Lessons of Successful Resistance: The Water Defenders of El Salvador

Resistance to environmental plunder shows us a path for our own struggles

The global proliferation of data centers, which require enormous amounts of water to cool the servers, is calling public attention once again to the preciousness of water as a resource and the history of its use and ruination by Big Capital and billionaires. Even a mid-sized data center can consume as much water as a small town. This redirection of water away from local communities and agriculture is the latest chapter in the fight for a life source that has often been rendered unsafe or unusable by pollution from mining and other extractive activities.

This was the case in El Salvador, where the Pacific Rim Corporation’s gold mining operations posed a threat to the country’s water supply: the extraction process would pollute the water with cyanide. And so an ultimately successful struggle shaped up. A poverty-stricken indigenous population took on a giant capitalist enterprise, in the process allying with international environmental and social policy advocates to stop the plunder and poisoning.

Lucid recently hosted two individuals who were part of that struggle and have resisted dictatorships in El Salvador, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Robin Broad and John Cavanagh are co-authors of the new graphic version of the award-winning book The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed, which tells the story.

Broad is a research professor at American University and has worked as an international economist in U.S. government and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Cavanagh is Senior Advisor and former Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

During our discussion, Robin sketched out some lessons from this landmark victory that are applicable to other resistance efforts, including those in the United States today. Here, for everyone, is a seven-minute clip from that presentation. Paying subscribers can access the whole 30-minute video at lucid.substack.com, videos tab.

I took careful notes during our session, and here are some bullet points about the lessons, with my own commentary added.

• It is not enough to engage in denunciation. Resistance efforts must be framed in a positive manner as contributing to an alternate vision of the future. In the case of El Salvador, the resistance coalition were less anti-mining than pro-water. Agua es Vida was one of their slogans, and one that everyone could understand and get behind, regardless of how they felt about mining and the jobs it might bring to local communities. Jobs are no good if you cannot survive because your water is poisoned. Water is life.

• Resistance must be bottom-up, grounded in the community, and powered by grassroots action. “In the roots lie the moral compass,” Robin stated. The community is also the source of immense ancestral wisdom in opposing tyranny, survival in difficult circumstances, and bringing people together for righteous action.

• Successful resisters are pragmatic. When necessary, they take on “unlikely allies,” as Robin put it. That means working with people who are perhaps distant from you on many issues and finding common ground. in this case, religion was a bridging factor, and I would add that working with faith institutions also enacts the maxim that resistance struggles can be accelerated by involving people who are already organized (whether in unions, congregations, or civil society organizations).

• Local resistance is enhanced by having global partners who can bring international pressure to bear. This is especially important when the aggressors are multinationals or, say, billionaires whose power and investments have a global reach.

And here are some last bullet points added by me. They give an expanded definition of authoritarianism I have been working with, which seems more relevant every day. I present it here because the way we conceive of the adversary determines the methods and messaging we use in our resistance efforts.

• Authoritarianism cannot only be defined in political-legal terms, as the executive branch’s encroachment on the independence and impartiality of the other branches of government and institutions. It is also a massive operation of transferring wealth and power.

• Authoritarianism is a process of taking away the rights of the many and giving unprecedented freedoms to the very few to plunder the environment, the economy, female bodies and the labor force with impunity.

The great victory achieved in El Salvador is a rebuke of this. We are all connected on this earth, and there is much to learn from all kinds of resistance struggles that threaten communities with disenfranchisement, and loss of vital resources and rights.