Across Latin America, private companies are tempting governments to invest in mining, especially as demand booms for the critical minerals used in clean energy technologies. Meanwhile, Indigenous and peasant communities are rallying against the threats the industry poses to their waterways and land sovereignty. Salvadorans once inspired anti-mining movements with their 2017 victory, but activists now have to contend with governments leaning more and more toward authoritarianism that prioritize corporations over communities—and that quell opposition with lethal violence. Leaders are determined to fight back, even if it puts their lives at risk.

“The choice now in the world and in Latin America is between democracies and many that are trying to protect their environment like Chile, Colombia, and Brazil versus authoritarian governments that are not,” Cavanagh said. “The struggle between authoritarianism and democracy is central in Latin America.”

Vidalina Morales still remembers when El Salvador entered its civil war in 1979. The now 55-year-old was only a child then, but she grew up along the border of Honduras where refugees escaping the military violence arrived in 1981. 

“Where I lived, a lot of injured people arrived, and many others disappeared along the way,” she told me in Spanish over the phone. “I remember those stories well.”

These memories planted the seed for Morales’s activism. She’s now the president of the Association of Economic and Social Development (ADES), an environmental and human rights group based in El Salvador that helped make the mining ban possible in 2017. “Those experiences shape a person,” she said. “They push you to get involved in the fights we face in our lives.”

These days, the fight hits especially close to home. In May 2023, the police wrongly arrested her son for two days, falsely claiming he was a gang member, in an act she called “arbitrary” and “intimidating.” Months earlier, her colleague Pacheco, the director of ADES, was among the five water defenders arrested. 

“They were sending us a message,” Morales said. “They want to open the path for these mining projects to come back. They want to criminalize the social movements in this country… This is the life we’re living in El Salvador. We feel so much fear for our lives and the lives of our families.”

She refuses to stop speaking out, though. Salvadorans shed blood, sweat, and tears to protect their waterways and ban mining; too many lives have been lost already. Morales recalls the killing of anti-mining activist Dora “Alicia” Recinos Sorto in 2009. She was eight months pregnant when she died. Her murder came after the deaths of two other comrades that year: Ramiro Rivera and Marcelo Rivera.

“When the mining ban passed, there was a great joy, but I also remember that lives were lost and sacrificed for that law to happen,” Morales said. “We know we’re not exempt from that. Any day now, they could capture or assassinate us. When they captured my son, those memories came flooding back.”

This unwavering resistance, however, is what made the historic prohibition possible. As Morales’s story shows, much of that organizing arose out of the country’s civil war era. During that war period, up to 70,000 people were estimated to have been killed, mostly by state forces. Many survivors escaped to refugee camps like the one Morales lived near as a child. In these camps, community members learned to organize and build political power. 

“Salvadorans were already starting to build what the country might look like post-war,” explained Jacey Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate of history at Montana State University who has researched on the ground in El Salvador.

The country’s successful anti-mining efforts were built off those movements. Despite the ban, however, El Salvador has continued to see its water resources suffer. One study estimates that the country could run out of water in less than 80 years as pollution, drought, and deforestation degrade the nation’s water resources. In communities like the one my mother grew up in, sewage is pumped directly into streams. Bukele passed a water law in 2021 that he positions as an attempt to protect resources from pollution, but advocates believe that the law moves to privatize water, instead.  

The president’s actions have been a source of global debate. Some celebrate the way he has reduced El Salvador’s homicide rate while others denounce the methods by which he’s accomplished that. For Salvadorans living in the country, it’s hard to not appreciate the notable change in everyday life now that gang members are behind bars. After all, the gangs used to control entire neighborhoods, issuing taxes on small businesses and killing anyone who defied them. They ran checkpoints to monitor who was entering and leaving communities. Thanks to Bukele, that’s not a reality anymore. 

“For a population that has seen the very severe issue of insecurity solved, environmental issues are probably not at the top of their concerns now,” said Ainhoa Montoya, a senior fellow at the Spanish National Research Council who has researched the mining ban on the ground in El Salvador. 

The nation’s environmental leaders, however, are preparing to mobilize yet again against mining. Since 2021, the Bukele government has quietly taken steps that indicate mining may be in El Salvador’s future—from joining the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining to allocating 2023 budget funds to revamp its mining and energy laws. If Bukele, indeed, attempts to reverse the ban, will he let advocates freely oppose him?

“What we want is functioning democracies,” said Pedro Cabezas, coordinator of the Central American Alliance on Mining, which is organizing against industry in the region. “It’s what we need.”

He knows what happens when communities don’t get a say—when they become sacrifice zones for dirty projects. “The mining industry takes a lot of territories. It destroys the biodiversity. It destroys water sources,” he said. “The indiscriminate use of chemicals also makes communities sick.”

No one should be living through such pollution and harm—not in El Salvador or anywhere else. In El Salvador, companies want to mine gold. In Argentina, the fight is over lithium, a critical mineral for building the batteries needed in electric vehicles and solar panel arrays. In Panama, activists have managed to delay a copper mine in the courts.

These types of wins are only possible when advocates can speak out—and when the judicial system is working as it should. In El Salvador, 10 of the 15 Supreme Court judges are newly appointed by Bukele. 

“There is a very strong correlation between the shrinking of civic space and attacks to defenders,” said Laura Furones, senior adviser for the land and environmental defenders team at Global Witness, a human rights group that publishes an annual report documenting attacks on environmentalists.

While governments are slow to identify who has killed outspoken community leaders, other leaders are increasingly being criminalized rather than protected—a trend Furones calls “troubling.” Latin America, in particular, has seen intense attacks on its social movements alongside growing support and admiration of iron-fist regimes like Bukele’s. 

But what comes after a government rids its streets of crime? When strongarm tactics bleed into other parts of life? In El Salvador, signs point to mining being forced back on their land—an industry people died to expel just years earlier. Without democracy, environmental defenders won’t be able to do it again, not without further bloodshed. Latin America has seen enough death, violence, and trauma throughout the centuries. A loss of democracy would only ensure even more.