El Salvador: Water Wars in El Salvador: Tacuba Resists

Sep 1, 2017 | Hilary Goodfriend, North American Congress on Latin America
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The struggle in Tacuba occurs in the legal vacuum generated by decades of deregulation in El Salvador, where organizers are campaigning for a nation-wide Water Law to defend the increasingly scarce resource from privatization, contamination, and depletion. It also unfolds in the wake of environmentalists’ recent historic victory that made El Salvador the first country in the world to enact a national ban on the metal mining industry, just months after the Salvadoran government defeated a transnational mining giant (Pacific Rim, which was bought by Australia’s Oceana Gold firm) in the World Bank’s controversial investor-state dispute tribunals. The anti-mining campaign was a battle for the value of water over gold.