Water Rites. A Murder Mystery Yields a Pollution Solution
| Author | Oliver Houck |
| Pages | 6-7 |
6 | THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, May/June 2021.
Copyright © 2021, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
The book reviewed here
begins with a murder of a
man na med Marcelo Rivera
in El Salvador. It was an inten-
tional killing, and particularly brutal.
Someone was sending a message. Ri-
vera was an environmental activist, as
are many such victims, most of whom
never draw a headline. e year 2019
saw a record number of 212 assassina-
tions of environmentalists, making up
40 percent of all assassinations around
the world.
Latin America has been a particular
hotspot. Of the 212 killings
worldwide, two thirds were
in the Americas south of the
U.S border. Of these, the
most rampant were in Bra-
zil, whose Amazon resources
have long been a Wild West
of gangs and pistoleros-for-
hire by domestic and for-
eign corporations. e sec-
ond most frequent killing
grounds are the small coun-
tries of Central America,
including El Salvador, the
location of e Water De-
fenders: How Ordinary People
Saved a Country From Corporate Greed,
by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh.
is time, and not uncommonly, the
book presents an acute conict over
the two substances most sought after
by human beings: water and gold.
Conceptually speaking, they make
an odd mix. Water is the sta of life for
nearly all civilizations, and those that
run short do not run for very much
longer. We cannot survive without it.
Gold is a dierent phenomenon, and
we can survive quite easily without it.
It’s primary use is in the form of gold
bricks that line the basement oors
and vaults of international banks.
ey are shuttled by little fork-lifts
from one side to another, from the
Britain corner to the China corner,
in order to guarantee the banks’ sol-
vency though we abandoned the gold
standard a century ago. e rest of it
goes into jewelry that we wear (or for
gold teeth) for no reason other than to
show how rich we are. We pay thou-
sands, of dollars for an ounce of gold.
At the same time, we pay pennies for
even a jug full of water. Just think of
the protability of an operation that
mines gold and uses lots of water to
process it. A Canadian corporation
called Pacic Rim thought of it too.
Whether it would kill to get them
we’ll never be absolutely sure.
Here we have the underlying con-
ict of Water Defenders. Pacic Rim, a
shell company of another shell, Ocean
Gold, had struck it rich in the moun-
tains of El Salvador. It would strip the
cover o the deposit (euphemistically
called “the overburden,” as if the soil
and trees removed were somehow
burdening things), crush the rock to
powder, and use a solution of one of
the most deadly poisons on the planet,
cyanide, to bleed out glittering specks
of the precious metal. It may take an
entire side of the mountain to pro-
duce one gold brick for the banks to
buy, and then put back underground.
e entire gold mining process is in-
ordinately destructive, from the opera-
tions just described to the leaching of
these toxic cocktails from containment
ponds into the groundwater, or the di-
rect discharge as with Pacic Rim into
the Lenga River, which “winds through
El Salvador like a snake,” providing
drinking water, bathing water, and irri-
gation water every meter of the journey.
Why do we do this? Because we
have and have always had a belief
that gold has great, indeed overriding,
value. What other value does it have?
e Bible refers to it more than 400
times, from “cities of gold” to “streets
paved with gold,” always in adulation.
Setting aside raids by gold thieves for a
moment, consider how long those cit-
ies of such a soft metal would remain
standing. Or how long the
gold streets would withstand
the pounding of hooves or
truck tires without needing
to be resurfaced . . . with yet
more gold. Perhaps a month?
e question is hypothetical,
of course. ose who invest
in gold follow its price swings
as closely as others do the
stock market, which ends the
discussion. Inter alia, it makes
money and it’s fun.
Returning to the plot of
Water Defenders, its chap-
ters document what became
a war, as vicious as any waged in his-
tory, homicides, torture, and all. Its rst
victim, the above-mentioned Rivera,
disappeared suddenly from the face of
the earth. No explanation. He was just
another desaparecido in a region full of
them — usually at the hands of right-
wing dictatorships, as in Argentina, or
paramilitary esquadrones de la muerte as
in Chile. After weeks of anxious wait-
ing, his family received an anonymous
tip. ere was a body at the bottom of
an abandoned well one-hundred feet
deep just west of Rivera’s hometown.
e corpse was his alright, more or less.
Mostly less.
e book continues: “So extensive
Water Rites
A Murder Mystery Yields a Pollution Solution
By Oliver Houck
In the Literature
The Water Defenders:
How Ordinary People
Saved a Country From
Corporate Greed.
By Robin Broad and John
Cavanagh; Beacon Press;
$27.95.
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