Photo courtesy of Nicole Dunham. Latin American water defenders work to protect their water resources from mining corporations.
By Kiera McLaughlin ’26
Staff Writer
Content warning: This article mentions murder.
Climate change has been at the forefront of international discussion with the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place this November. An event on Thursday, Nov. 10, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst discussed the social movements taking place in Latin America in support of the climate. The panel discussion, titled “A Blue Tide Rising in Latin America?” was held by the Political Economy Research Institute, and focused on the grassroots movements based on Indigenous peoples’ involvement to make a greener Latin America.
As described on the PERI webpage, “Social movements and governments in many Latin American countries are rejecting the heavy emphasis on fossil fuels and mining, and embracing paths that defend their waterways and center on Indigenous communities and women.” The discussion was centered around the book “The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed” by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, two of the guest speakers for the event. Along with Broad and Cavanagh, Manuela Picq spoke as the co-founder of Somos Agua in Ecuador, a movement of water defenders.
Broad, a professor of international development at American University, opened the discussion by reading excerpts from “The Water Defenders” that described the horrific murder of Marcelo Rivera, a water defender who was murdered and tortured in El Salvador. She read, “Marcelo Rivera became the first of several water defenders to be assassinated in the 21st-century fight over mining in northern El Salvador.” Broad further read about her time in El Salvador with Cavanagh investigating and researching the water defenders. She explained that the Pacific Rim Mining Corporation “had filed a lawsuit against the government of El Salvador right before Marcelo’s murder. [Pacific Rim] claimed that El Salvador had to either allow it to mine or pay it over $300 million in costs and foregone profits from future mining,” as Guernica reported. Rivera’s violent murder led Broad and Cavanagh to write their book and pursue more about the continuous fight against mining corporations in El Salvador and more broadly across Latin America.
Recently, some Latin American countries have banned mining in order to preserve water, which is pushing this new so-called blue tide, according to Berkeley Political Review. Cavanagh, a senior advisor and board director for the Institute for Policy Studies, discussed the grassroots movements throughout Latin America and the new elected officials throughout the region pushing greener policies. He explained how, in 2017, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban mining metals in order to save water and how, in 2016, El Salvador won the case against Pacific Rim. Expanding on this topic, Cavanagh talked about other movements with grassroots organizations and water defenders in Ecuador, Argentina and Costa Rica. He also discussed how more environmentally cautious officials have been elected, thanks to these movements, in Honduras, Chile, Colombia and most recently Brazil. He described how the organization of water defenders there were successful through studying mining and educating the public on the scientific dangers that come with it.
Cavanagh explained that in El Salvador, the water defenders gained allies domestically in religious communities, women’s groups and the Institute for Policy Studies, and created a connection with a former minister of the “death squad party,” which was in power during The Salvadoran Civil War in El Salvador, according to The History Connection. They also allied with the Catholic Church through the former Archbishop of El Salvador, Saint Óscar Romero. They also reached out globally and became allies with international communities that shared their interests.
In an interview with Mount Holyoke News, the moderator of the event and senior fellow of the PERI, Professor James K. Boyce, commented on the water defenders’ outreach, stating,“This whole phenomenon of building alliances, domestically and internationally, in order to support local communities, as they are engaged in these struggles to protect their environment, which really is not just their environment, it’s the world’s environment … I would say [is] tremendously important.” This networking and impact outside of El Salvador led to the government, although divided by party, voting unanimously to ban mining in order to protect their water, Cavanagh said. Boyce explained that because El Salvador had such powerful domestic and international allies the “relatively small and impoverished and marginalized communities [could] stand a chance … on the pro-environment and the pro-people side, there is a countervailing mobilization across different sectors in different countries to build an effective alliance.”
After Broad and Cavanagh provided context, Picq explained the reality of the situation in Ecuador and the truth behind her own experiences being a water defender. During the event, she explained that “it is much more dangerous to defend nature than to be a journalist” in Ecuador and many Latin American countries. By sharing statistics, Picq demonstrated the work that Indigenous peoples are doing in these countries. She explained that almost half of the nature defenders are Indigenous peoples, but only five percent of the world population is Indigenous, illustrating the disparities within this movement. Furthermore, she said, “It’s about self determination. It’s about consent. … It’s not about biodiversity, it’s about consent.” She explained that the water defenders and Indigenous peoples are simply defending their land from corporations that wish to mine the land and pollute their water. In his interview with MHN, Bocle explained, “The reframing that [Picq] was suggesting is in line with what I think of as the new environmentalism, which is seen [as] environmental struggles, not as nature versus people, but as struggles of some people versus other people.” He further elaborated, “It provokes an outcry because of the threats to people’s health, to their livelihood, to the well-being of the future generations. These are the things that stir us to try to protect the environment. By protecting the environment, we’re protecting ourselves.” Picq’s reframing of the cause behind environmentalism opens the floor for movements to support and help organize to protect the people affected by environmental changes, as explained by Bolce.
Picq provided a new look into understanding the environmental crisis by bringing the suffering of Indigenous and poor people to the foreground. While this event was portrayed as a hopeful look into the promising policies passed in Latin America, Picq explained that the fight is far from over and Indigenous peoples are still putting in the hard work to defend their land and water. Boyce said that he was “cautiously hopeful,” about the future of environmental policies, explaining, “These struggles are not lost. They’re not hopeless. There have been victories, there have been defeats as well. And I think one needs to have hope without having complacency.”