CINQUERA, El Salvador – It’s not far from town, but in the middle of the dry season, it’s a hot and dusty walk to the Cinquera Forest Ecological Park in northern El Salvador. Villagers in and around Cinquera took it upon themselves to protect the forest following the country’s 12-year armed conflict. Despite ongoing challenges, their efforts are palpable even at the entrance to the locally run 19-square-mile conservation area, where the trees tower over a cool stream.

“We’re three park rangers,” Raquel Recinos, a park ranger from a nearby village, told a group getting ready to hit the trails. “We try to maintain the whole 5,001 hectares [19 square miles].”

Interpretive signs along the well-maintained trails explain the different sights along the way, but it’s no ordinary nature walk. There’s the unmarked headstone next to a spot where human remains were exhumed. There’s the outdoor kitchen area, where guerrilla combatants used tunnels to disperse the smoke to avoid alerting the army to their position. And there’s the encampment where wounded combatants were treated, and where others learned to read and write.

In the past, it was all logged, Recinos said. However, the civilian population had to flee the whole region in the early 1980s, when state armed forces carried out massacres and bombed towns. When people began to resettle Cinquera in 1991, a year before peace accords ended the conflict, they found a regenerating forest covering the hills. “They said, ‘well, Cinquera is a new Cinquera,’” and decided to conserve the forest, Recinos told Mongabay.

Residents of the municipality of Cinquera are taking it upon themselves to protect the lands and resources in their little area of El Salvador in the face of deforestation and water crises. Most recently, on February 26, residents also took to the polls in a municipal referendum and voted to ban all metallic mining activities.

The smallest and most densely populated country in Central America, El Salvador is also the most deforested. Due to its high population density and volcanic soils, most of its lands have been dedicated to agriculture, and slash-and-burn practices are still common, Salvadoran government officials report. The combination of deforestation and changing rainfall patterns, with increased periods of drought recently, means that when the rains do come, they increasingly wash farmland topsoil down into the Pacific Ocean, according to the San Salvador-based Foundation for Socioeconomic Development and Environmental Restoration.

“Due to demographics, even just because of that, there’s more pressure on natural resources,” Angel Ibarra, the country’s vice minister of the environment and natural resources, told Mongabay. “We have a lower percentage of forest and vegetation cover than the other [Central American] countries.”

The country lost 6.2 percent of its tree cover between 2001 and 2015, according to Global Forest Watch, and the tree cover loss in the Cabañas department, where Cinquera is located, was 8.6 percent during that same period. Only two percent of the nation’s existing forests are primary forest, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

“But the important thing about this issue of deforestation, which is linked to the loss of biodiversity, linked to the loss of soil fertility, and linked to unsustainable farming practices and more, is starting to be tackled by the state,” Ibarra said.

Last year, the Salvadoran government launched an ambitious initiative to address environmental degradation head-on. The National Plan for Reforestation and Restoration of Ecosystems and Countryside is starting off by focusing on five priority areas, with a long-term plan to reforest or restore one million hectares by 2030.

“That’s approximately 50 percent of the country’s territory, so it’s no small thing,” Ibarra said. The plan does involve planting trees, but it won’t be pure reforestation, because 70 percent of the country’s lands are already dedicated to agriculture, he said. “It means improving farming practices, it means agroecology, it means watershed restoration, and it means biodiversity protection.”

However, according to Ibarra, the government won’t be able to meet its goals on its own – it’s going to require a shift in culture and the participation of municipal government and communities. “We don’t have a magic wand to stop all deforestation,” he said.

Ibarra and other high-level officials were in Cinquera on February 26 to observe and support a referendum on mining. Due in large part to the country’s small size and environmental challenges, the executive branch of the government has a moratorium suspending all administrative actions regarding mining. They do not grant any new permits or licenses. Aside from small-scale gold mining in one region, there are currently no operating metallic mines in the country, and the moratorium has prevented any shift from the exploration phase to exploitation.

Mining ban gains ground

After years of actions and campaigns by communities and NGOs organized in a National Roundtable against Metallic Mining, then-president Antonio Saca, of the right-wing ARENA party, announced a moratorium on new mining projects in 2008, towards the end of his term. The next two presidents, Mauricio Funes and current president Salvador Sánchez Cerén, maintained administrative moratoriums on metallic mining activities by executive decree.

Funes and Sánchez Cerén are both from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party, named after the left-wing guerrilla forces that formed the party following peace accords signed 25 years ago. Due to the actions and campaigns around the country, the FMLN included a ban on metallic mining in its platform, but the party didn’t have the votes to pass legislation to that effect until very recently, after the referendum in Cinquera.

On March 9, San Salvador Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas led a march to the legislative assembly, calling on lawmakers to pass a bill permanently banning metallic mining in the country. Legislators from GANA, ARENA, and the FMLN – the three main political parties in the country – received the protesters and pledged their parties’ support. On March 22, FMLN legislator Guillermo Mata announced that the legislative assembly’s multi-partisan environmental committee had approved the text of a law banning metallic mining. The bill is set to go to the floor for a vote this week, according to Mata.

For years, however, because communities and NGOs were unable to make headway with proposed bills to ban mining nationally, they turned to legal mechanisms at the local level. If residents can gather signatures from 40 percent of registered voters in their municipality on an issue of local concern, municipal authorities must convoke an official municipal referendum, known as a consulta popular in El Salvador’s Municipal Code.

Cinquera is the fifth municipality in the country to hold a referendum on mining. The initiative was spearheaded by the community member-based Municipal Reconstruction and Development Association (ARDM) in Cinquera, along with other local and national groups. The ARDM is also the force behind the Cinquera Forest Ecological Park and several other environmental and community development initiatives.

“It’s a historic day in our municipality to be carrying out this referendum process in Cinquera,” ARDM president Iván Hernández told Mongabay on February 26 outside the mayor’s office, where residents lined up to vote. Three other polling stations were set up in different communities around the municipality.

Across the street, Ibarra and other high-level government officials spoke at an outdoor press conference at the edge of Cinquera’s central plaza while voting was underway. Some of the national and international observers present to observe the process throughout the municipality stood in a row behind them. While most of the observers were individuals coordinated by NGOs, government observers from the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman were also present at each of the polling stations.

“In my capacity as a defender of the people, I’m here to verify the referendum process that the citizens of this region are carrying out today,” Raquel Caballero, who heads the office, told reporters.

Caballero’s office supports local citizen engagement to help people decide what kinds of development projects they want in their municipality. At the same time, her office and many other executive branch offices and cabinet ministers openly oppose all metallic mining in the country.

“Economic interests can’t be put ahead of life, of the environment,” vice secretary of citizen participation, transparency, and anti-corruption Lourdes Palacios said at the February 26 press conference in Cinquera. “Profits are the only thing that interests some companies that want to turn our environment in El Salvador simply into a commodity.”

By the end of the day, more than half of all registered voters had participated in the referendum in Cinquera, a municipality with a total population of fewer than 2,000 people. Nearly all of them voted against mining. Cinquera mayor Pantaleón Carmelo Noyola read the results over a sound system set up outside the mayor’s office, and the final tallies sparked applause and a few celebratory firecrackers.

All in all, 526 of 997 registered voters cast a ballot. Eight people voted in favor of mining, one ballot was void, and another was blank. The other 98.1 percent of participants voted against all metallic mining exploration and exploitation activities in the municipality of Cinquera.

“I feel satisfied and proud, because it’s a pretty big commitment,” Noyola told Mongabay shortly after announcing the results of the referendum. “The process that follows now is the preparation of a [municipal] ordinance,” he said. His office will then send the ordinance for publication in El Salvador’s official government gazette, making the local ban on mining official.

Cinquera is the first municipality in the Cabañas department to hold a referendum on mining. The first four that have taken place since September 2014 – in San José las Flores, San Isidro Labrador, Nueva Trinidad, and Arcatao – were all in the neighboring Chalatenango department. Noyola hopes his colleagues in the other eight municipalities in Cabañas will follow suit.

“It’s a wonderful exercise, a democratic exercise,” he said. “I urge [the other mayors in Cabañas] to work on this, because they’ll be working to protect life for the next generation.”

Vidalina Morales also hopes the referendum process will spread further into Cabañas. Now the president of the Association for the Economic and Social Development of Santa Marta (ADES), she has been involved in the region’s community-based fight against mining for more than a decade.

“Today is a special day for us as residents of the department of Cabañas, since it’s also the department where we’ve taken up the cause of this struggle,” Morales told Mongabay in Cinquera, where she came to support the local referendum.

International arbiter turns the tables on one mining company

Along with community-based environmental committees, Morales and ADES have been at the forefront of a struggle against a particular mining project in Cabañas. After years of exploration activities, Pacific Rim, a Canadian mining company, was planning on moving forward with its proposed El Dorado gold mine. Local and national groups were actively campaigning against the company’s plans, and putting pressure on officials to block the project. In 2008, the Salvadoran government denied the company’s applications for environmental and exploitation permits, citing environmental and health concerns.

In 2009, one of Pacific Rim’s wholly owned subsidiaries took the issue to the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), filing a claim against El Salvador. Pacific Rim has since been acquired by Australian-Canadian mining company OceanaGold, but the claim continued to move forward in ICSID, an international arbitration tribunal based out of the World Bank Group in Washington, DC. Initially $77 million, the company later increased its requested damages to $301 million for the profits it claims would have resulted from the mine.

In October 2016, the ICSID arbitration panel came to a decision. The panel rejected the company’s claim and ordered it pay El Salvador $8 million for legal costs incurred by the country over the course of the seven-year case. In an October 14, 2016, media release, the company initially stated that “OceanaGold will review the ICSID’s ruling in detail before evaluating the next steps related to its El Salvador business unit.”

Last month, 280 unions, research centers, environmental organizations, and other groups from several countries sent the company a letter demanding it “pay up and pack up.” They urged the company and its subsidiaries to leave El Salvador and comply with the payment established by the ICSID ruling. The government’s legal fees and expenses actually amounted to more than $13 million, they noted.

OceanaGold does plan on complying with the ruling, according to the company. “We remain committed to following due process as set by the ICSID and World Bank for these matters and we fully respect the decision announced by the ICSID regarding the $8 million for legal costs, we are not disputing that,” a company spokesperson told Mongabay via email.

The delay in payment is due to an ongoing ICSID matter, according to OceanaGold. In December 2016, after the main arbitration proceedings were closed, the Salvadoran government submitted additional filings for a supplementary decision on the award. Both parties submitted observations throughout December.

“These additional considerations are now currently under review by the ICSID tribunal,” the OceanaGold spokesperson wrote. “We reserve our right for the ICSID tribunal’s decision on the [Government of El Salvador] filings and take the time allowed under the tribunal process to review.”

In their letter to the company, the 280 groups also urged OceanaGold to address other issues linked to the company’s presence in the country: Over the past decade, several local anti-mining activists in Cabañas have been killed, including a pregnant woman; others report threats and intimidation. Activists’ claims that the company and its predecessor are behind the threats and violence have not been substantiated in a court of law. However, most of the cases of threats and killings have yet to result in any prosecution.

“OceanaGold should cooperate fully in a full, impartial investigation into the murders and threats that have taken place in connection with this conflict over the years,” the organizations wrote in their February 21, 2017 letter.

Morales says she’s been subject to many threats over the years, and wants the company out of the country. “That’s our specific demand. Two things: that [the company] pay the eight million, and that it pack its bags and leave El Salvador,” she said.

Working towards a sustainable future

Less than 30 miles west of OceanaGold’s El Dorado project, Cinquera residents are working to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself in their lands. Beyond the February 26 referendum on mining, they’re endeavoring to advance a different kind of development at the local level.

ARDM is working promotes sustainable agriculture practices and runs several community projects, including a hotel, a local history museum, an iguana protection and reproduction area, and the forest ecological park. One of the group’s main focuses is the environment, said Hernández, the group’s president.

“We contribute to the protection of our whole natural area,” he said. The ecological park is a key component of the group’s conservation efforts, and it’s been successful in attracting Salvadoran and international visitors since opening to the public in 2000. “Every year the number of tourists visiting increases,” Hernández said.

The park is also visited by countless non-human species, and biologists have come from San Salvador, the country’s capital, to survey and document its wildlife. Community park ranger Raquel Recinos darts inside the little office at the entrance to retrieve the statistics on the biodiversity found within the park.

According to the biologists’ studies, Recinos told Mongabay, there are 27 species of mammals, 138 kinds of birds, and more than 2,000 insect species, including 140 types of butterflies. Asked about the mammals, she begins to list the species, and a former guerrilla combatant being trained as a park tour guide listening to the interview chimes in with others. Their combined list includes ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), lowland paca (Cuniculus paca), collared peccary (Pecari tajacu), and many other species.

The Cinquera Forest Ecological Park is run by locals, but they’ve had a good working relationship with the national government over the past four or five years, Recinos said. The government now finances one of the three park ranger positions. But ARDM is still the driving force behind local conservation, she said: “We try to do everything humanly possible to be able to protect the forest and flora and fauna.”

Citations:

• Hansen, M. C., P. V. Potapov, R. Moore, M. Hancher, S. A. Turubanova, A. Tyukavina, D. Thau, S. V. Stehman, S. J. Goetz, T. R. Loveland, A. Kommareddy, A. Egorov, L. Chini, C. O. Justice, and J. R. G. Townshend. 2013. “High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change.” Science 342 (15 November): 850–53. Data available on-line from:http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest. Accessed through Global Forest Watch on Marc 28, 2017. www.globalforestwatch.orgBanner image by Sandra Cuffe for Mongabay

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