february-2018

Clergy, including José Luis
Escobar Alas, Archbishop
of San Salvador, center,
and Franciscan Domingo
Solis, right, helped lead
protests against mining.
“The owners [of the mines]
present themselves as grand
industrialists with great technology,”
said Domingo Solis, a
62-year-old Franciscan, in his
office at San Antonio Church in San
Salvador. “But they lack the recognition
of the dignity of the people and
other living beings—the plants and
animals—in the areas where they are
going to work. The object of the company
is to take the gold and silver that
is in the subsoil, at whatever cost. They
come and offer work, technology, and
development to the communities, in
order to extract the gold, silver, or whatever
metal there is. If they have to destroy
a mountain, [they say] they must do it
because the gold is below it.”
The new millennium brought more
interest from mining firms as the country
ended its long civil war and began negotiating
the Central American Free Trade
Agreement in 2003. The year before, the
government prepared a development plan
for the northern region of El Salvador
that relied heavily on natural-resource
extraction. According to Pedro Cabezas,
an independent investigator who works
closely with the movement against mining,
the national development plan directly
impacted 20 percent of the country.
Transnational mining companies—
such as the Canada-based Pacific Rim
Mining Corporation and the Utah-based
Martinique Mining Corporation—began
investing in El Salvador mining projects.
But this put El Salvador in a precarious position,
according to Cabezas: Mining would
exacerbate the country’s fragile environmental
issues, especially access to water.
“It is a small territory that is overpopulated
and has a deforestation rate of 90
percent; the majority of the water sources
were being contaminated,” Cabezas said.
“The presence of mining would accelerate
the environmental crisis.”
Faced with the threat of environmental
destruction, communities across the country
organized into a national movement to
challenge mining interests. “This movement
rose from the communities and brought
together powerful actors from across the
country,” said Cabezas.
“To work against the mines in El
Salvador is to work
for life; to work for the mines is
to work for death,” Solis said. “The mines
destroy the forests, they rip apart the ecosystem,
they contaminate the water, and they
expel the people.”
The resistance grows
Alejandro Guevara Velasco, a 68-yearold
farmer from the northern region of El
Salvador, has known no other world than
that of working in the fields. He’s been farming
to produce maize, beans, and other crops
since he was 7 years old.
“The campesino lives a very difficult
and desperate life,” Guevara Velasco said
in the office of the Social and Economic
Development Association, an organization
El Salvador’s mining moratorium had
a ripple effect around the world.
that has worked in the northern region of
Cabañas since 1993. “All the land in this
country was obtained by the land owners,”
Guevara Velasco explained. “This means
we are forced to rent for everything. We
live enslaved. They charge us whatever they
wish, and they can do what they want with
the lands. They can sell it if they wish.”
In 2004, Guevara Velasco began to see
strange men coming onto his land to collect
soil samples. The men were from the
Canadian mining company Pacific Rim,
which had been given licenses for exploration
in the area. The landowners impacted
by the exploration, including Guevara
Velasco, were never warned of the licenses.
“They were going to begin excavating
for gold under the nearby area without
informing the nearby campesinos,
including me,” explained
Guevara Velasco. This need for
information led to the earliest
mobilizations of the community
against Pacific Rim’s El
Dorado mine.
Guevara Velasco and
others told the Social and
Economic Development
Association about the
mining and asked for
help. David Pereira, a mining analyst in
San Salvador, along with other investigators
including Cabezas, began looking with
the farmers at the impact of the gold mines
in their region. They started by studying the
longest operating mine in Salvadoran history—the
San Sebastian mine owned by the
Wisconsin-based Commerce Group. What
they found was a legacy of contamination.
“In the 1980s, the residents said that
they began to see a stream of yellowish
liquid leaving the entrance of the mine,
leading to the river San Sebastian,” said
Pereira. “This liquid is the acidic drainage
of the mine. Today this stream has grown,
and the river is utterly dead.” The case of San
Sebastian, and the stories coming in from
movements against mining in Guatemala
and Honduras, influenced other communities
to organize against
mining interests.
In 2007, the Catholic
Church issued a formal
proclamation against silver
and gold mining,
signed by nine bishops and an archbishop.
The statement identified mining’s threats to
communities, to agriculture, and to clean
water. “For all of the above,” wrote the bishops,
“we affirm that, since the life of the
human being is in danger, even if some economic
benefits can be obtained, the mining
of precious metals should not be allowed in
El Salvador. No material advantage can be
compared to the value of human life.”
By 2008, numerous civil resistance
actions and protests had occurred, influencing
the national government to pressure the
mining companies. That year, Salvadoran
president Antonio Saca, of the right-wing
ARENA party, stated that his government
would not issue new mining permits. The
following year, new Salvadoran president
Jeff Abbott
28 sojourners FEBRUARY 2018 sojo.net