Women in a rural part of El Salvador are leading an effort to stop urban development that could result in deforestation and loss of access to water.
The Ciudad Valle El Ángel project involves the construction of stores, hotels and houses in Apopa municipality, an hour north of the capital, San Salvador.
It calls for clearing 351 hectares (867 acres) of forest and diverting 17 million liters (4.5 million gallons) of water a day from the Chacalapa River watershed.
The community has started working with other local organizations to stage protests, sit-ins and letter-writing campaigns, and has also filed numerous lawsuits.
A group of women in rural El Salvador is standing up against a major infrastructure project that threatens to clear hundreds of hectares of forest and cut off access to rivers that provide the community with clean drinking water.
The project, known as Ciudad Valle El Ángel, involves the construction of thousands of stores, hotels and houses in Apopa municipality, an hour north of the capital, San Salvador, where much of the land is still rural and many residents rely on subsistence farming.
Completing the project requires clearing 351 hectares (867 acres) of forest and installing eight industrial wells that will divert 17 million liters (4.5 million gallons) of water a day from the Chacalapa River watershed.
Around 2,000 people rely directly on the watershed for cooking, drinking, cleaning and crop cultivation, according to local environmental advocacy groups. The river also indirectly benefits another 60,000 people in 21 neighboring communities.
“Nothing about the project benefits the poorer classes. They’re building this for the upper classes, for the people who can pay,” said Sara García, coordinator of the Kawoq Women’s Collective, the eco-feminist organization protesting Ciudad Valle El Ángel.
The collective is made up of around 50 local women of all ages, who recognize that the destruction of Apopa’s ecology will have a direct impact on residents’ quality of life — especially the lives of women.
“We are the ones that spend the most time at home,” García said, “taking care of the water, preparing food. If there is no water, there is no food. There is more work for us and more fatigue and the deterioration of our bodies.”
She added, “I’m not saying that men aren’t also affected. But because of the burden imposed on us by a patriarchal system, we suffer the most.”
The Kawoq Women’s Collective has spent the last decade trying to stave off development projects that threaten local ecosystems. In that time, it has witnessed the arrival of some stores and gas stations as well as a highway that now connects the area to San Salvador. García said she viewed the highway as a precursor to the construction taking place today, an attempt to attract people looking for quick trips out of the city.
When the Ciudad Valle El Ángel project was announced in 2018, the collective started working with other local organizations to stage protests, sit-ins and letter-writing campaigns.
Public pressure helped move plans to drill the wells along the skirts of the San Salvador volcano to other parts of the watershed farther away from vulnerable residents of Apopa. But they said the new plans would still divert most of their drinking water, and possibly contaminate what remains.
In addition to direct diversion of water from the Chacalapa River, deforestation of nearby forests has the potential to decrease access to potable water because the cleared land won’t be able to stop runoff and filter harmful chemicals.
“We are beneficiaries of the Chacalapa River system,” said Johana Mejía, the president of Apopa’s community water board, “and because of that, we have to act.”
Sociedad Dueñas Hermanos Limitada, the company carrying out the project, did not respond to a request for comment.
Signs hang off of a bulldozer at a construction sight in Apopa. Image via Joya Galana/Junta Comunitaria de Agua.
In 2019, legal representatives for the community filed a complaint in the country’s environmental court that highlighted the irreversible ecological damage of the project, but it was denied.
In other lawsuits, the community has claimed the government failed to adequately carry out environmental studies and the consultation process, in which residents are given an opportunity to air their concerns with officials and developers.
In a statement to Mongabay, El Salvador’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources said it had carried out all required technical studies, identified all environmental impacts and established the proper measures to “prevent, mitigate and correct said impacts on soil, water, air and flora and fauna.”
Another lawsuit claims there were irregularities in the permit process between the project developer and the local water service, which didn’t respond to Mongabay’s request for comment.
So far, the lawsuits haven’t managed to stop construction, only delay the start date. In the meantime, other small-scale development projects have arrived in hopes of taking advantage of the area’s potential economic boom. The community is fighting scattered instances of deforestation and the drilling of wells, Mejía said.
In May, the country’s newly elected congress voted to remove five members of the Supreme Court, creating international concern that President Nayib Bukele, whose party now has a majority in congress, had threatened the country’s democracy and overstepped his power.
For Apopa residents, it was a sign that their cases might never receive fair consideration.
“In the community, there is always the hopeless outlook that we can’t stop what’s coming,” Mejía said, “that we can’t demand our rights to water because there is too much corruption. But there is another percentage that says no, we have to do something.”
Banner image: A lone sign of protest sits on cleared land with the San Salvador volcano looming in the distance. Image via Joya Galana/Junta Comunitaria de Agua.
On hot days the broken stone and dried up silt from the San Sebastian mine in Eastern El Salvador bake in the sun. The slew of refuse is freckled with rock stained bright blue with cyanide, open to the elements that on rainier days will wash it downhill into the Rio San Sebastian below.
The openings of passages into the mine dot the mountainside, and further downhill a bright orange stream with a chemical stench flows into another. The American Commerce Group ceased operating here in 1999 but sought to return when the price of gold began its current escalation. After a Centre for Investigation of Investment and Commerce study found the local river to be 100,000 times more acidic than the area’s uncontaminated water, and cyanide levels to be ten times above safe levels, Commerce Group’s environmental permit was revoked. The company is subsequently suing the Salvadoran government for $100 million through the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
Rising concern over the environmental impact of mining led both presidential candidates in the 2009 elections in El Salvador to pledge to suspend mining operations, a promise kept by current president Mauricio Funes. To prevent further legal cases, which are already draining millions from the country’s coffers, the Salvadoran legislature is considering a special law suspending administrative procedures related to the exploration and exploitation of metallic mining concessions.
Salvadoran environmentalists, in turn, are urging their government to go beyond the suspension of mining projects, and instead ban metallic mining altogether. Thousands of demonstrators marched through the capital this month to urge parliament to sign a law that would enshrine a “human right to water,” which they said would make it impossible to grant mining permits.
In a presentation outside the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly last week, El Salvador’s Human Rights Ombudsman Oscar Umberto Luna gave his support to a complete ban. Luna said that El Salvador’s environmental, climatic, institutional, social and economic conditions meant that it would not be viable for the “metallic mining industry to pursue its extractive activities without risk to the health and living conditions of the Salvadoran People and the resources on which they rely.”
The Ombudsman further urged that “the different state institutions must prioritize the human rights of the population, and keep in mind that true development pursues the improved overall quality of living of the population, not just economic profit.”
A law against mining would transform the country’s legislative framework towards foreign investment. Canadian group Pacific Rim is demanding $77 million to recoup its investments at its El Dorado concession in the northern province of Cabañas, claiming that the government violated the country’s 1999 investment law by denying it a license to extract gold and silver. The investment law allows disputes between foreign investors and the state to be taken outside of the country and decided by the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).
“Cyanide is not a vitamin”
Gatherings are being held around the country by anti-mining campaigners, raising awareness of the intertwined history of mining and water sources in the Central American gold belt. One meeting in the northern Salvadoran town of Ilobasco drew figures from a range of organizations united together in the National Roundtable against Mining.Ilobasco is in the agricultural countryside of Cabañas province, and the number of straw Stetsons dotting the sea of heads made the question asked from the podium almost rhetorical: “What do most of you do for a living?”
The audience responded en masse: “Farming!”
The speaker—Karen Vasquez of El Salvador’s Water Forum—echoed them before arguing that the access to land and water for tenant farmers would be made more difficult if the country failed to pass the proposed General Law on Water.The bill asserts that water is a “common good, finite, vulnerable, and essential for human life and ecosystems,” and prioritizes the human consumption of water over industrial uses. It has been sent by President Mauricio Funes to the Legislative Assembly for their approval, where it will be debated this month. The assembly is controlled by the President’s opponents, the right-wing ARENA party.
When Pacific Rim drilled to find gold beneath Cabañas, water sources used by local farmers dried up as subterranean water courses were diverted. Angel Ibarra of the Salvadoran Ecological Union sees such dangers reoccurring.
“Pacific Rim are talking about pursuing subterranean mining, so they’ll have to pump out the subterranean water and dehydrate the area, which would dry up the surface water and the wells,” he told the meeting in Ilobasco.
The proposed mine would, by its own projections, consume 3.2 million liters of water a year, and utilize cyanide to leach the gold from the rock.
“Cyanide is not a vitamin,” Ibarra says, responding to a member of the audience who told the podium that a chemist from the El Dorado mine visited their community to allay concerns over the compound. “Metallic mining causes cyanide and arsenic to be released into the area’s water, and causes acid mine drainage. There’s no such thing as green mining from a scientific or ecological perspective. It’s just propaganda.”
Acid mine drainage is caused by water generating acidity from the metal sulfides in disturbed rock formations. The sulphuric acid in turn releases toxic compounds and heavy metals, which are then washed into surface water.Ibarra points to the long term health damage that these elements can cause when released into the area’s water sources.
“The most serious problems begin when the mining stops, after the 6-10 years that the mine would function for,” he explains. “It’s afterwards that the kidney failures and the chronic illnesses begin. There are examples from other countries where this pollution has gone on for hundreds of years; we need a definitive ban on mining.”
The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns.
Military attacks like these in civilian areas make discussions of human rights an absurdity. Robert Bales, a U.S. Army staff sergeant who allegedly killed 16 civilians in two Afghan villages, including nine children, is not an anomaly. To decry the butchery of this case and to defend the wars of occupation we wage is to know nothing about combat. We kill children nearly every day in Afghanistan. We do not usually kill them outside the structure of a military unit. If an American soldier had killed or wounded scores of civilians after the ignition of an improvised explosive device against his convoy, it would not have made the news. Units do not stick around to count their “collateral damage.” But the Afghans know. They hate us for the murderous rampages. They hate us for our hypocrisy.
The scale of our state-sponsored murder is masked from public view. Reporters who travel with military units and become psychologically part of the team spin out what the public and their military handlers want, mythic tales of heroism and valor. War is seen only through the lens of the occupiers. It is defended as a national virtue. This myth allows us to make sense of mayhem and death. It justifies what is usually nothing more than gross human cruelty, brutality and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness. It hides from view the impotence and ordinariness of our leaders. But in turning history into myth we transform random events into a sequence of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude. We march to nobility. But it is a lie. And it is a lie that combat veterans carry within them. It is why so many commit suicide.
“I, too, belong to this species,” J. Glenn Gray wrote of his experience in World War II. “I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation’s deeds, but of human deeds as well. I am ashamed to be a man.”
When Ernie Pyle, the famous World War II correspondent, was killed on the Pacific island of Ie Shima in 1945, a rough draft of a column was found on his body. He was preparing it for release upon the end of the war in Europe. He had done much to promote the myth of the warrior and the nobility of soldiering, but by the end he seemed to have tired of it all:
But there are many of the living who have burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.
Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.
These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.
We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.
There is a constant search in all wars to find new perversities, new forms of death when the initial flush fades, a rear-guard and finally futile effort to ward off the boredom of routine death. This is why during the war in El Salvador the death squads and soldiers would cut off the genitals of those they killed and stuff them in the mouths of the corpses. This is why we reporters in Bosnia would find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated. This is why U.S. Marines have urinated on dead Taliban fighters. Those slain in combat are treated as trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art. It happened in every war I covered.
“Force,” Simone Weil wrote, “is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.”
War perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to your own annihilation—spiritual, emotional and finally physical. It destroys the continuity of life, tearing apart all systems—economic, social, environmental and political—that sustain us as human beings. In war, we deform ourselves, our essence. We give up individual conscience—maybe even consciousness—for contagion of the crowd, the rush of patriotism, the belief that we must stand together as a nation in moments of extremity. To make a moral choice, to defy war’s enticement, can in the culture of war be self-destructive. The essence of war is death. Taste enough of war and you come to believe that the stoics were right: We will, in the end, all consume ourselves in a vast conflagration.
A World War II study determined that, after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. A common trait among the remaining 2 percent was a predisposition toward having “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his book “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” notes: “It is not too far from the mark to observe that there is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98 percent of all men insane, and the other 2 percent were crazy when they go there.”
During the war in El Salvador, many soldiers served for three or four years or longer, as in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, until they psychologically or physically collapsed. In garrison towns, commanders banned the sale of sedatives because those drugs were abused by the troops. In that war, as in the wars in the Middle East, the emotionally and psychologically maimed were common. I once interviewed a 19-year-old Salvadoran army sergeant who had spent five years fighting and then suddenly lost his vision after his unit walked into a rebel ambush. The rebels killed 11 of his fellow soldiers in the firefight, including his closest friend. He was unable to see again until he was placed in an army hospital. “I have these horrible headaches,” he told me as he sat on the edge of his bed. “There is shrapnel in my head. I keep telling the doctors to take it out.” But the doctors told me that he had no head wounds.
I saw other soldiers in other conflicts go deaf or mute or shake without being able to stop.
War is necrophilia. This necrophilia is central to soldiering just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship. It is unleashed especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its highest pitch. When we spend long enough in war, it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation with our own destruction.
