Five environmental activists who helped secure a historic mining ban in El Salvador in 2017 are facing life imprisonment for an alleged civil war-era crime, in a case that has been condemned by UN and legal experts as baseless and politically motivated.
The trial against Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco, and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega, who were arrested in January 2023 for the alleged killing of an army informant in 1989, opened on Tuesday in Sensuntepeque, in the department of Cabañas in northern El Salvador.
The case has proceeded in almost total secrecy amid widespread allegations of legal violations — and repeated calls for the charges to be dismissed from UN experts, and hundreds of international lawyers, academics, and rights groups.
The defendants, who were at the forefront of a 13-year grassroots-led campaign to ban metal mining to protect the country’s dwindling water and farmland from further contamination, were arrested amid warnings that President Nayib Bukele was planning to overturn the 2017 historic law.
The five activists are among more than 70,000 people detained since Bukele declared a state of emergency and suspended basic rights after a surge in gang violence in March 2022.
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