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Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates

RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Colombia, 3/25/2025
March 25, 2025

Jaime Alonso Gallego Gómez was one of the most threatened social leaders in northeastern Antioquia. As a founding member of the Segovia and Remedios Mining Roundtable, Jaime Gallego led the ancestral mining movement in his hometown for decades, working to defend his community against the multinational, profit-oriented large-scale mining companies.  After participating in a miners strike in November 2024 (to demand government guarantees for ancestral artisinal mining), a pamphlet was circulated threatening to silence him.

On March 3, Jaime Gallego, better known by his nickname Mongo, and his bodyguard were reported disappeared when the GPS tracker of their National Protection Unit (UNP) vehicle was deactivated as they were traveling to a meeting in Vegachí, Antioquia Department. Six days later, after gunshots were reported in the early morning of March 9, Jaime Gallego was found dead. 

Jaime Alonso Gallego Gómez, ¡presente!

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News Article
30 year jail sentence for one of the assassins of Berta Caceres, killed March 2, 2016 in Honduras
February 26, 2025
The honduran human rights and environmental activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated on the morning of March 3 in 2016.
 
Now, after many years of waiting, the full bench of the Honduran Supreme Court of Justice has confirmed the conviction of Sergio Ramón Rodríguez Orellana, ratifying his guilt of aggravated murder for the role he had in Cáceres assasination. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
 
Sergio Rodríguez is part of the criminal structure that has terrorized the Lenca community of Río Blanco since 2013, with the intention of imposing the illegal Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, for the economic benefit of the Atala Zablah family.
 
 
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News Article
El Salvador: President's push to scrap gold mining ban causes outcry
December 10, 2024
El Salvador was the first country in the world to ban the mining of metals in 2017, warning of the harmful effects of the chemicals used in mining, like cyanide and mercury.
 
President Bukele, who used to be a strong advocate for the mining ban, now writes on X: "God placed a gigantic treasure underneath our feet," and argues that the mining ban was "absurd."
"If we make responsible use of our natural resources, we can change the economy of El Salvador overnight," he added a few days later.
 
Some El Salvadorans see the resumption of mining as a possibility to create jobs. Others who are earning their money through extracting gold nuggets from disused mining tunnels by hand are fearing to lose their income to multinationals.
 
And environmental activists warn about further poisoning of local rivers, which are a source of drinking water for many people.
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Event
Post-Election Direction: what do we do now?
December 5, 2024

It’s been an election like no other: polarizing, ugly, passionately contested. The results suggest a realignment of U.S. politics and a rightward shift in national policies and priorities. Yet most our greatest concerns were invisible during the campaigns.

Join Cleveland Peace Action for a panel and audience discussion, in-person and on Zoom, of the election and its implications for our work. They will address Palestine, the growing risk of nuclear war, the iron grip of the military-industrial complex, climate change, Latin America and immigration, and party politics.

register here for the online version: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMscO2pqTMvGdLzi1Afgi0RwdSyNiHeQb5y#/registration

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News Article
El Salvador: Catholic church calls on president not to lift ban on gold mining
December 1, 2024
In 2017, El Salvador banned all metals mining above ground and below. A broad coalition of sectors, including the Catholic church, supported the prohibition in order to protect the small country’s water resources from contamination.
 
President Bukele who supported a mining ban during his first campaign for the presidency in 2019 now wants to lift the country’s ban on gold mining and proposes “modern and sustainable” mining that would care for the environment. 
 
“It’s not true that there’s green mining, it’s paid for with lives, kidney, respiratory problems and leukemia that aren’t immediate,” said Amalia López with the Alliance Against the Privatization of Water. The Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas is also against the President's plans and asked President Nayib Bukele not to reverse the ban.
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Event
Online briefing: The Santa Marta 5 Water Defenders, What's Next?
November 18, 2024

Join two of the Santa Marta 5 water defenders and representatives from the international campaign for an update of their legal case, and how we can support the Five.

Thousands of individuals and organizations from all over the world have worked with civil society groups in El Salvador for the freedom of the five Santa Marta water defenders who were unjustly arrested in January 2023 and charged with an alleged crime said to have occurred 35 years ago during that nation's brutal civil war.  Finally, in October 2024, the five were found innocent of all charges in a court in northern El Salvador.  However, the Salvadoran Attorney General has appealed this verdict to a higher court.  We will discuss the case and ways the international community can support the Five.

(Spanish-English interpretation will be provided)

register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvdOiprDouH9Ugdi5E3rB7_US2m4f4VX-x#/registration

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News Article
IRTF is grateful to all who gathered for our annual Commemoration of the Martyrs
November 7, 2024

IRTF is grateful to the 200 supporters who gathered on October 27 at Pilgrim Church in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood for IRTF’s annual Commemoration of the Martyrs. In addition to marking the 44th anniversary of the martyrdom of Cleveland’s missioners in El Salvador (Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy Kazel, alongside Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke), we commemorated 36 human rights defenders killed in Central America and Colombia this past year because they dared to speak truth to power.

Our keynote speaker, Lorena Araujo of the largest campesino organization in El Salvador (CRIPDES), held the crowd’s attention with horrific stories of mass arrests, detentions and deaths currently happening under their government’s State of Exception, now in its third year. With more 88,000 imprisoned (and more than 300 deaths in prison), El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world—surpassing the astronomical rate of incarceration in the United States. 

As the people of El Salvador face the greatest challenge to their democracy since the end of the civil war in 1992, they invite us to renew and deepen our solidarity.

If you would still like to make a donation:

https://bit.ly/3YDmETj     via Zeffy platform

irtfcleveland.org/donate  via Network for Good

facebook.com/IRTF1981

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News Article
Honduras: Remembering Juan López- The Deadly Fight for Environmental Justice
October 18, 2024
Juan Antonio López was a prominent environmental defender, anti-corruption activist, and community and faith leader in Tocoa, Honduras. He was shot and murdered by an unidentified hitman in his car after attending a religious event at a local Catholic church.
 
This article remembers his firm activism and life. 
 
IRTF also wrote a letter about him as a part of our Rapid Response Network.
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News Article
El Salvador: International Allies Applaud the Dropping of the False Charges Against the Five Salvadoran Water Defenders
October 18, 2024

Since early 2023, IRTF has been involved in an international solidarity campaign to drop bogus criminal charges against five environmentalists in El Salvador. After 20 months of petition gathering, calls to the US State Departement and US Embassy, a sign-on letter from the US Congress and other advocacy efforts, we are happy to report that the Santa Marta 5 have been freed!

The five prominent community leaders (Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco, and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega) were all instrumental in the successful campaign to save El Salvador’s rivers from the threat of gold mining. With a unanimous vote in El Salvador’s National Assembly in March 2017, El Salvador became the first nation on earth to ban all metallic mining.

Since they were arrested in January 2023 on politically-motivated charges, IRTF has participated in an international campaign spanning 31 countries demanding that the bogus charges be dropped and denouncing the political motivations behind their detention given the lack of evidence presented by the Salvadoran Attorney General’s office.

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News Article
El Salvador: Five environmental activists facing scrutiny for ‘political’ trial
October 9, 2024
Five environmental activists who helped secure a historic mining ban in El Salvador are facing life imprisonment for an alleged civil war-era crime.
The only evidence is a witness who strongly changed his testimony during the pre-trial hearings. No body or weapon has been found.
 
Since sweeping to power in 2019, Bukele and his allies have taken steps to “effectively co-opt democratic institutions”, replacing independent judges, prosecutors and officials with political allies, according to Human Rights Watch.
 

In a letter to the government in March 2023, a group of UN special rapporteurs and the vice-president of the UN working group on arbitrary detention, said: “We fear that the case is an attempt to intimidate those who seek to defend the environment in the country, and especially those who defend human rights from the negative impacts of mining.”

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