On December 26, Dora “Alicia” Sorto Recinos, an active opponent of Pacific Rim’s El Dorado gold mine in El Salvador, was shot and killed as she returned home from doing her laundry. Sorto Recinos was eight months pregnant and carrying her two-year old child at the time. The child was also shot, in the foot, and is currently receiving medical attention.

Sorto Recinos is the second anti-mining activist to be killed in less than a week, in the department of Cabañas, where the Vancouver-based company Pacific Rim is working desperately to open their mining project despite widespread community and government opposition.

Ramiro Rivera Gómez, vice-president of CAC (Comité Ambiental de Cabañas/ the Environmental Committee of Cabañas) was gunned down six days earlier, in front of his thirteen-year old daughter in the Trinidad neighborhood of Ilobasco.

Rivera Gómez had just recovered from a previous attempt on his life in August of this year. He was shot 8 times in the legs and back. According to the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), Oscar Menjívar was arrested and charged with the attempted murder. Menjívar had been “previously implicated in physical attacks on anti-mining activists” and is reported to be a former employee of Pacific Rim; however, the company denies the charge.

Following the attack, Rivera was placed “under the protection of two police officers from the Witnesses and Victims Protection Unit of the National Civilian Police, adds CISPES. However, “on the afternoon of December 20th, they were apparently unable to protect him.”

The deaths of Sorto Recinos and Rivera Gómez are the latest in a string of recent murders and brutally violent attacks against community members opposing Canadian mining projects in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Intercontinental Cry