Environmental activists at a Jan. 19 demonstration calling on the Salvadoran government to free five members of the ADES anti-mining group. (Photo by Mesa Nacional Frente a la Minería Metálica)
Salvadoran green advocates have long warned that their country’s popular young president, 41-year-old Nayib Bukele, would encourage an extractive model of economic development and, even if the result is environmental damage, deal harshly with those who oppose it. They claim those concerns have been borne out with the arrests of five anti-mining activists in two municipalities located in Cabañas department, 85 kilometers (53 miles) north of the national capital of San Salvador. The men—attorney Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega and farmers Teodoro Antonio Pacheco, Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García and Pedro Antonio Rivas—are former leftist guerrillas who put down their arms when El Salvador’s civil war ended three decades ago. The government has accused them of kidnapping and murdering an alleged Salvadoran Army informant, María Inés Alvarenga Leiva, in Cabañas in 1989, during the civil war. Lawyers for the men, who were jailed on Jan... [Log in to read more]
