“Many people have watched fights between communities and big corporations around the world. The corporations usually win so those are the Goliath. The Davids usually lose,” says John Cavanagh, co-author of The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed. In this week’s episode of Friday Podcasts, Cavanagh and co-author Robin Broad recount how local activists mobilized a global coalition of religious leaders, labor unions, and environmental activists to block an international corporation from opening a gold mine that threatened El Salvador’s fragile water supply.

“We had no choice but to begin the book with the horrifying realization that murder can be the cost of protecting the environment in many countries around the world,” said Broad. In 2009, three months before Cavanagh’s organization, Institute for Policy Studies, was preparing to present its prestigious annual Human Rights Award to a group of El Salvadoran water defenders, they received news that one of the awardees, teacher and cultural worker, Marcelo Rivera, had been assassinated, his tortured body left at the bottom of a deep dry well. 

The Water Defenders tells the story of ordinary people coming together across national and political boundaries to resist powerful corporate interests.

In the early 2000s, mineral prices were on the rise and the Pacific Rim mining company sought to set up new mining operations to tap into El Salvador’s gold reserves, promising new jobs and one percent of their profits to the local government. While assurances of prosperity and profit by the mining company initially sounded inviting to Marcelo and the local community, “they visited a big mine in Honduras, and there they saw the horrible environmental damage that comes from the fact that gold is mined on a large scale, using cyanide to separate the gold from the rock [which is] highly toxic and very hard to contain,” says Cavanagh. In Honduras, cyanide-laced water flowed through the rivers, killing fish and causing skin diseases. The water defenders decided “that short term financial rewards for the few would be way offset by the environmental harms to the broader community,” says Cavanagh.

To expand their coalition of support and raise awareness of the dangers of mining, “they did some of the most creative education and organizing that we’ve ever seen,” says Cavanagh. Marcelo organized with humor, leading marches of laughter where people wore clown noses and involved local community radio stations who performed skits on water. The water defenders expanded their coalition to the global level, creating a network of “international allies” and appealing to the two million Salvadoran diaspora in the United States, and environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Global International Trade Union Confederation, says Cavanagh.

Against all odds, the diverse coalition of actors succeeded in helping to convince the El Salvador legislature to institute the world’s first ban on metal mining and influenced the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes to rule in favor of El Salvador in a lawsuit brought by the Pacific Rim mining corporation.

Part of their success was the fact that even as their international support expanded, “the anchor was always the frontline communities. They were the ones who took the lead, and they were the ones who set the goals,” says Broad.

They also framed their message around a positive goal. They didn’t call themselves anti-miners; they called themselves the water defenders, says Broad.

“This is a story about redefining progress in a way that hopefully works to the benefit of the majority of the population of the world, rather than just to an elite few,” says Broad. By sharing this unlikely success story, Broad and Cavanagh offer a practical playbook on effective grassroots, coalition-building to redefine development and to protect the environment in the face of powerful corporate interests.