Help IPS Fight a Dictator

Two years ago, on January 11, 2023, the self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world” arrested five close IPS allies on trumped up but extremely serious charges. The president: Nayib Bukele; the country: El Salvador; the allies: leading environmental human rights leaders. 

The charges were an alleged murder from 35 years ago, a murder for which there was absolutely no evidence. Two years later, the charges remain.

There may be some lessons from these past two years that can help us resist an authoritarian leader who will soon retake power in our own country. In the meantime, we at IPS need your help in our work to make sure that these five water defenders of El Salvador do not spend the rest of their lives in jail.

These five allies are special. They are among the most dedicated and talented water defenders in the world. They were leaders of the successful 13-year fight to save El Salvador’s rivers from the toxic pollution of gold mining. In 2017, that nation’s legislature became the first in the world to pass a law that banned all metals mining in El Salvador after sustained education and mobilization at the local, national, and global levels.  

IPS was a leader of the global work for that 2017 victory. We researched and pressured the mining companies and exposed the World Bank tribunal where the mining companies sued El Salvador for hundreds of millions of dollars for putting desperately-needed restrictions on toxic industrial mining.  

We were so inspired by this fight and its lessons that two of us wrote a book chronicling the story called The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed, which we also made sure was available in Spanish so that water defenders across Latin America could learn from the Salvadoran victory. 

Fast forward to the Bukele years and the trumped up charges against the five water defenders. Much of our campaign in 2023 mobilized civil society, academics, and lawyers to expose the absurdity of the charges against the five. We also were able to persuade the governments of Canada, France, Germany, and the UK to express displeasure over the arrests. After nine months of sustained national mobilization in El Salvador aided by the global campaign, the Salvadoran government released the five from Bukele’s squalid prisons into house arrest.    

Then, in October 2024, a three-person court in El Salvador ruled to acquit the five on all charges. The ruling was based on the fact that the Attorney General never provided any actual evidence of the purported crime. With that innocent ruling, the five walked out of the court house — and celebration erupted in El Salvador, at IPS, and around the world. 

Then all hell broke loose, and we witnessed what happens when an executive branch has excessive control over the rest of the government. The Bukele government did not accept the innocent verdict and, instead, appealed it to a higher court. Then, in December 2024, the appeals court threw out the innocent verdict and announced that the five would be retried on February 3 by a different court known for its loyalty to Bukele. 

Seemingly proving that the arrest of the five was indeed linked to their successful work to save El Salvador from toxic industrial mining, Bukele blanketed social media with exaggerated claims about how much gold lay under El Salvador’s soil, and why it was “absurd” not to mine it. 

With a lightning strike, two days before Christmas 2024, Bukele convened his National Legislature, where 57 of the 60 deputies are loyal to his party, and asked them to vote on a new mining law that would re-open the country to the gold mining companies. Not surprisingly, it passed quickly in a vote of 57 to 3.

This is where we’d love you to act with us and with the Salvadoran water defenders.  

We are now asking both non-profit organizations and individual academics and lawyers to sign this letter to President Bukele. This open letter to President Bukele calls on him to keep toxic mining out of the country — and for his Attorney General to drop the charges against the five water defenders. 

The letter points out that we have witnessed the destructive impacts of mining all over the world — and that El Salvador in particular faces multiple challenges and environmental threats that would be exacerbated by the reintroduction of mining. It stresses that mining would increase El Salvador’s risk of environmental contamination, human-rights violations, and public health concerns. 

More specifically, the letter we are asking you to sign notes the following:

• The new mining law passed on December 23, 2024, centralizes the decision making in the hands of the executive. It ignores international best practices, like requiring mining companies to submit an Environmental Impact Assessment for project approval. It does not provide for open and transparent information on mining activities nor does it require consultation and consent of the communities that will be impacted. And it leaves the high cost of mining closures and environmental remediation in the hands of the state while freeing mining corporations from responsibility for environmental crimes.
• El Salvador’s previous 2017 mining law that prohibited all metals mining was passed unanimously in the legislature. Almost four-fifths of Salvadorans opposed mining in a 2015 UCA poll. A new Central American University (UCA) poll in December 2024 found that 61 percent of Salvadorans oppose mining. 
  
• The Archbishop of San Salvador, José Luis Escobar Alas, along with 600 Salvadoran priests, a wide range of environmental and social movement organizations, and many in the communities that would be affected by mining have come out in opposition to new mining.
  
• We co-authored a piece for El Faro laying out 15 strong reasons why El Salvador rejected toxic gold mining in 2017 — and why it should not restart mining now.

So if you are a member of a non-profit, an academic, or a lawyer, please  sign this letter to Bukele to urge his government to stop any new mining and drop the charges against the five water defenders.     

Thank you for joining us in standing with the Salvadoran water defenders. We will need to show the same support to civil society leaders around the world who choose to speak truth to power, be it in El Salvador or the United States.