The Crime of Fighting for a Better Life: In El Salvador, environmental defenders and civic leaders opposed to mining are being targeted for arrest.

• Author: Dinur, Esty

On January 11, five leaders of the community of Santa Marta, Cabanas, in northern El Salvador, were arrested. A protected witness had accused them of involvement in a murder that happened in 1989, during the country's brutal civil war. The witness admitted he had no firsthand knowledge of the crime the five are accused of when he was questioned by the defendants' lawyer.

When charges were brought against soldiers who had committed atrocities during the war, they remained free until trial. A judge, however, ruled that these former members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) should stay in custody.

The five, Teodoro Antonio Pacheco, Saul Agustin Rivas Ortega, Miguel Angel Gamez, Alejandro Lainez Garcia, and Pedro Antonio Rivas Lainez, are human rights and water defenders. Pacheco and Rivas Ortega also work for the Santa Marta Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES), a local community development organization. They played a key role in bringing about the country's historic 2017 metallic mining ban, instituted to save the country's rivers from toxic materials.

According to the United Nations, more than 75,000 people were killed in El Salvador's civil war, which lasted from 1980 to 1992. The majority of these deaths were attributed to the security forces and paramilitary death squads that were actively supported by the United States. Approximately 9,000 people were disappeared. Human rights violations, including the kidnapping, torture, and murder of suspected FMLN sympathizers, were pervasive.

In May, the BBC reported that about 66,000 people, most of them young, had been detained by El Salvador's police and army after President Nayib Bukele declared a thirty-day "state of exception" in March 2022. That followed the biggest wave of homicides the country had seen since the end of the civil war, which was attributed to street gangs. The emergency order has been renewed every month since then.

The new laws allow police to make warrantless arrests, imprison children as young as twelve years old, restrict the public's right to gather, and conduct the mass monitoring of private citizens' communications.

A new mega-prison, expected to house 40,000 prisoners, has been built in Tecoluca, about fifty miles southeast of the capital San Salvador, and footage of the first group of tattooed suspected gang members transferred there was provided to the media. The state of exception has stemmed the gang violence that has long...