THE WATER DEFENDERS: HOW ORDINARY PEOPLE SAVED A COUNTRY FROM CORPORATE GREEDBy Robin Broad and John Cavanagh224 pages; Beacon Press$27.95
In 2009, a grassroots group working to stop a Canadian company from opening a gold mine in central El Salvador was chosen to receive a human rights award in Washington, D.C. A few months before its leaders were to travel to the United States, however, one of them — Marcelo Rivera — vanished. His family and friends spent a dozen agonizing days searching before an anonymous tip led them to a dry well where they found his tortured, mutilated body.
The group, including Vidalina Morales and Rivera’s brother, Miguel, received the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award that October at the nonprofit Institute for Policy Studies. The award is named for former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his assistant, Ronni Moffitt, who were killed by a car bomb in Washington in 1976.
At the award ceremony, Morales described the efforts by the water defenders of El Salvador’s central Cabañas department to keep Canadian-based Pacific Rim Mining Corp. from opening a gold mine in their area. Not only did they want to block the mine, she said, they wanted the country to ban all mining of metals.
But the story had a complicated twist. The mining company, which had not been granted a permit to open the mine, had sued the country for more than $300 million to compensate it for costs and for the loss of future profits.
Listening to the presentation, John Cavanagh, who was director of the Institute for Policy Studies and is now a senior adviser, and Robin Broad, a professor of international development at American University in Washington, were appalled. Marriage partners as well as fellow researchers, the two were determined to understand how a company could so blatantly hold a country hostage.
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