What Avatar and El Salvador Have in Common

If a $230 million production budget isn't enough to get you best picture, it is enough to make an old story look motion-capture animation new.  James Cameron's Avatar is a rallying cry against a corporation willing to resort to violence to clear out local people opposed to their mining operation.

People?  Uh, I mean aliens. Aliens called the Na’vi who fight the evil RDA Corporation arrived from earth to exploit a very precious metal: unobtainium. Pictures of the Na'vi are really sort of everywhere these days. They're cat-like, flat-nosed, blue and -- in the stilted dialogue of a flick made to look pretty -- "hard to kill."

If only people were so. You don't have to go to the moon Pandora to find mining companies with uncomfortably close links to suspicious deaths. Take a trip to Central America instead.

Just before Christmas 2009, Ramiro Rivera Gómez was gunned down with an M-16 in Cabañas, El Salvador.  On boxing day -- a great day to go to the movies -- Dora “Alicia” Recinos Sorto, an eight-month pregnant woman, was shot in the back on the way home from doing her laundry in the same town. Last June, someone kidnapped, tortured and then assassinated Marcelo Rivera in the nearby town of San Isidro.

What do these people have in common (according to the activist group CISPES)? They're all members of Environmental Committee of Cabañas, an organization that formed to educate the community about health and environmental risks of cyanide contamination from gold extraction.

Activists claim that Rivera, Recinos and Rivera were targeted for their opposition to plans from Vancouver-based, Nevada-incorporated mining company Pacific Rim, to open a gold mine in their area.  Pacific Rim for its part calls these accusations "misinformation" that are in themselves "an attempt to incite violence."

Nevertheless, the context is loaded. A movement of environmental groups has thus far succeeded in compelling the government of El Salvador to make it difficult for international corporations to mine for gold in the country. Oxfam America's 2008 report, finding that proposed mines in El Salvador could pollute large swathes of Central America, lays out some of the main reasons for the opposition.

The Salvadoran government’s refusal to grant Pacific Rim the necessary approval for a mining permit prompted a truly threatening response: the corporation filed a $77 million lawsuit against the Salvadoran government under the dispute resolution system of DR-CAFTA.   Seventy-seven million dollars (and potentially more claims for lost profits) is a lot of money for El Salvador.

In Avatar, of course, our computer-animated Na'vi friends expel the human miners from Pandora and live happily ever after (Spoiler? No. You knew it would end that way.). Human rights activists working against the mines in El Salvador still have a long, messy fight to do the same, not the least of which includes seeking accountability for deaths that activists believe were motivated by corporate strong-arming.

It's particularly troubling that Pacific Rim could use the investor guarantees of DR-CAFTA to undermine the Salvadoran state's legitimate (anti-mining) stance.  The most direct precedent for this sort of case, Metalclad v. Mexico, involved a Mexican community that didn't want a transnational hazardous waste landfill. Metalclad won $16 million from the Mexican government under NAFTA.

That's just to say that as long as states are subject to trade rules privileging access to financial capital over the protection of the human rights of their citizens, we'll probably not get a Hollywood ending.

Photo credit: Vankfire