign leader Marcelo Rivera. Several people have been convicted of Rivera’s killing, but to this day the “intellectual authors” have never been held accountable.

Pacheco also faced personal death threats. In the wake of Rivera’s assassination, one note read: “The hour has come…[Pacheco] for the bomb in your own house and of your pals, now is the hour you pay for what you did…[You are] the next like Marcelo Rivera.”

Pro-mining forces also tried to buy Pacheco off through offers of prostitutes and other bribes. He didn’t blink. Instead, Pacheco focused on broadening the campaign’s base, building relationships with the right-wing ARENA party’s environment minister, conservative bishops, and other unlikely allies.

He and Morales also encouraged my organisation, the Institute for Policy Studies and MiningWatch Canada, to create International Allies Against Mining in El Salvador, a coalition that has brought outside attention to the campaign and pressure on the mining company.

In 2016, the water defenders who had paid such a high price for their resistance won their first measure of justice: a three-person tribunal ruled unanimously against the mining company. This victory emboldened efforts behind a ban on metals mining, efforts that paid off in 2017 with a stunning, unanimous vote in the Salvadoran legislature.

Now, Pacheco and others who have inspired defenders of water and democracy around the world sit in jail cells.

Why would a government imprison heroes who have saved their country by saving its rivers? El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, is an authoritarian populist who has demonized environmentalists and suspended a wide range of civil liberties, leading to widespread  arbitrary detentions.

His targeting of the water defenders could be linked to Bukele’s mismanagement of national finances, in part through his disastrous marriage of El Salvador’s currency to Bitcoin, which has created tremendous pressure to generate revenue from any source — even if it destroys the environment.

Before his arrest, Pacheco was one of several people who had reported suspicious appearances by unknown individuals offering to lease farmers’ land for exorbitant amounts of money and provide funding for municipal social programmes in the mining region of Cabañas. These appearances are just one sign that the Bukele government could be moving toward increased collaboration with transnational mining institutions and overturning the mining ban.

El Salvador-based environmentalist Pedro Cabezas and Canadian journalist Owen Schalk have also reported that two mayors from the Cabañas mining region say they met with officials of the Exports and Investment Promotion Agency of El Salvador who told them that mining will soon be reintroduced.

In their joint statement, the international organisations call on Bukele’s government to “drop the charges against the five water defenders and otherwise release them from prison to await their trial.”

Through incredible courage, backed up by strong international solidarity, these water defenders have won seemingly unwinnable battles against formidable economic and political forces. The fight must continue to gain their freedom and keep mining out of El Salvador.

Notes:

• Robin Broad and John Cavanagh’s book is the definitive story behind the run-up to and the background of El Salvador’s metals mining ban, but the subject is also widely covered in a range of articles in Chapter 5 (‘Mining’) of The Violence of Development website.
• Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, 2021, The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed, Beacon Press, Boston.

Included here is a blog from Santa Clara Law’s International Human Rights Clinic.  They submitted a brief in support of BELPO’s Petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. I am grateful to Chloe Tomlinson for permission to reproduce the blog entry in The Violence of Development website.

By Santa Clara Law student Chloe Thomlinson and Prof. Francisco Rivera

On June 13th, 2018, Santa Clara Law’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus curiae brief before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of communities affected by the construction of the Chalillo Dam in Belize. The brief addresses novel legal issues and provides the Commission with a unique opportunity to further develop the human rights obligations of States and businesses in the area of environmental harms caused by large development projects.

Chalillo Dam in Belize.

Fourteen years ago, the Belize Institute of Environmental Law and Policy (BELPO) submitted a petition before the Commission alleging human rights violations caused by the approval, construction, and operation of the Chalillo Dam in the Macal River basin. Construction on the Dam began in 2002 and was completed in 2005. The petitioners allege the dam was approved in violation of applicable regulations that required, among other things, further studies on mitigation of impacts to wildlife, archaeological ruins, and the environment, as well as publication of required water tests.

People living in the Macal River Basin depend on the river for drinking water, employment, bathing, fishing, and recreation. The dam’s construction has severely damaged the Macal River and caused major, irreversible, negative environmental impacts, destroyed unique and critical habitats, and submerged unexplored Mayan archaeological sites, which are of cultural importance to the Mayan communities in the region.

On October 27, 2015, the Commission declared this petition admissible and a decision is pending on its merits.

The Clinic’s brief supports the petitioners’ allegations and argues that:

(1) Belize violated the human rights to life, health, and water by contaminating the communities’ water and food supplies and by making clean water economically inaccessible to them;

(2) Belize violated the right of access to information by failing to comply with public awareness requirements under the dam’s environmental compliance plan, provide adequate responses to requests for information, and offer an effective mechanism to guarantee the right to access information;

(3) Belize violated the right to work by negatively impacting tourism, fishing and farming in the Macal River Valley, and

(4) Belize violated the right to access to justice and judicial protection by failing to provide an effective recourse to address violations of the dam’s environmental compliance plan.

Clinic students Susan Shapiro, Chloe Thomlinson and Kyle Heitmann interviewing a local business owner in Belize.

Five Clinic students worked on the brief during a year-long process that included a fact-finding trip to talk to affected communities in the Macal River in Belize. “Interviewing the affected community members in Belize was an exceptional experience;” said clinic student Chloe Thomlinson, “it made the issues we were discussing all the more real and significant”. Students canoed down the Macal River with affected community members who described the negative effects the dam had on the river and on their livelihoods. Some community members, including children, developed skin rashes and stomach problems due to the contaminated water. For the community, the Macal was more than just a river; it was where they grew up, made memories, and worked, and it was a source of food and clean water.

The Clinic’s brief aims primarily to support and supplement the remarkable work that the petitioners and local NGOs have done to seek reparations for the damage done by the construction of the dam. Additionally, the Clinic expects the Commission to develop clear language on the relevant obligations States and businesses have in the area of economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights, particularly in the context of large development projects that contaminate rivers and cause harm to rural and indigenous peoples.

Read the amicus brief on Chalillo Dam in Belize.

http://law.scu.edu/ihrcblog/international-human-rights-clinic-submits-brief-addressing-environmental-and-human-rights-violations-in-belize/

By Martin Mowforth

The Santa Marta Five – Teodoro Antonio Pacheco, Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega, Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, and Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez – were arrested in January 2023 for ‘illicit association’ and an alleged murder that took place over 34 years ago during the Salvadoran war in the 1980s.

As members of ADES (Association for the Economic Development of El Salvador), the five activists are referred to as ‘water defenders’ on account of their activism in the National Water Forum and the National Alliance Against the Privatisation of Water. But their significance from the point of view of the government of President Nayib Bukele is that the five water defenders were also crucial activists in the campaign of the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining that resulted in the 2017 ban on metal mining in El Salvador, the first country in the world to implement such a ban.

That campaign had been led by ADES in collaboration with a number of other NGOs in El Salvador and had gained a remarkable level of public support that led all the major political parties to back the policy of a ban on metal mining. It now seems highly likely that the current Salvadoran government is attempting to row back against the mining ban and to invite international mining companies to invest in the country again.

The campaign to ban metal mining was motivated by concerns about the effects on the water table of gold exploration and exploitation. In the department of Cabañas where the Canadian mining company Pacific Rim had begun to explore for the metal, even exploration had given rise to a lowering of the water table and its contamination. There were social impacts too, especially in the form of assassinations of anti-mining activists – see this website: https://theviolenceofdevelopment.com/assassinations-and-other-human-rights-violations-of-anti-mining-activists/ .

The Five were instrumental in the campaign that led to the 2017 mining ban. Their detention is believed by many to be politically motivated, especially given the lack of evidence presented by the Attorney General’s office to warrant the charges and the loss of due process under El Salvador’s current ‘state of exception’, an emergency measure brought in by President Bukele to combat the growing violence associated with the gang culture in the country. The state of exception has now been in force for over two years, Bukele’s 25 monthly requests since its inception having been granted by legislators every time.

After several months in detention following their arrest, in August 2023 they were released into house arrest, but now await a trial which a preliminary court hearing in April this year determined they should stand despite a lack of evidence against them. The charges they face are widely seen as a SLAPP – a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation – see this website: https://theviolenceofdevelopment.com/slapps-strategic-lawsuits-against-public-participation/

Salvadoran and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have campaigned and continue to campaign on behalf of the Five, demanding that the charges be dropped. Groups involved in the campaign include NGOs from Germany, Honduras, Canada, the United States and various Latin American groups. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders is monitoring the case, and this general high international interest and pressure could be significant.

International Allies has coordinated the campaign involving academics, lawyers and many international groups, all critical of the lack of evidence behind the charges. John Cavanagh, a Senior Advisor at the Institute for Policy Studies in the USA, said:

It is outrageous that the judge is allowing this trial to go forward despite the lack of any evidence of a crime. The international community stands strong with the five leaders of the successful fight against mining, and we will join Salvadoran water defenders to continue to fight with them for justice in this case.

The international attention generated by the end of April 2024 has been essential to ensure that the Five gain the right to due process (based on international standards), and will remain essential as the trial moves to court.

Sources

• International Allies, 4 April 2024, ‘The fate of the Santa Marta Water Defenders is now in the hands of a judge’, International Allies Against Mining in El Salvador, San Salvador.
• Alexis Stoumbelis, 16 April 2024, CISPES Action Alert, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), Washington DC.
• Giada Ferrucci and Pedro Cabezas, 19 April 2024, ‘Solidarity with El Salvador’s Santa Marta 5 Grows Across Borders’, NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America), New York.
• CISPES, 28 March 2022, ‘The Privatisation of Water in El Salvador’, accessible in The Violence of Development website at: theviolenceofdevelopment.com.the-privatization-of-water-in-el-salvador/
• International Allies, 10 April 2024, ‘International Community Condemns April 10 Ruling in El Salvador’s Court on the Santa Marta Five Water Defenders’, International Allies Against Mining in El Salvador, San Salvador.
• The Violence of Development website, https://theviolenceofdevelopment.com/assassinations-and-other-human-rights-violations-of-anti-mining-activists/
• The Violence of Development website, https://theviolenceofdevelopment.com/slapps-strategic-lawsuits-against-public-participation/

In 2004, a petition against the construction of the Chalillo Dam in Belize was presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on behalf of the Maya people and those living downstream of the dam by The Belize Institute of Environmental Law and Policy (BELPO). Since that time the dam has been built; but now the IACHR has declared that the petition has validity. In such cases we might ask if it acceptable that the IACHR should take eleven years to reach a decision regarding the validity of petitions. We include below the press statement recently released by BELPO.

 PRESS RELEASE: HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS CAUSED BY THE CHALILLO DAM HAVE VALIDITY

June 21, 2016

 In an important decision, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has opened a case against the Government of Belize (GOB) regarding the controversial Chalillo Dam built on Belize’s Macal River in 2005.

The decision is in response to a petition from The Belize Institute of Environmental Law and Policy (BELPO) filed in 2004 on behalf of the Maya People and those living downstream of the dams who say their rights − including their rights to life, liberty and personal security, religious freedom, benefits of culture, legal rights and the right to work − have been violated.

In their brief to the Commission, BELPO documents show how the riverine populations have been harmed: water quality has been so degraded that people can no longer bathe in or drink the water; fish have been poisoned by mercury leaving citizens without their vital source of protein; more than 300 Mayan archaeological sites have been lost under the reservoir eliminating a large body of knowledge to the Maya; changes to river flows and sediment deposition have destroyed farms and ecotourism businesses along the river and unemployment has risen.

Also, BELPO says the Government of Belize has, in defiance of its own institutions and legislation, refused to abide by the Orders of the Belize Supreme Court to enforce the Environmental Compliance Plan (ECP) for Chalillo, which is a contract between the Government and the owner of the dam to take measures to mitigate the damages caused by the dam.

The GOB has also failed to inform the people on the quality of the Macal River water, to disclose mercury levels in fish to the public on a timely basis and to provide a viable warning system to alert downstream populations of dam breaks including the failure to disclose that the dam is built in a seismically active area.

IACHR’s decision to admit our petition is recognition of the severity of the harms to health, safety and property rights, as well as indigenous rights by the destruction of over 300 major Mayan archaeological sites as well as recognition that the people have a right to know the extent and nature of the harm inflicted upon them by contracts made in their name with corporations.

The opening of the case is, above all, a victory for the affected communities, the Maya people of Belize and local social movements, who have endured for all these years, and remain strong and determined in their search for justice and compensation.

As an organization representing the victims of the Chalillo Dam, BELPO remains committed to exposing the human rights violations directly caused by the dam’s construction.

BELPO acknowledges the integral role played by the Environmental Law Alliance (ELAW), the International Rivers Network (including a valiant fighter for the people, Berta Cáceres assassinated in Honduras earlier this year) and Probe International of Canada in the struggle to get these abuses into this international body.

Press Contacts:

George Gonzalez

Dr. Candy Gonzalez

The Belize Institute of Environmental Law and Policy (BELPO)

P.O. Box 105, San Ignacio Town, Cayo District, Belize

Phone: +501- 824-2476   | email: belpo.belize@gmail.com | candybz@gmail.com