Category Archives: Resource extraction

Ecuador bans opposition party, criminalizes ecological defenders, joins U.S. military attacks

by Jim Hodgson

In a just world, news that Ecuador has banned its largest opposition party would be enough to scuttle Canada’s plans for a free trade agreement with the country – and even end U.S. military collaboration. But that is not the world we live in.

The news came as 77 organizations from Ecuador, Canada and around the world sent a letter to Canada’s ambassador in Ecuador urging the embassy to adopt Canada’s 2019 Voices at Risk: Canada’s Guidelines on Supporting Human Rights Defenders in response to the criminalization of Indigenous and environmental defenders. Among the signatories are MiningWatch Canada, Common Frontiers, and KAIROS Canada.

The letter to Ambassador Craig Kowalik was sent in response to the criminalization of Indigenous and environmental defenders from the Federation of Indigenous and Campesino Organizations of Azuay (FOA, Federación de Organizaciones lndigenas y Campesinas del Azuay). 

FOA members are facing criminal proceedings for their environmental defense work to safeguard the Kimsakocha páramo from the Loma Larga gold mining project, owned by Canadian mining company DPM Metals Inc.

The letter to the embassy expresses concern over criminal charges initiated by DPM Metals against six FOA members — Lauro Sigcha, Lizardo Zhaqui, Marco Tapia, Ruth Pugo, Carmita Pérez, and Yaku Pérez — following a peaceful clean-up action to remove mining waste left by the company near the headwaters of the Irquis and Tarqui rivers in the Kimsakocha páramo. The Kimsakocha páramo is a fragile ecosystem that regulates the regional hydrological cycle and provides fresh water to tens of thousands of people. For more than 30 years, Indigenous and peasant communities have defended this ecosystem against large-scale mining projects.

Ecuador bans opposition party

Acting on the request of the government-aligned Prosecutor General, an electoral judge in Ecuador on Friday (March 6) ordered the nine-month suspension of the country’s largest opposition party, the Citizens’ Revolution (RC ). 

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) denounced the ban as the latest escalation in a broader pattern of authoritarian regression, including lawfare against opponents, repeated states of emergency, and deepening military ties with the Trump administration.

“The government of President Daniel Noboa, who is strongly backed by President Trump, is trying to accelerate the destruction of what is left of democracy in Ecuador,” said CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot. The move bars RC –led by former President Rafael Correa – from local elections to be held in 2027.

U.S.-Ecuador military strikes

On the same day as the ban on the RC party, the Ecuadorian and U.S. militaries conducted joint airstrikes near the Colombian border targeting a site allegedly tied to dissidents from the former FARC guerrillas from Colombia. 

These “lethal kinetic operations,” as the U.S. military calls them, are another of Noboa’s efforts since his 2023 election to deepen ties with Washington — including a failed attempt to re-establish a U.S. military base in the country.

Days earlier, on Tuesday (March 3), the United States and Ecuador launched joint attacks against “designated terrorist organizations” – Trumpspeak for drug-traffickers.

Since September last year, the United States has attacked small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, but these attacks in Ecuador are the first known land operations by U.S. forces against drug cartels. At least 150 people have been killed in 44 known strikes. The United States has never shown proof that any of the dead were in fact moving illegal drugs.

While neither government will say precisely where the attacks are happening, Noboa ordered curfews in four provinces west and southwest of Quito, extending to the city of Guayaquil and beyond. Noboa said his country was “entering a new phase in the internal war.”

* An update (March 25 from Drop Site News:

A New York Times investigation raises serious questions about a March 6 airstrike that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicized on social media as proof the U.S. military was “now bombing Narco Terrorists on land.”

According to the Times, the target appears to have been a 350-acre cattle and dairy farm owned by a 32-year-old carpenter named Miguel, not a drug trafficking compound. Farm workers told the Times that Ecuadorean soldiers arrived three days earlier, beat and detained four Colombian workers, subjected them to waterboarding and electric shocks, doused structures with gasoline and set them alight—then returned on March 6 to film themselves bombing the smoldering ruins, producing footage Ecuador and the U.S. jointly promoted as the destruction of a traffickers’ training camp.

The Pentagon said the strike was conducted “jointly” with Ecuador, though Times sources said U.S. troops had no direct involvement in the bombing itself. Ecuador claimed to have recovered weapons and evidence of illicit activity but released no photographs, as it typically does following drug seizures. “It’s a lie that 50 people trained here,” Miguel said, standing amid his dead chickens. “There’s no logic.” (NYT)

No to mining, Yes to life

Family members of the ‘Santa Marta 5’ file legal complaint over delay in final ruling

by Jim Hodgson

After four postponements in delivering the final written ruling to confirm the acquittal of the defendants, family members of five anti-mining leaders in El Salvador have filed an official complaint against the judges who provided only a verbal not-guilty verdict after trial five months ago.

The defendants are people that I have known for nearly 25 years through their involvement in the Santa Marta Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES).

The text that follows is a based on a text published this week by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), supplemented by other media reports.

The complaint against the judges was filed with the Judicial Investigation Directorate of the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) Jan. 20, 2026, and adds to a series of public actions undertaken by the families, organizations, and human rights groups to demand the definitive closure of the judicial process against the water defenders. They had previously been part of a successful struggle to stop a gold mine from re-opening in the northern part of Cabañas department.

The Santa Marta 5 were arrested Jan. 11, 2023, and charged in connection with the alleged disappearance of a woman during El Salvador’s civil war. The charges were widely denounced as political persecution: the community leaders had been sounding the alarm over indications that the Nayib Bukele government was seeking to overturn El Salvador’s 2017 ban on metal mining, the first and only in the world. 

They were imprisoned for eight months while awaiting trial and subsequently placed under house arrest, a measure that was granted only after pressure from national and international human rights organizations and elected officials.

In December of 2025, El Salvador’s legislature, dominated by Bukele’s New Ideas party, did in fact overturn the law prohibiting mining in the country.

The defendants were acquitted of all charges in October 2024. The Attorney General appealed the decision, and in November 2024, the Cojutepeque Criminal Chamber overturned the dismissal of the charges and allowed a retrial in a new jurisdiction.

When the second trial concluded in September 2025, the San Vicente Sentencing Court reached the same conclusion in its oral ruling, acquitting the defendants of criminal charges. But the court has since delayed delivering its final written ruling four times, unjustifiably prolonging the judicial process and leaving the case without definitive closure.

On Jan. 9, the judges once again postponed the delivery of the written ruling until Jan. 30, a decision that the families believe could constitute a delay of justice in violation to the principle of “prompt and fair justice” and keeps a process indefinitely open that already has two acquittal rulings.

In the document they submitted to the CSJ, the families of the defendants requested an investigation into the delays as they have prevented the sentence from becoming final. Without a written ruling, the procedural deadlines for either a possible appeal or the definitive closure of the case cannot commence.

Media and social media coverage of the new legal complaint.

Milton Rivas, son of Pedro Antonio Rivas, one of the defendants, explained to the media that the judges “have been delaying the final ruling” and that the complaint filed seeks to demand justice for his family members. “We are not asking for anything, nor have we come to beg for anything; we have come to demand justice, because it is unacceptable that it takes them about five months to submit a document that they could have delivered the same day the hearing ended,” he declared.

Social movements, human rights groups, community representatives, and family members of the defendants denounced the court’s stall tactic during a press conference on Jan. 13. Rivas, joined by community leader Alfredo Leiva, stated that the failure to deliver the written ruling has both prolonged the legal uncertainty and kept the defendants, their families, and the community in a constant state of anxiety.  “This delay keeps our family members in a situation of constant anguish and constitutes a denial of justice,” they declared.

A representative of the University Movement for Critical Thought also warned of a broader context of increasing persecution and criminalization in the country. Currently, at least 38 human rights, environmental, labour, and political activists remain imprisoned, while human rights defenders and community journalists continue to report receiving threats, police harassment, and intimidation campaigns against them.

“We demand an immediate end to [this] persecution and respect for the right to defend the environment, to inform, and to organize,” the organizations stated, issuing an urgent call to Salvadoran society and the international community to remain vigilant given the risk of additional arbitrary arrests targeting critical voices and community organizing efforts.

Finally, they reported that a permanent vigil is being held in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador every day at six in the evening as a peaceful act of protest and a demand for justice, freedom, and respect for human rights.

"Another World is Possible," World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brasil (2005)

The old order is dead. Let’s make a new, more just order.

by Jim Hodgson

It was too much to hope that the well-heeled audience at Davos would boo Donald Trump from the stage a day after they had offered Mark Carney a standing ovation. But by the end of Wednesday, it seemed that the wall of resistance to any U.S. take-over of Greenland was successful, and the president backed down. An important victory.

Still, “la rupture de l’ordre mondial” of which Carney spoke remains. And he’s right: we shouldn’t mourn it. The international financial institutions invented in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, gave overwhelming power to the rich countries of the Global North. 

And the United Nations system that followed, with a veto given to each of the five most powerful countries, has protected their interests – even in the face of overwhelming contrarian votes in the UN General Assembly. Think, for example, of the annual vote to end the cruel U.S. blockade of Cuba.

That order was designed by the nations that existed at the end of World War II, especially the colonial or neo-colonial states of Europe and the Americas. Most of the Caribbean, Africa and large parts of south Asia were still under colonial rule. That order imposed and perpetuated a Global North-based order on all the new nations that were born in the 25 years or so after the war: the majority of nations that exist today.

And that order, at least in the eyes of three of the five veto-holders, effectively imposed capitalism as a synonym for democracy. The United States and its allies were satisfied with a sort of formal democracy, a certain alternance between parties of the right and centre-right, and if that failed, then a military government was a useful interlude until the real order could be re-established and markets were safe. 

Canada would “go along to get along,” as Carney admitted. 

Just as it did less than three weeks ago when the United States bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its president. And just as it has for more than two years over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In his speech, Carney seemed to offer a vision of capitalism without the now-erratic United States. It’s still reliant on resource extraction, military spending, and massive capital investment.

But if we are all to grow and thrive, we must demand more. We require an end to practices that exploit social inequities and our shared ecology. 

Alternatives

Because of the paths on which my life has taken me, one that is especially close to my heart is the call from the Indigenous people of Zapatista communities in southern Mexico for “a world with room for all” – “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.” But other visions come from other places, including three decades of gatherings of the World Social Forum.

More than 50 years ago, the majority world united behind a vision of economic decolonization, sovereign development, and international cooperation across areas such as debt, trade, finance, and technology. That vision became known as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and was adopted by the UN General Assembly. But, power relations being what they are, it was never implemented. (Progressive International put together a set of reflections that trace its history and update the proposals for the 21st century.)

In March last year, the World Council of Churches and several global communions of churches repeated their call for a New International Financial and Economic Architecture (NIFEA). “It is immoral that over a billion people – half of them children – subsist in poverty whilst billionaires increased their wealth by over 15% in 2024 to US$15 trillion. It is outrageous that the richest 10% of the global population receives more than half of global income, whereas the poorest half earns merely 8.5% of it,” they said in a statement.

They expressed deep concern about “a rapidly escalating climate and biodiversity emergency that jeopardises livelihoods and poses an existential threat to all life.” It notes that “several tipping points are close to being crossed or have already been crossed, leading us to recognise that we may be beyond a point of no return.”

The old order is dead. The time in which we are living demands we do better.