'Yes to Life, No to Mining'

This article appears in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine. To subscribe, click here .

LAST APRIL, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban the mining of gold and other metals. The action grew out of a decades-long struggle to protect access to clean water and prevent pollution caused by mining projects.

The Catholic Church played a central role in the movement to end mining, which organized under the slogan Si a la vida, no a la mineria (“Yes to life, no to mining!”). An encyclical from Pope Francis provided inspiration, and San Salvador’s archbishop called on legislators to pass the anti-mining law, which the church was integral in writing. For many, it called to mind the actions of Archbishop Óscar Romero in El Salvador’s civil war decades before.

‘To work for the mines is to work for death’

Beneath the jungles and mountains that stretch from southern Mexico to Nicaragua lie untold mineral riches. Over the last two decades, transnational companies, drawn by the lack of regulation and the promise of huge profits, have sought to exploit these resources. But the rise of the extractive industries has triggered intense social conflicts, environmental destruction, and violence throughout the region.

“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-year-old 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 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 Mauricio Funes, of the left-wing FMLN party, declared a national moratorium on all mining activities.

The moratorium unleashed new levels of brutal repression against grassroots organizers by paramilitaries. In June 2009, Marcelo Rivera, one of the key leaders of the movement, was kidnapped, tortured, and later found dead. In December 2009, Ramiro Rivera Gomez, Dora Alicia Recinos Sorto, and her unborn child were assassinated by paramilitaries in the San Sebastian region.

Guevara Velasco himself narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in 2013. “The grace of God was upon me,” Guevara Velasco said. “A dog came and attacked the man as he pointed his gun at me. It really scared me, but I will not allow them to intimidate me.”

The ban heard around the world

El Salvador’s mining moratorium had a ripple effect around the world, including lawsuits and countersuits. Pacific Rim (which was later purchased by the Australia-based OceanaGold) sued the government of El Salvador for $250 million for violation of the Central America Free Trade Agreement. After seven years, in October 2016, the World Bank finally dismissed OceanaGold’s claim and ordered the corporation to pay El Salvador $8 million to cover legal costs.

The decision shocked observers—and added strength to the anti-mining movement in El Salvador and around the world.

“It was two giants against tiny El Salvador,” Solis said. “This decision really inspired the people. It gave them new force to continue to struggle against mining, and to struggle for a law banning mining.”

Riding this tide of enthusiasm, last February San Salvador’s Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas called on legislators to pass the anti-mining law, which members of the Jesuit-run University of Central America were instrumental in writing. Legislators said they would consider the law if the church was able to collect 10,000 signatures in eight days. The church gathered more than 30,000 signatures.

On March 9, thousands of supporters marched to the assembly building to present the signatures—including Archbishop Escobar Alas, leaders from the university and from Caritas, the coalition of Catholic aid agencies, as well as Solis. “The members of the legislative assembly said that they would have a decision by Holy Week,” said Solis. “And just days before Holy Week, they announced they had passed the law unanimously.”

The new law orders the Ministry of Economy to close existing mines, while prohibiting the government from issuing new mining licenses. It gives small-scale miners a two-year period to phase out production. The law does not apply to mining coal, salt, and other nonmetallic substances.

‘Our struggle will continue’

The mining issue has galvanized Catholics throughout the country and united the bishops. “We have to defend the rights of all people; as a church, we will always defend the right to life,” said Archbishop Escobar Alas.

Escobar Alas became archbishop of San Salvador in 2008, replacing the socially and politically conservative Fernando Saenz Lacalle, a member of Opus Dei. Escobar Alas was influenced by Pope Francis’ calls for the defense of “our common home” in his 2015 encyclical and by other papal documents. For example, in a 2015 letter to residents of mining communities, Francis called for a “radical paradigm shift” in the mining sector and decried the “dramatic consequences of environmental degradation in the life of the poorest and the excluded.”

“We were supported and inspired by the entrance of Pope Francis,” said Solis, the Franciscan. “Specifically, the encyclical Laudato Si’. It is an excellent encyclical for awakening the awareness of people to the responsibility to protect the environment, that everything is interrelated, and that we need to take care of our common home.”

The victory in the World Bank court and the enactment of the world’s first national ban on metal mining does not mean that the struggle is over for the communities of El Salvador.

“This law will not protect us from mining,” said Guevara Velasco. “We have good laws, but the state and people may not be capable of fulfilling the law. Our struggle will continue.”