Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates

After multiple postponements, a worrisome trial began in El Salvador on July 29: a re-trial of the Santa Marta 5, a group of well-known water defenders who had been instrumental in the country’s successful effort to ban mining in 2017. In a press conference prior to the start of the trial, grassroots organizations in El Salvador joined community leaders from Santa Marta to denounce the proceedings as “double jeopardy” in practice, “violating the legal principle that no one can be tried twice for the same crime.” The community concluding that “the only lawful and just outcome is the absolution of our environmental leaders” due to the lack of evidence against them. The case has been a flashpoint internationally for concerns about the integrity of the justice system and increasing risk to environmental and human rights defenders in El Salvador.A new trial against five Salvadoran environmentalists, accused of murdering a woman in 1989 during the civil war, will take place on Tuesday, announced the NGO they belong to, denouncing the case as a form of “persecution” for their anti-mining activism.

The environmentalists, who were guerrilla fighters at the time of the crime, were acquitted on October 18 along with three other former rebels also accused of the murder. However, a higher court overturned the ruling and ordered a retrial.

“The case is criminalization and persecution of environmental activism (…) they are key figures in the community resistance against metal mining,” said Alfredo Leiva, a board member of the Santa Marta Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES).

The five environmentalists helped push through the 2017 ban on mining, which was repealed last December by the pro-government Congress at the request of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who supports gold mining operations.

Under trade agreements, corporations are given the right to sue  governments using a controversial investor-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS), which allows private sector lawyers to determine whether the country has treated foreign investors fairly. Even though the government of Honduras announced its withdrawal from ISDS in February 2024, companies continue to sue governments for policies that may impact their profits, such as reforms to make electricity more affordable.

​​​​​​​Given that Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Central America, the lawsuits from various corporations (totaling $19.4 billion, an amount equivalent to roughly 53% of the country’s GDP in 2024) add immense pressure on the government to implement policies that favor the companies’ interests. These actions often come with harmful consequences for environmental protection and human rights, as communities adjacent to the companies’ projects have denounced for years.

Glencore is a global coal mining company based in Switzerland. It’s US-based subsidiary, Glencore USA LLC, is incorporated in Delaware. Glencore's U.S. operations (100% owned by Glencore) listed on its website includes 24 separate companies, including the company's New York headquarters on Madison Avenue. 

In Colombia, Glencore International is the 100% owner of several subsidiaries: C.I. Prodeco S.A., Carbones de la Jagua S.A., Carbones El Tesoro S.A., Consorcio Minero Unido S.A., Servicios Integrales de Cuidado y Mantenimiento Minero Ambiental S.A.S. (all in Barranquilla); Glencore Colombia SAS and Glencore Energy Colombia SAS (in Bogotá); and Sociedad Portuaria Puerto Nuevo S.A. (in Magdalena).

IRTF has been following the controversy around the Cerrejon Mine in Colombia for the past 20 years because of the negative impacts on local communities, including the Indigenous Wayúu in La Guajira Department (on the Atlantic coast and Venezuelan border). Cerrejon is Latin America’s largest open-pit coal mine. Once drinkable, the waters of the Ranchería River, now runs visibly dark.

Another layer of controversy is Glencore’s relationship with Israel. President Petro warned that if Glencore refuses to comply with the decree to suspend coal shipments to Israel, he would unilaterally alter its concession (permit) and would ask the local community near the mine to stage blockades.

During the first dozen years after the coup in Honduras, tThe arrangement between drug traffickers and the Honduran political elite was straightforward and mutually beneficial. On the one hand, political actors received kickbacks or other economic benefits from the projects they awarded. On the other, drug traffickers were afforded new ways to disguise their illicit proceeds, build up their social capital, and fortify their facade as seemingly legitimate business actors. But as the coup presidents opened a window for these corrupt networks to expand their wealth and consolidate power, the environment, and those working to protect it, suffered greatly.

In the nearly 15 years since Honduras was declared open for business, deforestation has increased at an alarming rate alongside the expansion of the extractives industry. During this same time, the country has also seen an unprecedented wave of violence directed at environmental defenders. The non-governmental organization Global Witness recently said that “nowhere on earth are you more likely to be killed for protesting the theft of land and destruction of the natural world than in Honduras.”

Guatemala has more fresh water than most countries, but its Indigenous population lacks safe, reliable access.

Human Rights Watch emphasized that the Guatemalan military’s legacy of racist policies continued to shape water access. During the country’s civil war, military campaigns targeted Indigenous communities, destroying infrastructure and displacing populations. Post-war reconstruction efforts largely excluded Indigenous areas, perpetuating inequality. The report stated, “The Guatemalan military’s historical role in marginalizing Indigenous communities laid the groundwork for today’s water crisis. Infrastructure development has consistently prioritized urban, non-Indigenous regions.”

In Guatemala, the site of some of Israel’s most abhorrent war crimes outside of Palestine, the reality of Israeli warmongering is well documented. Israel’s instrumentality in the decades-long civil war and state-sponsored genocide of the Indigenous Maya provides critical context for the genocide of Palestinians today.

Current relations between Israel and Guatemala are bound to this bloody history and fueled by the relationship between Zionism and an Evangelicalism informed by two biblical interpretations.

An estimated 200,000 Maya and, to a lesser extent, Ladino (also known as Mestizo) people of mixed Indigenous and European descent, were killed or disappeared during the 36-year Guatemalan civil war that was fought between 1960 and 1996.

However, it was between 1981 and 1983 – especially under the leadership of Efraín Ríos Montt, a Pentecostal Evangelical, and at the height of Israel’s military involvement – that “more than half the massacres and scorched earth operations occurred,” according to the UN-sponsored Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH).

Established in 1994 to investigate the history of human rights violations and acts of violence throughout the armed conflict, the CEH found that “agents of the state of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people which lived in the four regions analyzed.”

And Israel’s fingerprints were all over Ríos Montt’s atrocities.

In the wake of his coup d’état on 23 March 1982, Ríos Montt told an ABC reporter that it had succeeded “because many of our soldiers were trained by the Israelis.”

In 1983, his chief of staff General Héctor López Fuentes also confirmed that, “Israel is our principal supplier of arms and the number one friend of Guatemala in the world.”

SUMMARY

IRTF has been a member of the Honduras Solidarity Network since the coup 16 years ago that ousted their democratically-elected president, Mel Zelaya. Although the current government is considered post-coup, the administrations since 2009 implemented a lot of changes that benefit the oligarchy at the expense of Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino communities. Although state-led repression is less now, the network of coup proponents, corrupt actors and organized crime continue to have influence and to act, even violently, against the peoples’ movements.

Read our full statement on the anniversary of the coup here.

Giovanni Batz’s carefully researched text examines how the Ixil and K’iche’ Mayas have resisted attacks on their land, state violence, and extraction since Spanish colonization.