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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
Sat Sep 11, 2021, 12:12 AM Sep 2021

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed:

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People

a Country from Corporate Greed: A Conversation with Co-authors Robin Broad and John Cavanagh
September 10, 2021 By Holly Sarkissian

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed: A Conversation with Co-authors Robin Broad and John Cavanagh
by Friday Podcasts From ECSP and MHI

- Podcast at link -

“Many people have watched fights between communities and big corporations around the world. The corporations usually win so those are the Goliath. The Davids usually lose,” says John Cavanagh, co-author of The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed. In this week’s episode of Friday Podcasts, Cavanagh and co-author Robin Broad recount how local activists mobilized a global coalition of religious leaders, labor unions, and environmental activists to block an international corporation from opening a gold mine that threatened El Salvador’s fragile water supply.

“We had no choice but to begin the book with the horrifying realization that murder can be the cost of protecting the environment in many countries around the world,” said Broad. In 2009, three months before Cavanagh’s organization, Institute for Policy Studies, was preparing to present its prestigious annual Human Rights Award to a group of El Salvadoran water defenders, they received news that one of the awardees, teacher and cultural worker, Marcelo Rivera, had been assassinated, his tortured body left at the bottom of a deep dry well.

The Water Defenders tells the story of ordinary people coming together across national and political boundaries to resist powerful corporate interests.

In the early 2000s, mineral prices were on the rise and the Pacific Rim mining company sought to set up new mining operations to tap into El Salvador’s gold reserves, promising new jobs and one percent of their profits to the local government. While assurances of prosperity and profit by the mining company initially sounded inviting to Marcelo and the local community, “they visited a big mine in Honduras, and there they saw the horrible environmental damage that comes from the fact that gold is mined on a large scale, using cyanide to separate the gold from the rock [which is] highly toxic and very hard to contain,” says Cavanagh. In Honduras, cyanide-laced water flowed through the rivers, killing fish and causing skin diseases. The water defenders decided “that short term financial rewards for the few would be way offset by the environmental harms to the broader community,” says Cavanagh.

To expand their coalition of support and raise awareness of the dangers of mining, “they did some of the most creative education and organizing that we’ve ever seen,” says Cavanagh. Marcelo organized with humor, leading marches of laughter where people wore clown noses and involved local community radio stations who performed skits on water. The water defenders expanded their coalition to the global level, creating a network of “international allies” and appealing to the two million Salvadoran diaspora in the United States, and environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Global International Trade Union Confederation, says Cavanagh.

More:
https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2021/09/water-defenders-ordinary-people-saved-country-corporate-greed-conversation-co-authors-robin-broad-john-cavanagh/

So glad the Salvadoran people found a way to protect what should be considered sacred land. Best wishes to them forever.

~ ~ ~

Don't forget the heroic life of Berta Cáceres, indigenous water defender who was assassinated in Honduras for her effort to save a river from corporate murderous greed. Her Wikipedia:

Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈbeɾta isaˈ?el ˈkaseɾes ˈfloɾes]; 4 March 1971[1] – 2 March 2016)[2] (Lenca) was a Honduran environmental activist, indigenous leader,[3] and co-founder and coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).[4][5][6] She won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, for "a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam" at the Río Gualcarque.[7][8]

She was assassinated in her home by armed intruders, after years of threats against her life.[9] A former soldier with the US-trained special forces units of the Honduran military asserted that Caceres' name was on their hitlist months before her assassination. As of February 2017, three of the eight arrested people were linked to the US-trained elite military troops: two had been trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA, the former School of the Americas (SOA), renamed WHINSEC, linked to thousands of murders and human rights violations in Latin America by its graduates. In November 2017, a team of international legal experts released a report finding "willful negligence by financial institutions." For example, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), the Netherlands Development Finance Institution (FMO) and the Finnfund pursued a strategy with shareholders, executives, managers, and employees of DESA, private security companies working for DESA, public officials and State security agencies "to control, neutralize and eliminate any opposition".

Twelve environmental activists were killed in Honduras in 2014, according to research by Global Witness, making it the most dangerous country in the world, relative to its size, for activists protecting forests and rivers.[10] Berta Cáceres' murder was followed by those of two more activists within the same month.

In July 2021, David Castillo, manager of DESA, was found guilty as the intellectual author of her murder.[11]

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berta_C%C3%A1ceres

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