On January 11, El Salvador president Nayib Bukele’s administration issued arrest warrants for six community leaders who played key roles in the historic 2017 victory against metallic mining in El Salvador, accusing them of an unrelated thirty-year-old murder.
The Salvadoran government is accusing the community activists of participating in killing a woman in August 1989, during the country’s twelve-year-long internal armed conflict. It is also accusing the six ex-guerillas with “illicit association.” The arrest warrants came just days ahead of the anniversary of the signing of the country’s peace accords, which ended the war. Human rights advocates in El Salvador say that the arrests are part of the Bukele administration’s attempts to reverse the country’s historic metallic mining ban that was declared in 2017.
The accusations of “illicit association” are seen as odd by those who worked with the community leaders in their efforts to ban mining.
“It is very strange for us to see at this point, thirty years [later]” Andrés McKinley, a human rights defender in El Salvador who is part of the movement to ban metallic mining in the country, tells The Progressive. “They are not members of any other organization, other than the community non-governmental organization, the Association for the Economic Development of El Salvador (ADES), an NGO that promotes human development.”
Many of those arrested for the 1989 murder come from the community of Santa Marta, Victoria, in the department of Cabañas in north central El Salvador. Residents in the community, along with the local ADES organization, played a key part in the movement against mining in El Salvador. It was in their territory that the Canadian-based Pacific Rim mining company began exploring for mineral resources.
Beginning in 2004, residents began to organize against mining companies over fears of the contamination of their water sources. By 2017, the anti-mining movement forged a broad coalition with other civil society groups, including the Catholic Church, under the banner “Si a la vida, no a la mineria” or “Yes to life, no to mining.”
Their efforts succeeded. In March 2017, El Salvador became the first country to pass a nationwide moratorium on mining.
But this victory now seems to be under threat.
“The Bukele administration wants to get rid of all citizen resistance, of any voice that opposes its megaprojects.”
The arrest of key leaders in the movement has generated fear that the Bukele administration, which has never fully implemented the anti-mining legislation, is targeting the key actors as a show of force. This is especially worrying as there is speculation that the mining sector has secretly entered into the free-trade negotiations with the Bukele administration and China, which is among the key aid providers to El Salvador and has become a major investor throughout the world through their Belt and Roads initiative.
“The anti-mining movement in El Salvador has been very strong, an example for the region,” says Leonor Arteaga, executive director of the Due Process of Law Foundation, based in Washington, D.C.
“[The Bukele government] wants to dismantle the leadership in the communities, and they want to dismantle the [anti]-mining movement,” Arteaga tells The Progressive. “The Bukele administration wants to get rid of all citizen resistance, of any voice that opposes its megaprojects.”
The concerns over the Bukele administration dismantling the anti-mining movement overshadows another alarming aspect of the arrests: the accusations come from the era of the country’s internal armed conflict.
President Bukele has frequently criticized the country’s peace accords, which in December 2020 he referred to as being a “farce.” The following January, he stated that his administration would no longer commemorate the accords.
Bukele’s sidelining the peace accords has been viewed as a rejection of their democratic principles, and of both the leftwing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), the two parties that have governed El Salvador since 1992. His criticisms of the peace accords come as he has continued concentrating power around himself.
The accusation of illicit association bring concerns that there is an expansion of the definition of this term, reflecting the divisions in the country during the war.
“But at the level of public discourse it seems [they are implying that] being a member of the FMLN is being part, or was part of, an illicit association,” Arteaga says. “No! This is absurd, because this is the same charge that is made to punish people who are associated with committing crimes.”
The FMLN became an official political party following the 1992 accords, and has won the presidency twice during the past two decades. “The FMLN is not an illicit group,” Arteaga adds.
The case, she says, has been filled with other procedural errors. No serious investigation was carried out, and the accusations were brought under spurious circumstances.
Furthermore, the details of the case file remains sealed.
Yet as the judicial branch under Bukele pursues community leaders for crimes committed during the civil war, other cases involving war crimes by the country’s military have been stalled. These cases include the high-profile lawsuits against former military leaders for the 1981 massacre in the community of El Mozote, where over 1,000 people were killed by the Salvadoran military, and the massacre of the six Jesuit priests at the Central American University in 1989.
“All cases from the Internal Armed Conflict are all still open, and in all cases new judges have been appointed,” Arteaga says. “All of these new judges were appointed by Bukele’s allies within the country’s Supreme Court.”
She adds, “There has not been a single person convicted in El Salvador for crimes committed during the internal armed conflict.”
Within days of the arrests, over 250 organizations from around the world called on the Bukele administration to free the leaders. But given Bukele’s escalation of clamping down on the opposition ahead of his 2024 run for re-election, these calls are unlikely to have results.