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Vidalina Morales and her son. Photo: let’s get misinformed
A state of emergency has been in force in El Salvador since the end of March 2022. Nearly 70,000 people have been arrested in the last 15 months and most are being held without charge. But now the repression is not only aimed at suspected gang members; environmentalists are also affected.
In January, several environmental activists were arrested in the municipality of Santa Marta in northern El Salvador. They are accused of a murder in 1989, but Vidalina Morales from the environmental organization ADES believes that with the arrests the government is resisting the weak regulation of this economic sector, implemented as a result of neoliberal policies. This generates hardly any income for the governments of the region, while transnational corporations are making high profits and industrialized nations continue to use the scarce raw materials. Colombia, for example, is the fourth largest coal exporter in the world and is one of Germany’s most important suppliers. People who live near the mining areas suffer from respiratory diseases and lack of economic prospects. In Peru it is similar with copper mining. Despite mining, the population in the mining areas lives in poverty, has little access to public services and is struggling with negative consequences for health and the environment.
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The interview was conducted by Antonia Rodriguez from the Munich Ökubüro.
Repression of Environmentalists by News Pool Latin America is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 international.