Robin Broad and John Cavanagh
Thirty years ago, several thousand civilians in the northern Salvadoran community of Santa Marta quickly gathered a few belongings and fled the US-funded Salvadoran military as it burned their houses and fields in an early stage of the country’s twelve-year civil war. Dozens were killed as they crossed the Lempa River into refugee camps in Honduras.
Today, residents of this area, some born in those Honduran refugee camps, are fighting US and Canadian mining companies eager 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. Once again, civilians have been killed or are receiving death threats.
The communities’ goal: to make El Salvador the first nation to ban gold mining. We traveled to El Salvador in April to find out if this struggle to keep gold in the ground can be won. Our investigation led us from rural communities in the country’s gold belt to ministries of the new progressive government in San Salvador and ultimately to free trade agreements and a tribunal tucked away inside the World Bank in Washington, DC.
We were greeted at the airport by Miguel Rivera, a quiet man in his early 30s whose face is dominated by dark, sad eyes. Miguel is the brother of anti-mining community leader Marcelo Rivera, who was disappeared—tortured and assassinated—in June 2009 in a manner reminiscent of the death squads of the 1980s civil war. We had first met Miguel in October 2009, when he and four others active in El Salvador’s National Roundtable on Mining traveled to Washington to receive the Institute for Policy Studies’ Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, a prize that brought international recognition to this struggle.
http://www.thenation.com/article/162009/water-gold-el-salvador
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