On January 5, 2024, 185 academics and lawyers from 21 countries, along with 13 legal and related organizations, sent an open letter to El Salvador’s Attorney General.  The letter requests “that the Attorney General of the Republic immediately drop the case against the Salvadoran Water Defenders.”

Link to the letter and the signatories in English

Link to the letter and the signatories in Spanish

Signatories include: American University professor and Guggenheim Fellow Robin Broad; distinguished international law professor at Princeton and UC Santa Barbara Richard Falk; Andreu Oliva, Dean of the University of Central America; Mirna Perla, former magistrate of the Supreme Court of El Salvador; and other distinguished academics and lawyers.

The letter was released on the eve of the first anniversary of the January 11, 2023 arrest and detention of five Water Defenders from the department of Cabañas. The men arrested—Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco, and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega—helped lead the struggle to save El Salvador’s stressed water supply from the notoriously water intensive and polluting metals mining industry. They played a central role in the events that led the Salvadoran government to pass the historic, first ever national prohibition on metals mining in 2017.  They were released to house arrest in September 2023, but the charges against the five remain, and they are scheduled to go on trial later this year.

The letter lays out a growing body of evidence which demonstrates that the case brought against the five Water Defenders was unsubstantiated by evidence, in violation of the National Reconciliation Law of 1992, in violation of the right to due process enshrined in the Salvadoran constitution, and was likely politically motivated.

The letter also expresses “grave concern about the criminalization of environmentalists, the systematic violation of human rights, and the flagrant undermining of democracy in El Salvador perpetrated under the ongoing State of Exception.”

Said Rafael Paz Narvaez, Sociology Professor at the University of El Salvador, who signed the letter:

“Continuing with the unjust detention of Alejandro Laínez, Antonio Pacheco, Miguel Gámez, Pedro Rivas Laínez and Saúl Rivas, from the Santa Marta Community and the ADES organization, attacks them personally as historical leaders.  But, in essence, it is also a direct attack on the dignity and the rights of an entire population who fought 22 years of popular resistance for their freedom against the oppression imposed by powerful economic sectors and tyrannical rulers. Their imprisonment, without concrete evidence, under unfounded accusations for an alleged past crime, is an outrage against justice and an affront to the achievements obtained after decades of fighting against authoritarian governments. Unjustly imprisoning the leadership does not stop the popular struggle, and destroying monuments does not annul a people´s memory. We support the demand for their immediate freedom and the recognition of the rights of access to land, work and freedom, for which the Salvadoran people rose up.”

Said signer Angela Sanbrano, J.D., an immigration, labor, and human rights advocate in the United States:

“The prosecution of the five Water Defenders represents an extremely dangerous precedent, as the defenders are protected under the 1992 National Reconciliation Law, which was foundational to the negotiations of the U.N. brokered Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992. As such, the charges against the five Water Defenders are a violation of the letter and spirit of the Peace Accords that ended the civil war.”