Category Archives: Resource extraction

Political trial of El Salvador’s water defenders continues

by Jim Hodgson

Sadly, it’s not unusual for peace activists and the defenders of ecology or Indigenous rights to find themselves facing trumped-up criminal charges. It’s a bit weird when it happens to members of a modest community development organization in rural El Salvador.

But that’s what has happened to five people whose organization, the Santa Marta Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES). They’re people that I have know for more than 20 years.

This past week, five ADES members have been on trial, accused of a murder that supposedly occurred long ago during El Salvador’s civil war. No one, except zealous defenders of the government of Nayib Bukele, believes they are guilty of that crime. Rather: they built an alliance that reached around the globe, preventing a gold mine from operating in their Cabañas department and eventually winning a ban on metals mining in the whole country. While it is true that the five defendants were FMLN combatants during the 1980-1992 civil war, they are protected by the internationally-recognized Peace Agreement and the National Reconciliation Law, both signed in 1992.

Defence lawyers will present final arguments on Monday (Oct. 14) and a verdict could be issued as soon as Tuesday (Oct. 15). The next few days are a CRITICAL time to raise the visibility as much as we can to try to avoid a grave injustice. 

Here below you will find a statement from observers of the trial and some suggestions about how you can show your solidarity.

Statement of the international observer delegation on the ongoing trail of the Santa Marta and ADES water defenders  

October 11, 2024

Following three days of observing the trial of the five Santa Marta and ADES environmentalists, the international delegation convened by International Allies Against Mining in El Salvador releases the following statement:

San Salvador, we are international observers from King’s College Western University in Canada, Dartmouth College and UCLA Law School in the United States, and the Autonomous University of Mexico City in Mexico. At the conclusion of the third day of the trial, we offer the following observations:

  1. We witnessed a trial that, formally, appears to have followed most international standards of due process, however, the proceedings transgressed those standards on numerous occasions. We agree with the defense that sufficient proof was not presented to convict the five defendants. Based on what was presented in the courtroom, we believe that the only just resolution is the acquittal of all five defendants. Failure to acquit signals the lack of presumption of innocence and, therefore, the lack of an independent judiciary in El Salvador. 
  2. For example, the Attorney General´s communications team violated the gag order imposed by the judges, exposing the identities of witnesses and observers, as well as depicting the defendants in ways that assumed their guilt across social media. We fear that this violation of the gag order without a court reprimand represents a lack of procedural impartiality. Additionally, while journalists were allowed to access court grounds on the final day of the trial, we believe this was a last minute measure to rectify the earlier breach of the gag order by the Attorney General. We lament that the measure was not announced widely to members of the wider press who were respecting the gag order. Throughout the proceedings, the independent press was not allowed to take photos or videos inside the courtroom.
  3. Additionally, we observed an overly aggressive strategy by the lawyers representing the Attorney General that included berating and a using of their bodies to put pressure on witnesses. For this behavior, they were repeatedly cautioned and corrected by the tribunal. Despite warnings and requests by the judges, the Attorney General´s lawyers ignored directions, interrupted procedures, and failed to respect courtroom decorum. 
  4. At least one defendant was mistreated by the police who deprived him of sleep and food. Rather than transferring him directly to his residence following the day’s proceedings, he was held at a police substation and verbally abused, only to arrive home hours later underfed and exhausted. The following morning, police arrived at his home unexpectedly early and denied him a proper breakfast. We witnessed the visible fatigue and inability to focus on the proceedings from all of the accused. Mistreatment remains a concern as the defendants are of advanced age with a variety of preexisting conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. The well-being of the accused must be prioritized to ensure a fair trial. 

Outside of the courtroom, we witnessed overwhelming support for the defendants from international human rights organizations, the Santa Marta community, Salvadoran civil society, and social movement organizations. Many have concluded that the case is an attempt by the Salvadoran government to intimidate the environmental movement that resulted in the landmark national ban on metallic mining in 2017. For us, the incessant pursuit of a conviction by the Attorney General’s lawyers despite a lack of evidence, cannot be unlinked from these broader politics and concerns against communities resisting the encroachment of extractive projects.

While we await the closing arguments and the tribunal’s decision, and based on our observations, we maintain that justice can only be served by a ruling that affirms the innocence of the accused. The community of Santa Marta too, aggrieved and impacted by this lengthy ordeal, must be presented with restitution and steps must be taken to ensure lasting transitional justice.

Given the mistreatment described against one of the defendants above, we recommend that the rest of the proceedings, particularly the logistics of transportation, are monitored by the Office of the Ombudsperson for the Defense of Human Rights in El Salvador (PDDH) to ensure their personal and physical integrity.

  • Aideé Tassinari, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México
  • Yvette Borja, Faculty of Law, University of California Los Angeles
  • Jorge Cuéllar, Dartmouth College
  • Bernie Hammond, King’s College, University of Western Ontario

What you can do: 

Check out these suggestions from the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES): 

Social media solidarity posts: Make the case visible on social media & make sure the community knows we have their back! As the trial approaches, one of the most important things we can do is show the Salvadoran government that all eyes are on them. You can show your solidarity with the Santa Marta 5 by participating in the international social media campaign!

Write a brief statement of solidarity like:

  • Drop the charges against the Santa Marta 5!
  • ¡Retiren los cargos contra los Santa Marta 5!
  • International solidarity is with the Santa Marta 5!
  • The diaspora is watching! Free the #SantaMarta5 of all charges!
  • Keep El Salvador metallic mining-free!

Take a picture OR make a short video with your sign

Post on social media with the following hashtags: #SantaMartaNoEstaSola  #ComunidadSantaMarta #ADESNoEstáSola

Tag the following orgs on Twitter: @stopesmining @acafremin @CSantaMarta1987 @ades_sm@no_mineria_sv @cispes_solidarity 
(On Facebook: @ComunidadSanta Marta, @Mesa Nacional frente a la Minería Metálica en El Salvador, @International Allies Against Mining, @acafremin, @ADES Santa Marta)

Check out these examples for inspiration from CISPES on X and Instagram

For more information, check out some of these resources:

El Salvador faces scrutiny for ‘political’ trial of five environmental activists, The Guardian, Oct. 9

La Justicia de Bukele vs los Defensores del Agua, Manuel Pérez Rocha, La Jornada, Oct.7

Solidarity with El Salvador’s Santa Marta 5 Grows Across Borders | NACLA
Minera Titán, la empresa que acecha para llevarse el oro de El Salvador – Voz Pública
Threat of Metal Mining Returns to El Salvador, Organizations Warn | CISPES
State of Deception: Fact Finding Report

Visiting scenes of climate disaster and getting ready for the next one

Contrasts: trees near Osprey Lake between Summerland and Princeton, and trees east of Spences Bridge, July 15, 2024.

by Jim Hodgson

David, Kamill and I headed out by car last Monday for a quick visit to a small patch of territory northwest of our Okanagan home where a forest fire and an extreme flood wrought havoc just months apart in 2021. 

We drove west from Summerland on a beautiful mountain route that follows an ancient Indigenous trail—later part of the Kettle Valley Railroad and now a bike path—to just north of Princeton. Then we turned north to Merritt. From there, we followed the Nicola River northwest on Highway 8.

Left: Southern British Columbia watersheds: the Okanagan valley is in the Columbia watershed; the Nicola and Thompson rivers are in the Fraser watershed.
Centre: our route (the inset shows where the Thompson enters the Fraser at Lytton).

On Nov. 14 and 15, 2021, an atmospheric river brought an unprecedented amount of rain to southern British Columbia. All highways leading east from Vancouver and into the province’s Interior were blocked by floods or landslides. Princeton and Merritt were among many communities flooded.

The Nicola valley was particularly hard hit. It’s a narrow valley, and areas along both sides of the river were farmland. It’s home to the Nooaitch, Shackan and Cook’s Ferry First Nation communities and to their settler neighbours. The flood destroyed homes, farms, the old rail bed and parts of the highway. You can see the devastation of the Nicola valley in a Globe and Mail photo essay or in a B.C. highways department video. In November 2022 after a year of work, the highway re-opened with partial repairs. 

As we drove towards Spences Bridge, we also passed through an area severely damaged in a forest fire some years ago. At the same time, we could see a new fire spreading on a mountainside ahead of us above the Thompson River—likely what came to be called the Shetland Creek fire.

We had lunch in a nice little restaurant called The Packing House in Spences Bridge—just next to the Baits Motel. We drove south on Highway 1 (the Trans-Canada) along the Thompson River to its confluence with the Fraser River. 

And here we came to Lytton, the town of 3,000 people that was destroyed by a wildfire on June 30, 2021. Back in the late 90s, David and I began stopping here occasionally on trips to or from Vancouver. (We like to vary our routes.) It was a lovely town. It had a museum about the history of Chinese migration to the area—and its creator hopes to rebuild. Elsewhere in town, there is more construction: signs that the community will recover.

As we observed how the blue Thompson flows into the muddy Fraser, we could see a helicopter collecting water to drop on another fire burning in the mountains across the river.

We drove home via Ashcroft, whose residents are now on evacuation alert because of the Shetland Creek fire. After passing the massive tailings pond of the Highland Valley Copper Mine—a disaster of a different sort—we returned to Merritt and took the Okanagan connector highway to Peachland, and then turned south on Highway 97 back to Summerland. We drove about 600 km that day.

Of flood and fire

On Tuesday, Toronto had another “once-in-a-century” rainstorm after previous ones in 2005, 2013 and 2018. That day, we were back on Highway 97 as we drove Kamill to the airport in Kelowna for the trip home to Ottawa.

On Wednesday, a wildfire south of Peachland closed Highway 97 for most of the day. Traffic was later restricted to “single-lane alternating” (a phrase I am getting used to) and fully re-opened Friday afternoon.

As the week progressed (and U.S. climate-change deniers held their party’s convention in Milwaukee), I gathered some stories of effects of the climate catastrophe elsewhere in the world. (I did this in post back in January as well.)

These AP stories were published June 20, the summer solstice. Eight days later, Hurricane Beryl formed in the Atlantic Ocean just east of the Caribbean’s Windward Islands. In just 10 hours, it jumped to Hurricane 4 level before striking Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and other islands before easing as it moved west across the Caribbean, the Yucatan peninsula and south Texas.

Back in April, U.N. secretary general Antonio Guterres warned that “we cannot replace one dirty, exploitative, extractive industry with another” as we reshape how we power our societies and economies. Some developing countries have large reserves of “critical minerals” such as copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt. But they “cannot be shackled to the bottom of the clean energy value chain. The race to net zero cannot trample over the poor.”

In May, Raúl Zibechi, longtime observer of the role of social movements in processes of political change in Latin America, warned that the climate crisis cannot be stopped. Politicians won’t act for profound change; those who prefer wars over struggles for peace won’t change. His suggestion is that impoverished or otherwise marginalized peoples (“los de abajo”) build collective “arks.” The rich and powerful (“los de arriba”) already have theirs. The example he points toward is that of the Zapatista movement in Mexico’s southern Chiapas state, where for 30 years Indigenous communities have been living in a mostly self-sufficient and self-governing way.

Summers were always hot in the Fraser Canyon and up along the Thompson River towards Kamloops, just as they are where I live in the Okanagan valley. But it feels different now. There were always forest fires, but I don’t remember living in dread of them or having to put up with the long smoky days we have now. In the winter, there were cold spells, but I don’t remember the peach and grape crops being wiped out as has happened this year.

We are putting our emergency kit together (as we did last year) and placing all the important documents in one metal box. North American-style, I suppose: it’s an individualist sort of “ark.” We’re okay with having to take these steps. But we’re also talking about the election in B.C. later this year and a likely national one next year. How do we recover momentum for the dramatic changes necessary to carve a new way forward?

Venezuelans head to the polls July 28 under shadow of sanctions

President Nicolás Maduro (left) is challenged by retired diplomat Edmundo González. (TeleSUR graphic)

by Jim Hodgson

Just over a week from now, Venezuelans will again head to the polls. For the election in 2018, I was there as an observer. This time, I’m watching with concern but from a distance as Venezuelans vote under the pressure of U.S., European and Canadian sanctions that have made living conditions worse for most people.

I got involved with Venezuela soon after the election of Hugo Chávez in December 1998. Those of us concerned about the expansion of corporate-driven “free trade” across the Americas had created the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), a coalition of networks that included Common Frontiers Canada, the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, Brazil’s Network for Peoples Integration and the U.S. Alliance for Responsible Trade.

At a meeting in Toronto in November 1999 with some of the region’s trade ministers, we found we had a new ally. Venezuela’s trade minister won applause when she said that concern for the rights of the poor needed to be central in trade talks and public policy.

The trade ministers, nevertheless, forged ahead with plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).When their heads of government gathered in Quebec City in 2001, President Chávez was the one participant who refused to endorse the timetable for FTAA by 2005. By 2005, spurred by pressure from social movements, Chávez and other new leaders were able to defeat the FTAA.

Between 2004 and 2019, I visited Venezuela about a half-dozen times. I observed the 2004 recall referendum and the 2018 presidential election. With encouragement from faith-based organizations in Cuba and Colombia, I joined ecumenical encounters in 2004, 2006 and 2019, and attended the Americas Social Forum in Caracas in 2006.

Inside Venezuela, opposition to Chávez and to his successor Nicolás Maduro has been unrelenting. But their coup in 2002 failed. Their recall referendum in 2004 failed. Their attempt in 2019, in alliance with Canada’s then-foreign minister Chrystia Freeland and the “Lima Group,” to impose an interim head of a past national assembly, Juan Guaidó, as president failed—along with three coup attempts and then a botched invasion.

The May 2018 elections followed months of internationally-sponsored negotiations in the Dominican Republic between the government and opposition that, by February that year, achieved an agreement. But at the last minute, part of the opposition movement said no: other parties, notably that of Henri Falcón, did participate. Our Canadian delegation saw the May election as free and fair. Maduro won. I wrote about our experience in a series of articles for rabble.ca. 

After the vote, the pressure continued: the Lima Group’s Guaidó gambit; sanctions strengthened again in order to force regime change; and assets of the state oil company, PDVSA, and its U.S. subsidiary, CITGO, were blocked or seized, as were gold reserves held in London. Humanitarian aid became heavily politicized, even blocking access to vaccines during the Covid pandemic. In those circumstances, migration became a normal response. (International organizations set the number of Venezuelan who have left over the past dozen years above 7 million. The government says their figure is about 2.5 million and that of those, about 1.2 million returned between 2020 and 2023—almost half of them with government support.)

A deep dive into both mainstream media and alternative media (Pressenza, Orinoco Tribune, Venezuelanalysis, TeleSUR, among others, is necessary to get a reasonable sense of what is happening in this election. The far-right may reject official results, much as Trump did in the United States in 2020.

The July 28 vote

This election takes place while Venezuelans suffer under more than 930 “unilateral coercive measures”—sanctions—imposed by the United States, Canada and their European allies. “These should be elections without imperial sanctions,” argued the Mexican philosopher Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez recently. But that is not what is happening.

Early in 2023, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said sanctions on Venezuela “have exacerbated the economic crisis and hindered human rights,” and called for the measures to be lifted. Türk visited Venezuela in January 2023. His comments reflected similar remarks made two years earlier by Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights. She said that the Venezuelan “government’s revenue was reported to shrink by 99% with the country currently living on one per cent of its pre-sanctions income.”

Again this time, complex international negotiations unfolded to produce a basis for the election, finally established through the Barbados Accords. The document was signed in October 2023 by the Maduro government and an alliance of opposition parties known as the Unitary Platform.

The leading opposition candidate is retired diplomat Edmundo González. He is regarded as a stand-in for María Corina Machado whose candidacy was blocked because of her involvement in organizing violent street protests (sometimes called guarimbas) between 2014 and 2018, and for demanding sanctions. González and another far-right candidate, Enrique Márquez, refused to sign a declaration requested by the Electoral Authority promising they would respect the elections results and refrain from violence in its aftermath.

In the campaign, Maduro and his allies report a number of gains made over the past decade with regard to child care, medical attention, job-training and education. More recently, the inflation rate has dropped to 7.8 per cent, and that the GDP is up by seven per cent. The government has sought ways to diversify the resource-dependent economy and increase national production.

Throughout these 25 years, the government has expanded access to health care, education, housing, public transit, food and pensions through misiones—popular campaigns that use oil revenue for public benefit. 

A recent example is the “Great Mission Return to the Homeland” (Vuelta a la Patria). “We want to ensure that the vast majority of those who have not returned come here, with their family, with their friends,” said Maduro. Pointing to foreign sanctions as the principal cause of emigration, he added that it is his desire to “heal this wound” that the departure of millions of people caused , inviting them to return and to invest and enjoy their country.

It’s not that there are no legitimate criticisms to be made of the government. One might wish, for example, that much more had been done long ago to reduce criminal violence, advance LGBTQIA+ rights,* protect the country’s ecology, reduce dependence on oil revenue, and stimulate food production. If only such criticism could be made in an atmosphere of civil debate without threats to overthrow the government or to foment violence.

Since the 1970s in Latin America, the left in power has tried to govern according to the rules of liberal democracy, perhaps without sufficient regard for the roles of money, foreign interference and private media conglomerates. When the poor win power and actually have a shot at changing the rules of politics and economics—at transforming the structures that made them poor—what may they do to hold on? 

“It is not just any election. It is an election that defines the future,” said former vice-president Jorge Arreaza recently. In the face of strong external and internal opposition, Venezuelans sought to transform democracy so that they could continue re-inventing Latin American politics and economics in ways that benefit most people, not just the rich and not the corporations.

Will they have a chance to continue the effort? Or must they rebuild the social movements and networks necessary for a new attempt that may be decades away?

* Regarding LGBTQIA+ rights. In 2016, Venezuela’s Supreme Court declared that the state will provide protection without distinction to all families, including to children born into same-sex families. In the same year, Venezuela’s Public Ministry announced that transgender people may request a new identity card according to their gender identity.

Recent Pride celebrations are reported in the Orinoco Tribune, with some critical comments:

Venezuela is among the few countries in Latin America that have not legalized marriage equality and, unfortunately, a marriage equality bill has been languishing for nearly a decade in the Venezuelan National Assembly.

Recently, some Chavista politicians have been using socially conservative slogans that replicate US conservative approach towards the LGBTQ+ community and promoting so-called “family and traditional values” against what they call the “perversion” of “Western LGBTQ+ values.”

The ruling PSUV has failed to achieve adequate protections for the LGBTQ+ community which is both a failure of its responsibility to the nation and a national security vulnerability that is being exploited by the imperialists.