El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador's government has locked up 5 community organizers and environmental activists from the rural community of Santa Marta, alleging their participation in a decades old crime during El Salvador's civil war.   But the circumstances surrounding the case suggest to many that the real motivation for their detention is to weaken resistance to metallic mining in the country and make possible the lifting of a mining prohibition. The actions of the country's Attorney General, Rodolfo Delgado, illustrate how the State of Exception with its suspension of judicial guarantees of due process is being used, not just to fight gangs, but to intimidate human rights defenders, including environmental activists. His actions show that the hard won victory to ban extractive metallic mining in the country may be under threat.  Nina Lakhani in the  Guardian  reported the arrests of the five community leaders:  Five prominent environmental defenders who played a crucial ro...

Earlier this week, El Salvador's environmental groups came together for the 22nd annual Caminata Ecológica or "Environment March".   They walked through the streets of the capital San Salvador under the theme Exigimos justicia ambiental para el cuido de nuestra casa común --  "We demand environmental justice for the care of our common home."  The march began at Cuscatlan Park in the center of San Salvador and proceeded towards the presidential palace, although barricades and riot police stopped the march short of the palace.  March leaders were not greeted by anyone from the executive branch, but could only deliver their letter at the correspondence window. ¡Exigimos Justicia Ambiental para el cuidado de nuestra casa común! @SomosAguaES fue parte de la XXII Caminata Ecológica, en el marco del Día Mundial del Medio Ambiente, para exigir el respeto de los derechos ambientales, nuestros bienes naturales y territorios. pic.twitter.com/r1p9jmDwQb — Alianza Nacion...

Today I am sharing an update on the "Valle El Ángel" commercial/residential mega-development on the outskirts of San Salvador. The development is a project of real estate developer Urbánica . The owners of Urbánica are the ultra-wealthy Dueñas family in El Salvador, and their proposed development of 8000 houses, shopping centers, churches and more would threaten the available water resources in the capital region, according to environmental and community groups. Most of the land, located along the Pan American highway northeast of San Salvador, is currently used to grow sugar cane. The development has been opposed for years by a coalition of groups with a special concern about the impact on the important aquifer which lies beneath this zone. I described the project and the environmental concerns in a long piece here in 2019.   Despite the years of struggle against the project by advocates, under the current administration in El Salvador, it now appears likely that developme...

For fifteen years , environmental activists and water defenders have been calling for a comprehensive national water law in El Salvador which would protect the scarce liquid resource from over-exploitation and pollution.   Last night El Salvador's Legislative Assembly, dominated by the president's Nuevas Ideas party, passed a broad Hydro Resources Law , but water activists are denouncing that measure. In June, president Nayib Bukele announced he was sending a water law proposal to the Legislative Assembly for review and adoption.   The Assembly created an ad hoc commission to study the law, which met with a broad variety of interest groups, although water advocates insist that their points of view were not taken into account. Water advocates are claiming that the newly passed law favors mega-users of water and economic interests and does not have a focus on water as a human right.  Local boards which operate community water systems across the country are not g...

For months now, a special committee in El Salvador led by vice president Felix Ulloa has been working on drafting a set of reforms to the country's constitution.   The meetings have been held behind closed doors, and although some details had been leaking out, much was unknown about what would be proposed.  The completed draft of the proposed reforms to the constitution are now public.  The changes are sweeping, with revisions, deletions or replacements of some 215 articles of the 274-article constitution.   While there is much to study in the proposal, and I do not purport to have had the chance to review the document fully, at this point I can say that many changes are remarkably progressive.   If the proposal were to be adopted and the courts and government were to fully implement and respect the rights created by this document, it would be a positive step forward for the country. (That's a big "if"). (For those wishing to study the proposed re...

Sumpul River, Chalatenango Climate change, deforestation, pollution, urban development, and government inaction all threaten the availability and quality of water for every person living in El Salvador.   Here is a summary of a number of the most prominent water issues facing the country in 2021. Proposed National Water Law The current Legislative Assembly dominated by Nayib Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party has formed an Ad Hoc Committee to review a national water law proposed by the Bukele administration.  This proposal came after the Assembly removed from discussion  drafts of a law on which prior Assemblies had slowly worked for the past several years. Environmental activists who have been working on the issue for many years have several concerns about the newly proposed law.  One of the biggest objections to the bill relates to provisions that would allow a national water authority the power to grant large industrial water users concessions lasting as long as 15...

El Salvador is in the midst of a years long water crisis, but past governments have been completely incapable of taking the necessary actions to address it.   Now a new party controls the legislative and executive branches of government, and Nuevas Ideas claims it will take positive action where its predecessors have failed.   As journalist Nina Lakhani wrote in The Guardian in 2019: El Salvador is the most densely populated country in Central America. It also has the region’s lowest water reserves, which are depleting fast thanks to the climate crisis, pollution and unchecked commercial exploitation. The water issues calling out to be addressed in El Salvador are many:    The national water authority ANDA fails in its basic mission to get drinking water to communities, with neighborhoods and entire towns with spotty or no service for weeks or months at a time.   It is a distribution system with tremendous gaps in the quality of service between weal...

On November 3, El Salvador's environmental ministry ("MARN" for its initials in Spanish) gave the green light to a commercial/residential mega-development on the outskirts of San Salvador. The development is called "Valle El Ángel," a project of real estate developer Urbánica . The owners of Urbánica are the ultra-wealthy Dueñas family in El Salvador, and their proposed urbanization development of 8000 houses, shopping centers, churches and more would threaten the available water resources in the capital region, according to environmental and community groups. Most of the land, located along the Pan-American highway, is currently used to grow sugar cane. See photos here . On hearing the news, Carlos Flores, one of the leaders of groups opposing the project, decried the failure of MARN to address environmental concerns which had been raised.   Earlier this year, MARN had acknowledged questions about the hydrology impact of the development, but there has bee...

It was a proceeding not seen in El Salvador for twenty years. Government officials from the Bukele administration were required to come before the full Legislative Assembly to answer questions for three days from the assembled deputies in a process called interpelación . The officials were the Minister of Health, Dr. Ana Orellana Bendek, and the president of the ANDA water authority, Fréderick Benítez, and they were being questioned about a water crisis earlier this year when the water from the Las Pavas water purification plant was a dirty brown color with a bad odor. The politicians in the Legislative Assembly, of course, were not just trying to learn what happened, but to score points against the Bukele administration. What we did learn: 1) You should probably never drink the water from the ANDA water system 2) The health risk of the water during the January water crisis was not significantly worse than normal, despite the bad color and odor. 3) The bad color and odo...

In many municipalities in the department of San Salvador, the drinking water coming out of faucets in recent days has been brown with a foul odor.  Affected communities include parts of Apopa, Ilopango, Soyapango and Santa  Tecla among others. These communities around San Salvador receive their drinking water from the  Las Pavas water purification plant  which draws from the Lempa River and is operated by the Salvadoran water authority, ANDA.  The government says the problem relates to an unexpected algae growth in the Lempa.  Today the government rolled out a plan to supply drinking water to affected communities.   Cartons and cartons of bottled water were loaded onto trucks which headed out into the affected areas.  The effort was accompanied by a major publicity campaign, with more than a dozen government ministries tweeting out messages, with countless photos of public officials carrying cartons of bottled water, and lines of truc...

Six months ago I described how a proposed high density residential project to be built just northeast of the San Salvador metropolitan area will be an early test of the priorities of the new government of president Nayib Bukele.  We may see the results of that test soon. The development is called "Valle El Ángel," a project of real estate developer  Urbánica .    The owners of Urbánica are the ultra-wealthy Dueñas family in El Salvador, and they plan a mega-real estate project in the municipality of Apopa, just northeast of San Salvador at the base of the San Salvador volcano. The proposed urbanization development of  8000 houses, shopping centers, churches and more would threaten the available water resources in the region, according to environmental and community groups.  Most of the land, located along the Pan-American highway, is currently used to grow sugar cane. Opponents to Valle El Ángel argue that this mega-project will cause the over-exploita...

A recent article by Nina Lakhani in the Guardian titled  Living without water: the crisis pushing people out of El Salvador   is an excellent summary of how a failure to comprehensively manage the precious resource of water in El Salvador threatens many in the country.  As summarized in the article: Years of drought has prompted water rationing in urban and rural areas across the country. Yet much is wasted: most rainwater is lost due to widespread deforestation and eroded river basins; once in the system, 48% of water is lost through leaks.  Sources are already running dry: the Nejapa aquifer provides 40% of the water used by the overcrowded capital, but the water level has shrunk by 20% in the past five years alone....  “There are no clear rules, no sanctions, no monitoring, and big business uses these legal vacuums to exploit water as a product for profit. It’s the poorest who suffer most." That article should be read in conjunction with Heather Gies' ...