On January 11, five leaders of the community of Santa Marta, Cabañas, in northern El Salvador, were arrested. A protected witness had accused them of involvement in a murder that happened in 1989, during the country’s brutal civil war. The witness admitted he had no firsthand knowledge of the crime the five are accused of when he was questioned by the defendants’ lawyer.
When charges were brought against soldiers who had committed atrocities during the war, they remained free until trial. A judge, however, ruled that these former members of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) should stay in custody.
The five, Teodoro Antonio Pacheco, Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega, Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, and Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, are human rights and water defenders. Pacheco and Rivas Ortega also work for the Santa Marta Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES), a local community development organization. They played a key role in bringing about the country’s historic 2017 metallic mining ban, instituted to save the country’s rivers from toxic materials.
According to the United Nations, more than 75,000 people were killed in El Salvador’s civil war, which lasted from 1980 to 1992. The majority of these deaths were attributed to the security forces and paramilitary death squads that were actively supported by the United States. Approximately 9,000 people were disappeared. Human rights violations, including the kidnapping, torture, and murder of suspected FMLN sympathizers, were pervasive.
The new laws allow police to make warrantless arrests, imprison children as young as twelve years old, restrict the public’s right to gather, and conduct the mass monitoring of private citizens’ communications.
In May, the BBC reported that about 66,000 people, most of them young, had been detained by El Salvador’s police and army after President Nayib Bukele declared a thirty-day “state of exception” in March 2022. That followed the biggest wave of homicides the country had seen since the end of the civil war, which was attributed to street gangs. The emergency order has been renewed every month since then.
The new laws allow police to make warrantless arrests, imprison children as young as twelve years old, restrict the public’s right to gather, and conduct the mass monitoring of private citizens’ communications.
A new mega-prison, expected to house 40,000 prisoners, has been built in Tecoluca, about fifty miles southeast of the capital San Salvador, and footage of the first group of tattooed suspected gang members transferred there was provided to the media. The state of exception has stemmed the gang violence that has long plagued the country and has netted Bukele a 90 percent approval rating. But that success has exacted a terrible toll on many innocent people, including community leaders, members of civil society organizations, and even journalists, who are attacked as gang defenders when they document the abuses.
Karla Rodas
Environmentalist Miguel Rivera stands in front of a mural commemorating his brother, Marcelo Rivera, who was murdered in June 2009 because of his activism against mining in his town of San Isidro, Cabañas, El Salvador.
Among those being targeted are the Santa Marta Five, Pedro Cabezas, coordinator of the Central American Alliance on Mining, based in El Salvador, tells The Progressive in a telephone interview. He believes the arrests are related to Bukele’s intention to restart mining in the country.
Cabezas explains that the Salvadoran economy is the slowest growing in Latin America—at around 2 percent annual GDP growth—and has debt of more than 75 percent of the country’s GDP. In the past two years, basic food prices have increased by 23.7 percent in urban areas and 30.4 percent in rural areas, and more than 70 percent of the population has reported that they have had to change their purchasing habits, according to a recent survey.
Ending the mining ban would bring in new government revenue and improve the economy, but it would also threaten communities like Santa Marta, which is at the forefront of sustainable development initiatives and environmental defense in the country.
A peace agreement and the National Reconciliation Law were signed in January 1992 to bring an end to the twelve-year conflict. According to a long list of Canadian and other international organizations, the arrests of the five Santa Marta leaders violate that agreement. No evidence has been shown for their involvement in the murder; the alleged crime is not part of the United Nations Truth Commission report of cases; and the arrests contravene El Salvador’s National Reconciliation Law.
“These arrests,” says a statement by the Canadian organizations, “are politically motivated to demobilize opposition to mining in a context of judicial and human rights crisis in El Salvador.”
The families of the five, as well as organizations like the Red Cross, have not been able to see them since their arrests, and their lawyer hasn’t seen them since March, when they were sent to preventive detention. They are elderly and have medical conditions, and Cabezas says he’s concerned that their conditions will worsen “and they may die, as has happened to many under the state of exception due to health issues or violence.”
He adds that their detentions are “consistent with the strategy of this government of opening the mines. They intimidate communities. Cabañas has a history of working against mines. The government studies its enemies, and this, we believe, is a way of intimidating local communities and making them cooperate.”
Cabezas has a point. Consider the case of “Lito” (a nickname used to protect his identity for fear of reprisal), one of five boatmen from Isla el Espíritu Santo, in southern El Salvador, who were arrested on May 13, 2022. The father of two says that at the time of his arrest, he had not been working for a month due to a stroke that caused facial paralysis. Nonetheless, authorities called him to the local port, where police and soldiers arrested him, his nephew, and three other boatmen.
Photo provided
“Lito” is one of five boatmen from Isla el Espíritu Santo, in southern El Salvador, who were arrested on May 13, 2022, under President Nayib Bukele’s “state of exception.”
“I asked, ‘What are the charges?’ and the policeman said, ‘It is because of the regime of exception. If you didn’t commit any crime, you’ll be released in fifteen days.’ ” His detention lasted more than ten months.
Upon arriving in prison, Lito says the five men were forced to kneel on gravel for two hours and were beaten with batons. The medicines his wife had brought to the port were thrown away.
He says the men were moved from prison to prison and became sick from various illnesses. “I had scabies, ulcer sores with pus, chickenpox—there was an outbreak in the prison—and facial paralysis.” Prisoners can only see the doctor once every three months, “so you don’t ask to see him because you’re afraid you might get something worse.”
After nearly five months, Lito says he was called for a virtual hearing that was then canceled to allow for a medical exam. None of his conditions, including facial paralysis, were in that report.
In October 2022, the boatmen were called for another hearing. Their lawyer presented their backgrounds, including work histories and a lack of prior arrests. But the judge said they hadn’t proven their innocence, so he couldn’t release them.
Lito’s family brought basic necessities to the prison, “but we never got them,” he says. He adds that 150 people were held in a single jail cell with only one toilet and four people to a bed. “Everybody in my cell was innocent. Nobody had gang tattoos or anything,” he says. “Many people are dehydrated and suffer from kidney infections.”
After a third hearing, he was granted conditional release on March 15, 2023, which means he now must make a long and expensive trip to the mainland to sign in with the court every fifteen days for an indefinite period. Some of the other boatmen are still in custody.
Cabezas says that recent developments suggest an order to rescind the mining ban is already in the works.
Environmental organizations have demanded that the Salvadoran government take steps to prevent pollution from old mines from contaminating rivers. Instead, in 2021, the government joined the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development, which is based in Canada and has been subsidized by the Canadian government to the tune of $20 million from 2015 to 2023, with additional support from other governments like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
“Sustainable mining is an oxymoron,” Cabezas says. “And we’re wondering why they’d join such an organization if there’s no mining.”
In October 2021, the Salvadoran government passed a law creating a secretariat of energy, hydrocarbons, and mining. The 2023 budget allocated $4.5 million to reform the energy hydrocarbons law. “We are concerned that this includes ending the mining ban law, which they can do because they have a supermajority in Congress,” Cabezas says.
“Sustainable mining is an oxymoron.” —Pedro Cabezas
Residents in Santa Marta and other communities in Cabañas have reported the presence of people from Peru and China, who Cabezas suspects represent mining interests looking for large swaths of land to lease, “which is very appealing to people who have been making very little money.”
These individuals also offer support to local development organizations like cooperatives and water utilities. “We have a list of mayors who have been called to El Salvador’s Export Development Office and told to get on board with mining,” Cabezas says. He claims to have seen a ten-year lease with an option to buy that a farmer received. It offers about $1,000 per hectare, which is a lot more than people can make working the land.
“All this has been going on since the early 2020s, a few months after Bukele took office,” Cabezas says.
On the morning of May 16, Mary Lawlor, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, wrote the Salvadoran government seeking information about the Santa Marta Five and demanding their release. That evening, President Bukele spoke out against human rights organizations, accusing them of supporting terrorists. A day later, Salvadoran police detained Manuel Gámez, the son of Vidalina Morales, who chairs ADES. Morales, a leader in the fight to ban mining, had discussed the arrests of the Santa Marta Five just a few hours earlier on a popular university radio station.
Esmeralda Ramos
Cultural development initiatives for children and youth are among the projects of the Santa Marta Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES). The group is led by Antonio Pacheco, one of the Santa Marta Five.
In an online webinar in April, Morales had said that “the five participated in the civil war, as did so many others who contributed to the revolutionary struggle at the time. They later became leaders of the Santa Marta community. These arrests are intended to intimidate this community and stop it from fighting against mining in the department of Cabañas and the defense of our water and human rights.” She called for a resumption of the international solidarity that had been offered during the civil war, “because this is the only way we can defeat these atrocities to people whose only crime is to fight for a better quality of life.”
Cabezas believes that police had intended to charge Gámez with collaborating with gangs, a generic charge allowed by the president’s state of exception order. “They held him for over thirty-six hours. Through a national and international campaign, he was released. But this was a message to the communities saying, ‘We can pick up your children at any time,’ ” he says.
Court dates for the five community leaders are scheduled for early August, but under the state of exception, their detention could be extended by another six months. Cabezas trusts that their lawyer can prove their innocence.
If they are not released, however, “we are ready for a long-term campaign to demand that their physical and mental capacities remain intact, and their human rights are respected,” he says. “We’re hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.”