Photo: STHANLY ESTRADA/AFP/Getty Images
For: roger cute
Posted Jan 19, 2023, 4:18 pm EST
ON JANUARY 11, agents from the El Salvador Prosecutor’s Office and the National Civil Police (PNC) arrested directors of the Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES) and community representatives of the rural population of Santa Marta, who for years had they faced powerful foreign mining interests in the department of Cabañas. The Government of El Salvador accuses them of the murder of an alleged Army informant 40 years ago. Paradoxically, the enclave of Santa Marta was formed by war displaced persons who, in the mid-1980s, left the Mesa Grande refugee center in Honduras and returned to El Salvador determined to reclaim their homeland. During that war of more than ten years, vast communities were wiped out in blood and fire by the Army of El Salvador and paramilitary organizations such as ORDEN. The UN Truth Commission that investigated the war crimes that occurred in the Salvadoran conflict documented with abundant information the government repression waged against the inhabitants of that department. Three decades after the end of the conflict, these crimes continue in impunity.
The people captured in Santa Marta were accused by the Minister of Security of the Government of affiliation to “illicit associations”, a formula that under the State of Exception created by President Nayib Bukele, is used to accuse people of being linked to gangs . In addition to constituting a serious accusation, it is used at will. An element of the PNC that recently participated in the capture of a trade unionist who was demanding the payment of two months’ wages in arrears, reflected it this way: “The position is the least of it.” The accusations against the community members of Santa Marta have not gone unanswered. “We have known the community of Santa Marta since 1987 and 1988, when we accompanied them in a pastoral and supportive manner on their return from the shelters,” reads a statement from the Emmanuel Baptist Church released this Monday. The ADES has been an element of progress for the people of San Marteño thanks to its initiatives in the fields of education, productive work, health, work with young people and the defense of water and the environment, affirms that Baptist church. So, what could be the context of the recent judicial action against the comuneros? According to the residents of Santa Marta, we must go back to the early years of this century, when that community aligned itself against powerful mining interests that wanted to open operations in Cabañas to the detriment of the aquifers and health. That historic campaign against mining led to the government’s approval of a moratorium on this type of exploitation, and in 2009, the National Roundtable Against Metal Mining in El Salvador won the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award. Five of the leaders captured by the Government led that resistance movement, as recognized this week by the organizations called to the III Continental Meeting for Water and Climate Crisis, Cuenca-Ecuador. Leonel Rivas, a community member from Santa Marta, recently assured journalist Gloria Silvia Orellana, from the dailyCoLatino
, that the accusations against his colleagues are related to an attempt to reactivate mining in Cabañas. “Right now there are people from Peru who work for a Chinese company, and they are meeting with local members, telling them that mining will bring them benefits,” environmentalist Ricardo Navarro told Orellana. Journalist Nina Lakhani of the British newspaper Guardian
collects an interpretation of the Santa Marta raid based on interviews with community members. President Nayib Bukele, whose bet on cryptocurrency has met with a disastrous end, Lakhani writes, is under “enormous pressure” to raise financial resources: “In recent months, Cabañas officials have been visited by people interested in mining. Some individuals are offering to buy land on the land where the old mines are located.”
Meanwhile, the leaders of Santa Marta have been thrown into the limbo of the State of Exception, where nothing is guaranteed, not even life. But their community does not abandon them.
Roger Lindo is a journalist and writer