Robin Broad and John Cavanagh: The Water Defenders
Robin Broad and John Cavanagh recount how Salvadoran communities defeated a multinational mining company to protect their watershed, with Tope Folarin.
Why we picked this
The Salvadoran water case is one of the clearest documented victories in the history of community resistance to extractive industry — Broad and Cavanagh were there for it, and the story is more improbable than the outcome suggests.
El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban metal mining, largely through the sustained organizing of communities in the Cabañas region who refused to let a Canadian-Australian mining consortium extract gold from their watershed. Robin Broad and John Cavanagh documented that fight from inside — accompanying the organizers, tracking the legal battles, and watching a coalition of farmers, Catholic sisters, and environmental lawyers take on a corporation backed by trade arbitration tribunals.
“The Water Defenders” tells that story in full, and the implications reach beyond El Salvador. The legal mechanisms used by the mining company — international investor-state arbitration — are the same mechanisms used in trade agreements worldwide to challenge environmental and health regulations. The communities’ victory was specific, but the tools they faced and the strategies they used are global.
Tope Folarin, a novelist and essayist whose own work explores Nigeria’s oil delta, brings a different geographic lens to a conversation about the same underlying dynamics. Free at Politics and Prose, Connecticut Avenue.