The executives of a global mining corporation assumed it would be easy to get their way in Cabañas, a rural region of northern El Salvador. They were wrong.
What they wanted was 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. Instead, local farmers and others came together to fight the project over concerns that the toxic chemicals used in gold mining would poison their water. In time, they won over a strong majority of the public and rallied the Catholic Church, small businesses, and labor and environmental groups to successfully pressure the national government to oppose mining.
Then the company struck back. Pacific Rim (a Canadian firm later bought by Australia-based Oceana Gold) filed a lawsuit against the government of El Salvador in 2009, demanding $250 million in compensation for the loss of profits they’d expected to make from their mining project there. This is a staggering sum for a cash-strapped country, the equivalent of 40 percent of El Salvador’s entire public health budget in 2015.
The mining company demanded $250 million, the equivalent of 40% of El Salvador’s health budget.
After seven years of legal blackmail aimed at getting the Salvadoran government to back down and allow the mining to go ahead, an international tribunal that is part of the World Bank Group finally dismissed the lawsuit on October 14. They also ordered the company to pay $8 million of the government’s legal expenses. For the Salvadoran anti-mining activists who have paid a painfully high price for their resistance, it was a measure of justice.
One of those activists is Miguel Angel Rivera. In June 2009, his brother Marcelo, a prominent cultural and environmental leader who opposed the mine, was tortured and assassinated. While questions remain, many activists believe that pro-mining forces — including local politicians who stood to benefit if Pacific Rim started mining — are ultimately…