Land and Water Protectors Continue their Struggle!

by Amy Argenal

“Esta lucha no podemos hacer solos”
Land and water protectors continue their struggle!
Anti-mining movements in El Salvador

This July, I joined Share Foundation’s Planting Seeds of Hope delegation, along with 15 others from around the United States.  We spent one-week visiting communities, cooperatives, and collectives that are working with rural communities to access health resources, like ProVida, access to land, and cooperative ways of being, like Confras, working with communities to preserve the historical memory and defend the land in communities that were heavily affected from the war and repopulated in the late 1980s, like CCR and ADES.

On July 7th, one of the last days of the delegation, we left the beautiful, nourishing land of Chaletenango after spending three days with CCR, planting, making colorful pupusas, and learning of how a community provides and defends itself.  It was another powerful visit of many on this trip.  From Chale, we drove through curvy roads with amazing views of the countryside to Santa Marta, in the department of Cabañas, to meet with communities there fighting against mining, and the state of exception.Paragraph. Haz clic aquí para editar.

Santa Marta, Cabañas, like Chaletenango, was a region heavily impacted by the years of conflict and many were forced to flee until the late 1980s, when the region was repopulated.  Santa Marta was repopulated in 1987.  Both regions received very little support to rebuild their communities from the government, and through their work supporting each other, and with international and faith based solidarity, were able to return home to create new lives.  In Cabañas, this struggle for a life of dignity and freedom continues, as the community has been impacted by the possibility of mining companies, and the state of exception, which allows the police to arrest anyone and hold them indefinitely on the charges of terrorism, or being a gang member.  Migration from the region has always been high, previously due to lack of job and educational opportunities, but more recently due to the fear that the state of exception has left with the youth.  We learned previously in the delegation that there have been over 80,000 arrests under the state of exception, and 2300 of those are adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 years old.  Between March 2022 and June 2024, 304 people have died in police custody.  CRISTOSAL has a new report out sharing the horrific impacts of the state of exception.  

Our visit was with some of the men recently arrested for the role they played in the movement of the 80s, however, most believe that to be a farce, and recognize their arrest as an attempt to silence the community for their role in defending the land against mining.

Santa Marta has always been on the government's list of communities that will resist oppressive laws.  It is a community with a deep legacy of resistance, but, with much cost to the community.  Everyone in Santa Marta lost at least one family in the civil war.  In 2014, in collaboration with UCA (University of Central America, El Salvador), Santa Marta held a people’s restorative tribunal where they charged the state responsible for five massacres, the largest being that of the Rio Lempa Massacre in 1981, where Salvadoran and Honduran troops opened fire on communities fleeing across the river into safety.  

The state used this pretext to “investigate” the crimes, however, they then turned the information against the actual victims of these massacres to charge the Santa Marta 5 with crimes of illicit association and murder.  On the 11th of January 2023, the police came in the middle of the night to arrest them.  The five men spent eight months in various different prison cells in the country before being released to house arrest, which is how we were able to visit them.  The conditions of the prisons are horrific, and even though the five men were technically not arrested under the state of exception, much of their treatment was very similar.  Under the state of exception, families must pay to have their relatives receive food, but reports from inside show that if they receive it at all, it is a fraction of what the family sent.  If you do not follow orders, you risk being beaten, and there is no access to any health care inside.  Many of the men from Santa Marta are older and shared that if they had not been released to house arrest, they would have surely died inside.  The state of their case is ongoing, and the community is expecting some sort of a trial in October 2024, however, all know that this trial is not at all about justice.  It is about silencing a community with a long history of struggle in defending the land, and a continuous history of violent repression against them.

“We don’t know where one struggle ended and started the other.” -Community member in Santa Marta

In 2009, Marcelo Rivera was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for his activism against the exploratory permits granted for mining in the region.  There was no search when his family reported him captured, and with community support the family was able to discover his body at the bottom of a thirty-foot well.  Five people were prosecuted for the murder of Marcelo but the masterminds were never brought to justice.  One of the accused was a minor, who was later murdered while in prison.

In 2017, El Salvador, after years of struggle and a huge impact on human life, as demonstrated in the killing of Marcelo, banned all mineral mining, open-pit and underground.  It was a huge victory for the communities, but one which has been short lived.    

With the recent arrest of the Santa Marta 5, the community once again knows it is an attempt to silence them, as more and more gestures by the government appear to signal a move to allow mining to return to the region.  In 2020, El Salvador joined a network of other countries that have mining industries called the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development.  In 2022, a parallel law was passed that allowed for special economic zones, “Zedes”, as they are known in Honduras.  These zones allow a company to by-pass national legislation for the purpose of economic development.  This law, if implemented in the region, could circumvent the ban on mining.  During the fight to ban mining in the early 2000s, many scientific experts were brought in on behalf of the community to investigate what the harm would be, and it is well documented that mines completely destroy the livelihood of rural households.  Multinational corporations are able to exploit the natural resources while receiving huge tax-breaks, and while they often offer cash payouts to mayors with the promises of jobs, schools, and hospitals, the long term destruction of the land can no way compare with the short lived promises of the mining companies.  

There are key takeaways for all over the world from what is happening in Santa Marta.  The first is that the struggle cannot be done alone.  Honduras, Guatemala, Peru, Chile, the Congo, Nevada, US are all hot spots of mining.  In Guapinol, Honduras, a place I know well, the community has been fighting for years against an open-pit iron-ore mine.  It has cost them a great deal, including the murders of their family members and large-scale displacement.  Studies there show that if the mine continues to operate at its potential, the risk of contamination could come all the way down to the Caribbean, including contaminating every single fresh water source in the Bajo Aguan. The same is true in El Salvador and Guatemala, where the impacts could be felt all the way down to the Pacific Ocean. The risks of mining, the polluting of the waters, the suctioning of waters from communities, removes their autonomy and possibility for a dignified life, and will continue to lead to migration. 

As the communities of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras continue to support each other in their demands to end mining in the region, we in the Global North must do the same. From the Zero Blanca mine in Guatemala, to the Pinares/ Ecotek mine in Tocoa, to Mina Dorado in El Salvador, we must stand with our companeras to say “Fuera La Mineria”!

In 1987, when the community of Santa Marta began returning home, some asked why they were allowed to return.  The soldiers told them, the world knows that Santa Marta exists.  One community member shared that “it is hard for the government to continue to repress us when the world knows that we exist''.  It is our call to be PRESENTE for Santa Marta and movements against mining in the region.

Written by Amy Argenal, SHARE collaborator and assistant teaching professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  This project was supported in part by a grant from the Institute for Social Transformation at the University of California, Santa Cruz.