Seven years ago, El Salvador banned all mining for metals to protect its water supply. But now the government seems to be making moves to reverse the ban – and environmental activists are in the firing line
On the afternoon of 17 May 2023, in the rural El Salvador state of Cabañas, Vidalina Morales’s mobile phone rang. It was her 33-year-old son, Manuel, but his voice sounded strange. “They have me here in the police station,” he said. He’d been arrested while playing football with friends on a local field. Morales tried to breathe. This had long been her worst fear: that her loved ones would be targeted on account of her work.
Morales, 55, is one of the most visible leaders of the Salvadoran environmentalist movement. About 5ft tall and slight, with long black hair wrapped into a sensible bun, she often wears the blouses and long skirts traditional to rural Salvadoran women. As the president of a development organisation in Cabañas called the Association for Social and Economic Development (Ades), she is also familiar with the halls of power. In March 2017, she and her colleagues, after years of activism, won a national ban on metal mining, the first such ban in the world. Mining posed an existential threat to the Salvadoran water supply. Worldwide, the industry often overrides local laws and regulations and leaves violence and environmental destruction in its wake. For Salvadorans, a ban was the only way to protect their resources.
