In March 2016, news of the murder of Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres went around the world and made headlines. The death of the environmental leader revealed the violence faced by many people who defend their territories around the planet.
Despite the enormous media coverage of the case of Berta Cáceres, three years later things have not changed much and have even gotten worse. According to the Front Line Defenders organization, in 2017 more than three hundred human rights defenders were killed for their peaceful work around the world. The Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) had registered at the beginning of 2019 a total of 2,688 cases of conflicts in the world related to territories, almost all with companies that, however, are not subject to any binding international treaty that binds them to fulfill human and environmental rights.
Activists face various attacks such as intimidation, threats, psychological harassment and smear campaigns, and countries such as Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador are some of the most dangerous to defend the environment.
The DesTieRRRadas project, prepared by the organization Alianza por la Solidaridad, shows the human rights violations suffered by women who defend the environment in El Salvador and Guatemala. For this, they have given a voice to eighteen women who face different socio-environmental conflicts in these countries, and whose activity in defense of the territory has changed their lives and has put them, many times, in extreme situations.
We have spoken with one of these women, Sonia Sánchez, who leads the Women’s Movement of Santo Tomás in El Salvador and is part of the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders. He has been fighting for years in defense of natural assets against the Grupo Roble company, the builder of a luxury housing development that has cut down more than 30,000 trees in his municipality and has caused numerous environmental impacts in the area.
The movement led by Sonia Sánchez against this urbanization managed to make itself heard among its neighbors, before which the company began to give gifts to the community and threaten its leaders. For this fight, he has had two lawsuits for coercion and for defamation and slander by the company. Although she was finally acquitted, the material and emotional cost has been very high: Sonia has faced intimidation and has suffered various death threats.
Tell me how your fight against this urban project started
The community that was going to be affected by the construction of the urbanization contacted the Movement of Women of Santo Tomás so that we could accompany them in their fight against the project. At first there was a lot of resistance from other organizations and the community but, in the end, the company managed to divide us by making gifts and promises that until now it has not kept. In the end, we were left with two women’s associations in charge of the complaint.
The company bought land in an area that, according to municipal ordinance, was a water recharge zone. This means that it could only be used for cultivation or to be declared a forest reserve area. But in 2007 the ordinance was changed and it was classified as a developable area. In this way, the municipality, which at that time was represented by a party that brought together all the economic powers of the country, gave the company the green light. On the other hand, with the change of central government in 2009, a series of environmental permits were issued to different companies to develop their construction projects. In this one in particular there was a clause to execute it within a year, and if it was not done, the procedures would have to be renewed. However, the works did not begin until 2015, but the permit was not renewed, that was our complaint.
What have been the environmental consequences of the project? And the social ones, what impact has it had on people’s lives?
The urban project consists of 416 homes valued at about $ 80,000 and designed for upper-middle-class families. The population of Santo Tomás, which lives off crops, work in the textile industry and informal trade, cannot access them.
From the occupation of the new houses we are suffering water cuts: the poorest communities only have access two days a week but, nevertheless, the people of this urbanization have water day and night.
The river is polluted as a result of the discharges from the urbanization’s wastewater treatment plant and the crops of the people living downstream have been affected for this reason. In addition, several artisanal wells have dried up.
He commented that the local population had conflicting opinions regarding the project …
Faced with the social movement generated, the company summoned the leaders of the communities to reach agreements. Many gifts were offered, mainly toys and bicycles for the children, the wood from the thousands of felled trees , improvements in the green area, the construction of a park and a soccer field, the construction of a new church…. In the end, of all those promises, almost none have been fulfilled, they have only improved the school. There is no such social responsibility to which they committed themselves.
Photo: image of the urbanization built in the municipality of Santo Tomás
What have been the reprisals for fighting this project?
At the judicial level, they sued the association leaders for the crime of coercion, and they also filed a second lawsuit against me for defamation and slander.
We have also had to face death threats, to ourselves and to our relatives, telephone calls, sexual harassment -even by the same comrades in struggle-, discrimination, criminalization, house searches … a series of situations that did not happen to us before in this case, it was from 2015 when this started.
The costs we pay are immense, both emotionally, physically and financially. We do not have much financial support, we work voluntarily. Although, yes, we have strategic alliances with other feminist and environmental organizations that were the ones that assumed the costs of paying a lawyer, and of psychological care to support me throughout the lawsuit process.
On the other hand, since all this happened I have not been able to employ myself.
Tell me about a moment of special tension experienced during your fight.
When you work collectively, every event a partner experiences affects you too. For example, raids are a time that generates a lot of tension: you are sleeping in your house at one in the morning, your door is knocked down and a whole military body with large caliber weapons comes in to search you. I am a human rights defender, I am not going to be involved in illegal things, but they are looking for a way to criminalize you, and in the end we have to continually search our house because they can put illegal things in us and then report us for it.
We also receive calls on the phone to threaten us, they tell you for example that they are going to pay 3,000 dollars to someone to make you disappear or to harm your family. You no longer walk quietly down the street because you don’t know if they are going to kill you… yes, we have had to live very complicated moments.
And what is your current situation? Are you still living in El Salvador despite the threats?
Yes, when the threats began, there was a moment when the possibility of leaving the country was raised, but I have four daughters and I did not want to separate from them. In addition, when I raised it in the organization, my colleagues told me: “What about us?”
We realized that none of us could get out without leaving the companions in the lurch. At that time we analyzed our situation, and we realized that each of the women who are members of the two organizations that continued to defend the urban project had experienced a risk that, until that moment, had not been related to the environmental fight. that we were carrying out.
In just a few months, each of us had experienced a series of situations that were related to what was happening. So we decided to stay and work a whole security protocol in our house, with our families, in the community and in the organization. We are working on the issue of collective self-care, because in the end all these processes make you sick: when you are taking care of other people, you are not taking care of yourself.
In addition, within the Salvadoran Network of Defenders there is a space that seeks the protection and integrity of the country’s activists, and thanks to all this we have managed to stay. We are on the Internet and in the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders where we carry out a systematization of the registry of threats and risks that women defenders suffer and every two years we make a report on our situation in the region.
This whole system of self-defense has been developed by you and the associations that collaborate with them, but do you feel protected by your government and the international community?
The Salvadoran government should guarantee our safety, and it does not. In 2015, the human rights attorney who was in office spoke out publicly about the situation we were experiencing in Santo Tomás and due to an anonymous death threat. He summoned the affected leaders to us and told us that he was going to collect precautionary measures. However, the current attorney is not fulfilling her role but is lending herself to the interests of companies and large power groups.
Yes we have had the support of social and feminist movements. And, when we ran the risk of being convicted, many letters of solidarity arrived for the hearing of the sentence. A letter of support was prepared that was sent to the judge by different national and international organizations and in the end I was acquitted.
That was a great moment, we set a precedent, the message was launched that not always the company or the economic powers will win. We believe that if the social movements unify we will achieve great struggles. The issue of defending the territory should be a task for all people: we are defending common goods, because without these goods the life of the human being will disappear. We are defending life: water gives you life, oxygen gives you life, and if there are forests, there is water and there is oxygen.
One of the biggest tasks is to make the population aware that the environmental fight is everyone’s fight.
Photo: Sonia Sánchez with one of her teammates
Do you think that being a woman puts you in a more vulnerable position as an activist?
Yes, being an advocate is not the same as being an advocate. Society has assigned women the role of caregivers. He has also assigned us a space in the private sphere, but when you encounter injustices and become a defender, you are leaving that established framework: the private sphere and your role as a caregiver.
For society, when you go to the streets you are going to throw stones, you become a prostitute, a woman without work, a bad mother … because that is what women who have been in the street defending the territory have been told. Let us go home to wash the dishes, they tell us. All this is not lived by a man. The male defender who gets into this fight is a hero, a brave man … he is recognized, but women are not.
In addition, human rights defenders are touched by our sexuality, they tell us that we are lesbians, that we destroy homes, that we have several husbands … they label you in a thousand ways for the simple fact of being a woman. On the other hand, no one interferes with men’s sexuality, or with their family, or with what they most want.
The life that you have chosen to position yourself as a defender of the environment and your land is very hard and involves many sacrifices. What is your motivation to keep going?
You have to have a cultural identity. What motivates me is that I know my municipality, my surroundings, what my territory has and what each of the common goods it has serves me for. It is a territory that is a source of life and, in addition, I am motivated by that historical struggle that women have been developing around the world. It is the struggle of those women who have fallen ill, who have been guillotined or imprisoned for pursuing their rights … I do not want that struggle to be in vain.
Every right that we have is a conquered fight, because they have not given us anything as a gift, on the subject of human rights we have earned everything by hand. I am inspired by those women who fought for us and who have allowed us to be where we are. And, therefore, where there is violence or injustice, Sonia Sánchez will be there, I am not going to stop fighting.
The DesTieRRRadas campaign wants to make visible the role of women in the defense of natural assets, their struggle is made invisible by gender discrimination, generating specific violence that also requires specific protection. It is part of another more general campaign, TieRRRA, which advocates responsible investments by transnational companies when they work in territories with populations that may see their rights affected.
Photos: Rosa M. Tristán
