A Road Trip to Save El Salvador’s Water
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- Published: Monday, 08 July 2013 17:48
Robin is standing in front of a church in Guatemala with some of the other members of the first international delegation on “gold mining and the defense of water in El Salvador.” We are 44 people from 12 countries who have come to support El Salvador's right to stop environmentally destructive gold mining. We have come as allies of a coalition called the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining (“La Mesa”), and we have traveled just across the border to Guatemala because the source of the Lempa River that supplies most of El Salvador's fresh water is here in the Guatemalan hills.
Goldcorp, one of Canada's largest gold mining firms, is building a mine here. The environmental havoc unleashed by this mine will affect not only Guatemalans, but also Salvadorans who depend on the Lempa’s waters as it meanders through El Salvador on its way to the Pacific Ocean.
May 10-12 close to 50 delegates representing 22 different organizations from four continents gathered in San Salvador to take part in the first ever international fact-finding mission around the impacts of metallic mining. It was organized by the International Allies Against Mining in El Salvador in collaboration with the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining in El Salvador known as 
The revolutionary Salvadoran writer Roque Dalton once remarked, in his poem “OAS,” that “the President of the United States is more president of my country than the president of my country,” an observation still accurate today, some 45 years after Dalton penned those words. His life, like those of well over 100,000 Salvadorans in the 20th century, ended violently. But if assassins hadn’t gunned him down in 1975, he would no doubt agree that North American businessmen should be added to the list of outsiders running his homeland’s affairs.
