Abstract
During the mid-2000s, Honduras and El Salvador implemented mining moratoria. By 2017 El Salvador had legislated a globally unprecedented ban on all forms of metal mining, while in Honduras mining was expanding aggressively. These neighboring countries present the explanatory challenge of understanding the distinct trajectories of mining policy and politics. These divergent pathways can be explained by the interactions between the political economy of subsoil resources, national political settlements, and the ways in which diverse actors have taken advantage (or not) of openings in these settlements.
A mediados de la década del 2000, Honduras y El Salvador implementaron moratorias mineras. Para el 2017, El Salvador había legislado una prohibición sin precedentes a nivel mundial de todas las formas de minería de metales, mientras que en Honduras la minería se estaba expandiendo agresivamente. Estos países vecinos presentan el desafío explicativo de comprender las distintas trayectorias de la política minera y la política. Estas vías divergentes pueden explicarse por las interacciones entre la economía política de los recursos del subsuelo, los acuerdos políticos nacionales y las formas en que diversos actores han aprovechado (o no) las aperturas en estos acuerdos.
When on March 29, 2017, El Salvador passed a law banning all metal mining in the country, activists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) celebrated this as a historic, world’s-first piece of legislation. It was also lauded as the culmination of a decade-plus-long process of resistance and mobilization. Meanwhile, across the border in Honduras, metal-mining concessions affected large parts of the country, including watersheds that drain into El Salvador. In this paper, we suggest that the comparison between these two countries can shed analytical light on the factors that made the Salvadoran legislation possible. While some factors are related to sustained social mobilization around mining, others pertain to elite ambivalence, changes in the national political settlement, maneuvering by government technocrats, and positions assumed by the Catholic Church. Those factors raise the questions of how likely such changes might be in Honduras and how resilient the law is in El Salvador itself. That reflection, in turn, has implications for an understanding of the political bases that could allow for a more progressive regulation of resource extraction.
Political ecologies of large-scale extractivism have tended to fall into two broad categories. The first has primarily focused on the political economy of extraction. Whether informed by O’Connor’s (1991) notion of the second contradiction of capitalism, by ecological economic interpretations of the extractive economy (Martinez-Alier, 2002), or by political economy readings of an “extractive imperative” that pulls countries inexorably toward a deepening of resource extraction (Arsel, Hogenboom, and Pellegrini, 2016), these studies approach resource extraction at a macroeconomic and aggregate scale and tend to emphasize the economic drivers in policy making. Another body of work has focused on socio-environmental conflicts linked to mining, oil, and gas. Some studies emphasize how social movements emerge and contest particular projects; others document the social and ecological impacts of extraction on livelihoods and environments and interpret emergent contentious politics as responses to such impacts, and still others explore the everyday experience of the extractive economy as a driver of uncertainty, loss, opportunity, and dispossession (Bebbington and Bury, 2013; De Echave et al., 2008; Jaskoski, 2014; Warnaars, 2013). Between these two foci (one more macro, the other more micro), political ecology has said less about the detailed politics of policy making around resource extraction (other than the politics that derive from mobilization and contention). Also, studies in these traditions tend to ascribe positions and interests to elites and to explore only in limited ways the extent to which actors within the state maneuver to take advantage of opportunities for policy innovation that might open up within government.
Rather than opt for one or another of these entry points, we develop a framework and an empirical analysis that attend to each of them. For this, we merge literatures and languages that do not necessarily sit together comfortably but together can help us understand why Honduras and El Salvador have taken divergent paths in regulating extractivism and illuminate what conditions might be needed for an innovation such as El Salvador’s to emerge in other national contexts. To build this argument, we develop this conceptual framework and then use it to describe and interpret how mining has been contested, legislated, and halted in El Salvador and then how mining has been contested, regulated, and ultimately rolled out in Honduras. The paper draws out implications of the analysis both for theory and for action.
Methodologically the paper draws on two research experiences not initially conceived as a comparative exercise. In El Salvador, work revolved around a series of collaborations between Bebbington, the Ministry of Environment, and the Ministry of Economy regarding stakeholder attitudes to environmental governance, the conduct of a strategic environmental assessment of the mining sector, and legislative proposals deriving from that assessment. In Honduras, research involved a collaboration between Clark University, the National Autonomous University of Honduras, Oxfam America, and Oxfam in Honduras to document the emergent geography of mining concessions in the country. The study sought to make information on this geography available to community groups concerned with the effects of mining in their lived environments. These different origins for the two country studies make for both synergies and imbalances in the analysis.
Our accounts are based in part on the involvement of two of the authors as direct participants in the processes described. Bebbington was appointed by the Salvadoran Ministries of Economy and Environment to chair the committee that assessed the acceptability of the work that was done for the strategic environmental assessment. He subsequently collaborated with the Ministry of Environment in drafting the ultimately unsuccessful proposal for a law to suspend all mining activity indefinitely and served as an expert witness in the Government of El Salvador’s defense against a claim made by the Canadian mining company Pacific Rim at the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). These experiences of the inner workings of ministries and their interactions with other actors influence his perspective on the micro-dynamics of policy change. Fash grew up in and is a member of a Honduran community affected by mineral concessions (Copán Ruinas). He is active in community-based organizing around extractivism, and his perspective is affected by close interactions and friendships with people whose lives are threatened because they obstruct extractivism. This has affected his understanding of ways in which social movement actors can fail and the multiple commitments that people in social movements, NGOs, and government positions hold in tension.
While not important actors, we were actors nonetheless with our own interests and commitments to particular strategies of change. Our positions gave us privileged access to certain parties, but they also mean that our accounts are inescapably touched by our own senses of what constituted appropriate strategies. Like all readings, these are partial, and so the accounts we offer here are most definitely views from somewhere as opposed to implied god’s-eye views from nowhere (see Haraway, 1988). That somewhere was a place in which individual agents were trying to foster change in the face of significant structural obstacles. Insofar as we identified with these people, our accounts are inescapably tinged with a belief in agency and the capacity to promote change from within a policy process. Consequently, our framework places special emphasis on the internal dynamics of political settlements and boundary-spanning work. It also leaves us skeptical of structural interpretations of policy and movement processes and convinced of the need to recognize both the commitments and the dignity of the people involved and their contradictory motivations and failings.
Political Settlements, Social Conflict, and the Political Ecology of Mining Policy
The conceptual framework we propose operates at three levels: the place of the environment within a broad dynamic of capitalist development, the relationship between policy formation and the structure of national political settlements, and the interaction between conflict dynamics, bureaucratic action, and policy making. We do not argue for the causal primacy of any one of these, though we do suggest that the second and third levels have received less attention in the literature on extractivism.
Capitalist Dynamics and the Subsoil
Any effort to theorize the drivers of mining policy must attend to the relationship between subsoil resources and the dynamics of accumulation in national economies. This begins by understanding the environment as simultaneously a means of accumulation of capital and a means for the reproduction of the conditions that make such accumulation possible. The environment’s joint function applies to units of production at all scales. At the level of a rural household, land and water are central to the possibility of petty accumulation, but the continued existence of fertile land and clean, available water resources are also essential for the reproduction of the rural household as a social unit. In the mineral economy, subsoil resources and water are the primary means of accumulation; absent either of the two, no amount of finance or technology can deliver accumulation. At the same time, the reproduction of the mineral economy requires the continued reproduction of water resources. These different forms of enterprise coexist in rural areas. Thus, the water resources needed by mining are also central to accumulation and reproduction in other rural enterprises, both household and large-scale. Consequently, these enterprises need a guarantee that these resources will be reproduced over time.
Seen through this pared-down political economy lens, environmental policies will be understood as reflections of the dual imperative to guarantee accumulation and reproduce the environmental conditions it requires. When these imperatives collide, the tendency has been to assume that policy and corporate practice will privilege accumulation (O’Connor, 1991; Ospina et al., 2015). The implication is that socio-environmental policy that limits mining’s access to natural resources will not prosper unless mining is relatively unimportant to national models of accumulation. Conversely, policy proposals that do not affect access to resources but focus on “better” environmental management (e.g., basic environmental monitoring, technological modernization, etc.) might be expected to fare better because they do not threaten the relations of resource access (Ospina et al., 2015). Where political economy readings are of more limited use, however, is in explaining the relative influence on policy of one or another strategy of accumulation (e.g., mining or agriculture) or the details of the policy that is ultimately approved and implemented. To conceptualize the processes driving these dimensions of policy requires frameworks that delve into the politics of the policy-making process.
Political Settlements and Subsoil Governance
The concept of political settlement “refers to the balance or distribution of power between contending social groups and social classes, on which any state is based” (di John and Putzel, 2009: 4). The concept draws attention to the extent to which governing relations are negotiated among economic and political elites. Such negotiations will, it is argued, tend to produce distributions of economic and political opportunity that reflect the bargaining power of these different elites (Khan, 2010). A settlement is not a broad-based consensus among social actors but an implicit or explicit agreement among those actors, who would otherwise have sufficient power to threaten any settlement that excluded them. Elites who are party to the settlement manage relationships with excluded factions in such a way that these factions do not threaten it. Such relationships can be managed through the exercise of force, through discourses, or through clientelism and the manipulation of incentives. The settlement is then understood as structuring the dynamics and quality of development and the nature of public policy (Hickey et al., 2015).
Settlements are relatively stable arrangements, reflecting the slow-to-change nature of power structures and hegemonic ideas, but they can change. One source of change may be the arrival or increasing leverage of transnational actors with the capacity and legitimacy to affect arrangements. Another may be the emergence of actors who are able to challenge the dominant settlement. This capacity may develop from the increasing value of the income streams controlled by excluded factions, the increasing ability to mobilize a broad base of citizens, their proclivity toward violence, or their ability to reframe debates and challenge ideas that have historically legitimated distributions of opportunity and power. In this sense, conflict can be a mechanism of change in the national settlement.
The value of such frameworks is that they draw attention to the importance of political negotiation and contention among elites and between elites and excluded groups as drivers of the rules (policy, legislation, norms etc.) that govern the distribution of benefits and opportunities in society. This is an approach to the politics of policy making that does not presume that the balance of power can be easily read off from structures of accumulation or capacities to negotiate, use force, mobilize populations, and frame and reframe ideas. Read through these concepts, mining policies would be expected to change when sets of elites view change as being in their interest or at least as not threatening to them; when dominant ideas of legitimate forms of development shift in ways that challenge existing settlements; when excluded actors become so strong that they are able to force themselves into the settlement, renegotiate its terms, and in the process become a new political elite; or when the leverage and/or positions assumed by critical transnational actors change. We need to look elsewhere, however, for framings that throw greater light on the ways in which the final specifics of policy are determined.
Agency and Change in Mining Governance
Beyond the causal influences of the dynamics of accumulation and the negotiation of political settlements, other literatures suggest that forms of agency within bureaucracies have direct influence on policy design and implementation. Indeed, these literatures go farther than those noted above in providing means for explaining how the details of mining policies are determined.
Evans (1995) argues that what is central is the extent to which bureaucrats and technocrats within the state apparatus are simultaneously (1) embedded in the sector that they are responsible for governing so that they adequately understand its needs and capacities and (2) sufficiently autonomous of actors in the sector that they avoid being captured by industrial interests. Embeddedness allows for learning rather than blueprint thinking, while autonomy allows for decisions that are developmental rather than clientelistic. While officials’ degree of autonomy has much to do with the broader political settlement, it also depends on the existence of Weberian work cultures within the bureaucracy that guard against capture. Embeddedness has much to do with the initiative, competence, and prior social networks of public functionaries. The argument that Evans makes for policy design is rehearsed by Ostrom (1996) for policy implementation. Such functionaries, able to interpret, understand, and translate between government and the sector being governed, operate in much the same ways as “boundary agents” in literatures on innovation systems (Bebbington and Bury, 2009; Jasanoff, 2006; Tushman, 1977).
The crossing of such boundaries and the embedding of such public functionaries can also occur when officials are pulled toward actors with whom they have historically had less contact. One mechanism for this “pulling” is through social conflict and mobilization. Patel and Mitlin (2014) discuss the extent to which this is a strategy for Slum and Shack Dwellers International (SDI), a movement of community groups representing residents of informal settlements. National SDI movements use a mixture of pressure, negotiation, and conciliatory tactics as they engage with government to secure support programs for informal settlers. These literatures suggest that much policy design and deliberation happens through these boundary crossings and reciprocally embedded relationships that allow for policy learning.
Guiding Postulates
This framework leads to the following postulates. First, mining policies are heavily conditioned by accumulation dynamics. Second, mining policies are significantly fashioned by the dominant political settlement. This settlement is in turn related to (though not determined by) interests that are based in the model of accumulation. Third, conflicts over the mining sector and particular mining projects will have more influence on environmental management policies than on policies that determine access to the subsoil and water resources. Fourth, the translation of conflict into specific, legislated proposals requires the existence of public sector and legislative actors with the predisposition to understand these demands and the capacity to turn them into politically viable policy and laws. Finally, mining policy changes that are secured through conflict, in particular those that influence patterns of access to resources, will be sustained over time only if this conflict is accompanied by a political settlement in which mining interests are not well represented, either directly or indirectly, by groups whose own interests revolve around a strong mining sector.
El Salvador: the Long Path Toward Unprecedented Policy
Postconflict Processes and the Mineral Economy
Postconflict mining reforms and investment have frequently been the bases for the deepening of an extractive economy because of the need for revenues to finance reconstruction and state building. This pattern can be seen globally and certainly in Latin America (e.g., Dougherty, 2011; Holt-Giménez, 2008). In El Salvador, in a context of acute inequalities in access to land, civil war (1980–1992) pitted elites and conservative interests against a broadly Marxist guerrilla force grouped under the umbrella of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front—FMLN). Following the war, the peace accord process explicitly excluded any chance of revising the market-oriented, small-state model of the economy. A new mining code was passed in 1995–1996 to foster investment, and in 1999 a new law allowed investment disputes with the state to be heard at the ICSID (see Spalding, 2013, on these reforms). This was shortly followed by a revision of the mining code further facilitating investment and reducing royalties from 4 percent to 2 percent (part of a race-to-the-bottom with Guatemala and Honduras [Dougherty, 2011]). In 2005 El Salvador signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement. These reforms were led by a series of conservative (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista [ARENA]-controlled) governments with the U.S. embassy playing a critical role (Bull, Cuéllar, and Kandel, 2015) and sought to institutionalize an open and investment-friendly postconflict economic model (Spalding, 2013). Eight international mining companies had invested in El Salvador by 2006 (Spalding, 2013), and the state had issued 29 exploration licenses by 2007 (Cartagena, 2009). This investment came from international junior companies; neither large transnational enterprises nor national elites were especially invested in the sector.
Conflict and a Shift in the Political Settlement
While El Salvador had some history of underground mining, the economic and social significance of mining was small in comparison with that of agriculture, remittances, or other sectors. New mining exploration activities elicited mobilization and conflict (Cartagena, 2009; Deonandan and Dougherty, 2016; Spalding, 2013). Protest framed mining investment as a threat to El Salvador’s fragile water resources and led to the consolidation of civil society actors that played important roles in the 2017 ban on mining—in particular the National Roundtable against Metal Mining (the “Mesa”) and Oxfam America’s El Salvador office. 1 The conflict drove national discussion of the mining question, pressuring the ARENA Ministry of Environment to suspend (in 2006) all mining-related environmental impact assessment processes, and ultimately placed the mining question on the 2008–2009 presidential campaign agenda.
Though not directly causally related, antimining mobilization was part of a process that culminated in the election in 2009 of an FMLN government. This election marked a palpable shift in the balance of power among and the constitution of national political elites and the incorporation of previously excluded groups into policy processes. Still, these new political elites engaged with ARENA-supporting, neoliberally oriented economic elites, largely to ensure investment for tax revenue and employment.
Negotiations with these economic elites consumed much of the energy of the first secretary for economic affairs (secretario técnico). With few exceptions, these elites showed no particular interest in supporting a mining boom in El Salvador. 2 At the same time, they were clear in their conversations with the secretary that they viewed the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources as an obstacle to investment because of its increasingly demanding environmental licensing procedures. While not supportive of international mining investors, nor were they supportive of legislation that, by banning mining outright, might call into question the security of contracts more generally.
The Canadian embassy also perceived the Ministry of Environment as a problem: the very first words of the ambassador to the newly selected FMLN environment minister in 2009 were a question about his position on mining. Leaked cables would subsequently suggest that the U.S. embassy viewed him as “antimining.” While mining companies’ leverage within El Salvador’s political settlement was limited —reflecting their modest size and weak links with national elites—two companies, Pacific Rim and Commerce Group, began to exert significant pressure through cases at the ICSID. The fact that Pacific Rim sustained this case over a seven-year period 3 likely created even less sympathy for the company among national elites.
Processes of Policy Articulation
The shift in the national political settlement in 2009, coupled with the marginal role of mining in accumulation strategies, created political space for public officials and activists to pursue a formal change in mining policy. The FMLN government inherited the ARENA ministry’s suspension of environmental impact assessment processes, along with a campaign commitment by its president, Mauricio Funes, to block mining. Civil society organizations linked to the political bases of the FMLN used that same campaign commitment to pressure the government to pass a law prohibiting mining (Achtenberg, 2011; Broad and Cavanagh, 2011).
Levels of conflict had pulled state functionaries toward the concerns of affected communities even during the ARENA government, culminating in the 2006 de facto moratorium on mining. The FMLN government was therefore doubly invested in the demands of the antimining movement: its bases were demanding a ban, and it had to develop a policy response to the ARENA moratorium. It had to respond, however, without weakening the government’s case in the ICSID disputes with Pacific Rim and Commerce Group and without alienating national economic elites (Bebbington, 2015; Bebbington et al., 2015; Spalding, 2018). Through this process the ministry sought to lay the technical and political bases for more stringent regulation of metal mining, deciding that its most important instrument would be the conduct of a strategic environmental assessment of the mining sector. This assessment was subcontracted to a Spanish company and overseen by an external committee of specialists.
The assessment involved vigorous debate on quality and rigor in the data collection process and on how to interpret the information generated. There was also external criticism from the Mesa and others who considered the process insufficiently consultative or participatory. The negotiated outcome was an assessment that concluded that while mining could technically play a part in El Salvador’s economy, the parlous state of national water resources coupled with deficient legislation and acute capacity constraints in the government meant that the conditions for any adequate regulation of mining did not exist.
The ministry used the assessment findings to develop a legislative proposal to suspend all administrative processes for mining indefinitely until adequate regulatory capacity was in place. Both the secretary of economic affairs and the lawyers representing El Salvador at the ICSID insisted that any proposal to ban mining outright, even if technically justified, would imperil the country’s case. Conversely, the Mesa lobbied against the proposal and presented its own draft law banning mining. Ultimately, neither proposal progressed beyond the committee stage. However, the strategic environmental assessment and the proposed law did help build an argument that the acute vulnerability of El Salvador’s water resources would make any encouragement of mining investment extremely ill-advised. This line of reasoning was also taken up as part of El Salvador’s defense in the ICSID case and was closely aligned with the one developed by the Mesa in the public sphere.
The Mesa Process
The Mesa had been building an argument against mining for some time, supported by, among others, Oxfam America, which helped run workshops on the risks of mining and develop links with other movements across the region. In some sense, the Mesa’s process was the inverse of the strategic environmental assessment’s in that the Mesa was embedded in communities, the Church, and the FMLN but was relatively distant from government bureaucracy and technocracy. Its process (just like the government’s) did not create many opportunities for joint learning between public officials and activists.
After the two legal proposals had been sent to and then sat languishing in the Legislative Assembly, some Mesa members turned their attention to the transboundary water problems that would be caused by proposed mines in Guatemala. However, in mid-2015 elements of the Mesa reinitiated efforts to propose a law banning mining with the new FMLN government elected in 2014. The same Oxfam America program officer who had previously supported the Mesa, now working from the Human Rights Institute of the Jesuit Universidad Centroamericana, played an important role in coordinating the drafting of this proposal.
In elaborating the law, the Mesa consulted widely, including with the president’s office and former members of the strategic environmental assessment oversight committee. Early in the process, members of the president’s and vice president’s offices and some ministers had expressed potential interest in mining as a revenue stream, but after October 2016, when the ICSID found in favor of the government in its dispute with Pacific Rim, room for maneuver seemed to grow. However, the critical factor that ultimately led to the Mesa’s proposal’s becoming law had to do with the Church.
The Church and the Ban on Mining
As Nadelman (2015) shows, 4 the Catholic authorities in El Salvador had been building technical, social, and theological arguments against mining since the early 2000s. Prior to the mid-2000s these were crafted by individual clerics and Church-related NGOs. In 2006 the bishop of Chalatenango (an area of mining conflict) pointed to the adverse impacts of mining on human dignity (Nadelman, 2015). Subsequently the Salvadoran Bishops’ Conference issued statements against mining, and from 2007 on, the (Opus Dei, conservative) archbishop of San Salvador, Fernando Sáenz Lacalle, took a public stance against mining. Trained as a chemical engineer, he took issue with industry claims about the possibility of clean mining in El Salvador and again raised the specter of risks to water resources. He was succeeded by another conservative, Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas, who took a similar position, calling on the government to halt mining (Nadelman, 2015).
The Catholic Church thus played a significant role and by March 2017 was organizing signature collection after Mass to petition the government for a mining ban. The group drafting the proposal for a ban on mining was in conversation with Church leaders, and the Church very publicly took its petition for a law banning mining to the Assembly (Spalding, 2018). Shortly thereafter the Assembly approved a law prohibiting metal mining. Both FMLN and ARENA legislators voted in favor of it, and according to Johnny Wright Sol, the ARENA legislator who played a role in persuading party colleagues to support the ban, narratives around water and climate change were critical: “Water won out against gold” and “More than a theory or an uncertain science that [climate change] might have been 10 years ago, today for Salvadorans, it is a reality” (New York Times, March 29, 2017). Three of the six considerandums in the proposed law involved environmental concerns, one of them referring explicitly to the results of the ministry’s environmental assessment.
5
According to one commentator close to both the ministry and the upper echelons of the Church, the ban demonstrated the enormous weight that the Church still has in the country, because beyond any pressure from social organizations, the church was the decisive factor that in the end shifted the balance and also put everyone in a corner: the party members in the government who believe that mining can play a role and the right-wing parties who doubtless concluded that the political cost of coming out against the law would be too great
—not least because the pope had also come out against damage to the environment in his encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si (Nadelman, 2015). Indeed, one reading is that, had opposition members of the Assembly opposed the Church’s proposal, this would have implied ipso facto opposition to the murdered Archbishop Óscar Romero, in turn implying an opposition to Pope Francis, who beatified Romero in 2015 and declared him a saint in October 2018. The political fallout of such a posture would have been severe.
The path to the globally unprecedented law banning mining required change in national political settlements, sustained conflict from civil society, a reframing of dominant narratives about water and development, and several years’ work by boundary agents seeking to convert protest narratives into policy. That said, Andrés McKinley (2018), who led the drafting process at the Universidad Centroamericana, expresses serious concerns that a change of governing party in the forthcoming elections may bring to power a president far less committed to this law.
Honduras: A Short-Lived Victory in a Long-Term Cycle of Extractivism
Long Histories of Mining Interests
Honduras has a longer and more significant history of mining than El Salvador (Rabchevsky, 1994). Many of the country’s major cities were established under the Spanish as mining towns where settlers oversaw operations and indigenous and black people worked as slaves (Oyuela, 2003; Taracena, 1998). Mining has periodically waned—following independence in 1821, following World War I, and from 2004 to 2012, when antimining mobilizations culminated in a moratorium on new concessions. However, each bust has been followed by new rounds of investment fostered by new mining policies (1876, 1998, and 2013).
Following the mining policy of 1876, there was a push to reopen colonial mines and exploit capital from foreign (especially U.S.) and newly established Honduran banks, whose primary stockholders included presidents and other political elites. Mining companies were legally exempt from both import and export duties, and minerals became the primary export (though they were later surpassed by bananas) (Caspar, 1903; Euraque, 1996). The 1998 neoliberal reforms saw a surge in Canadian investment, while after the 2013 reforms investment expanded to include Taiwan, Germany, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile (La Prensa, January 7, 2018). Throughout this history national investors have also financed the sector, and mining activity has served as an important accumulation strategy for elites and politicians—a significant difference from the situation in El Salvador, placing mining interests squarely within the negotiation of political settlements and national ideas about accumulation strategies. More recently, elite investments in hydroelectricity projects, which also benefit expanded mining operations, have become part of this equation. 6 Honduras also has a longer history of resistance to mining than El Salvador, dating to sixteenth-century indigenous mobilizations (Barahona, 2009). Oyuela (2003) argues that the 1960s saw a surge of ecological consciousness in Honduras, with students from the Honduran National Autonomous University decrying contamination from uranium in El Mochito in 1969. This, coupled with union organizing around the country, may help explain why the mining and hydrocarbons code of 1968 included environmental impact assessments that had the power to suspend mining activities (IBP, 2007).
Neoliberalization
The Rafael Callejas administration began the Honduran structural adjustment program in 1990, but its implementation was possible only because of the previous decade of militarized repression. In 1981 Miguel Facussé, owner of the Dinant Corporation, suggested that the way out of the country’s economic woes was to “sell the country to foreign investors” (CEDOH, 2009), a vision consistent with a development plan issued by the U.S. embassy months later (Philips, 2015). In 1983 Facussé joined forces with the head of the Honduran military and Callejas, among other military, business, media, and political elites, to form the far-right-wing Asociación para el Progreso de Honduras (Association for Honduran Progress—APROH). With the APROH’s help, hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the United States, and collaboration with emergent drug traffickers (see Dudley, 2016), the Honduran state oversaw the assassination, disappearance, and torture of hundreds of activists. These included key leaders of trade unions, campesino groups, and student and professional organizations and environmentalists who had made significant advances over previous decades (Alvarado, 1987; Philips, 2015).
Callejas devalued the currency and implemented the Agricultural Modernization Law of 1992, which served to dispossess indigenous and peasant groups of communally held land. The privatization and deregulation of natural resources were accompanied by increased social conflict. 7 Mining reform in 1991 provided tax exemptions coupled with a 10-year initial tax-free period for new exploration and exploitation. Then, in 1995–1996, the Liberal Party’s Carlos Reina administration nullified the 1968 mining code’s requirement of environmental impact assessments during exploration. These measures paved the way for mining sector expansion, with the infamous San Martín mine in the Siria Valley of Francisco Morazán assigned to U.S.-based Glamis Gold in 1995. A new mining law was debated for several years but did not pass until the weeks after Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
This 1998 law erased any distinction between exploration and exploitation concessions, legalized open-pit cyanide mining, permitted forced expropriation in the case of conflict, reduced taxes on mining, and established no limits on water use and no closure requirements for abandoned mines. The law was integrated with initiatives such as the elimination of the export tax on mining products proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and approved in 2000 (Marsh, 2001). While some claim that the law was a product of the Canadian mining lobby’s holding hurricane relief hostage until pro-mining reforms were passed (Escalera-Flexhaug, 2014; Holly, 2009; Shipley, 2013), the law was also pushed—and taken advantage of—by national political and economic elites. It was passed under President Carlos Flores Facussé, nephew of the APROH cofounder and palm-oil magnate Miguel Facussé. The latter’s sons-in-law also benefited: one would later start Emco (Global Witness, 2016) and the other (Fredy Nasser) has since led major hydroelectric projects. Beyond the Facussé family, the Honduran Banco Atlántida and the investors behind another palm-oil giant, Grupo Jaremar, financed the growth of the colonial-era San Andrés mine in Copán. Currently, members of the Honduran Atala Faraj family—including the chief shareholder of the Honduran Banco Ficohsa—are investors in a variety of extractivist activities (Global Witness, 2016; Mollett, 2014).
Countermovement
The impacts on local communities of the expansion of unregulated mining under the 1998 law led to conflicts at the San Martín and San Andrés gold mines that sparked a movement linking mining communities and Church leaders, doctors, environmentalists, scientists, and local and international NGOs. Networking with other socio-environmental movements, they ultimately secured a 2004 moratorium on mining and a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that declared 13 articles of the 1998 law in violation of the constitution and of many international agreements. Arriving at the ruling was a product of networked mobilization, the generation of knowledge and discourses around mining, water, and health, and relationship building with state actors in the judiciary and parts of the bureaucracy.
Though there was ample reason to protest the 1998 law on paper, it was the vivid examples of lived hardship that fueled the movement. Only three years after San Andrés was concessioned to the Canadian Greenstone Resources Limited, community leaders spoke of increased respiratory diseases and skin infections, broken employment promises, and scare tactics such as shutting off access to water and expropriation that left residents without space to grow food (Marsh, 2001). Building from shared experiences with residents of San Martín, a network was formed that organized a national meeting with members of 15 communities surrounding eight mines, earning the attention of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which amplified their concerns (Marsh, 2001).
Communities around San Andrés and San Martín enlisted scientific studies on problems such as cyanide usage and spills and associated fish kills (Moran, 2002). In El Mochito, the Center for Research and Control of Contaminants demonstrated that the mine was discharging high levels of lead, copper, and cyanide in 2001, resulting in a lawsuit. At the end of 2002, the new Civic Alliance for Mining Law Reform, headed by human rights and environmental organizations, established exchanges with organizations across Central America, including Caritas and the Research Center for Investment and Commerce in El Salvador (CIDSE, 2009).
The Church, with a number of leaders in the Latin American liberation theology tradition (ERIC, 2013), figured prominently in the antimining movement itself and through related environmental movements. These efforts led to the signing by the full Bishops’ Conference of Honduras of a “call to the conscience of the government authorities to have the will and strength to oppose the exploiters of natural resources that destroy nature and contaminate the environment” (Equipo Nizkor, 2004). It specifically called upon the president to abolish the 1998 mining law and lent the bishops’ support to the second March for Life led by Father José Andrés Tamayo of the Olancho Environmentalist Movement, which sought to expose the “neoliberal conspiracy” of resource exploitation in Honduras. Alongside the Church leadership, Father Ismael Moreno Coto took on the discursive battle through his Radio Progreso.
Pressure from all these sources culminated in the de jure moratorium on mining. In a maneuver very similar to that of the Salvadoran Church in 2017, on July 26, 2004, alongside 150 representatives of communities and NGOs, Cardinal Óscar Rodriguez presented Porfirio Lobo Sosa, then president of Congress, with a proposal for mining law reform. This led to President Ricardo Maduro’s rejection of more than 60 mining concessions solicited that year and the suspension of new concessions by executive decree pending the passage of a new mining law (CIDSE, 2009). This networked movement is generally obscured in the literatures on social movements and Canadian involvement in Honduras, which often state that the next president, Manuel Zelaya, imposed the moratorium as part of progressive reforms (e.g., Philips, 2015; Shipley, 2013; Truth Commission, 2013).
While Zelaya did ratify the moratorium, his administration wavered on taking the policy farther and left existing concessions unaffected. Furthermore, the underlying stance of government technocrats and bureaucrats had not changed. The Office for Mining Promotion continued to receive requests for new concessions and coordinated information campaigns with mayors to set the stage for future expansion (IBP, 2007). As Anderson (2012) points out, though the Zelaya administration was more open to meeting with leftist groups regarding resources and territory, few noted significant results. The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in 2006 that 13 articles of the 1998 law violated the “fundamental right to harmonic conviviality with the environment and to sustainable development” (Corte Suprema, 2006: 18–19) reflected a brief period of stability and credibility of Honduran institutions.
The momentum toward progressive reform did not culminate in a law with staying power because both Congress and the Executive continued to support mining: the political settlement had not shifted. In 2006, Roberto Micheletti, then president of Congress, publicly stated the intention to advance legislation to ban open-pit mining (Holland, 2015), but the draft legislation ultimately included nothing on open-pit mining, cyanide, or the tax code (ACD, 2008). At the same time, Zelaya removed his minister of environment, Mayra Mejía, who had overseen the passage of a stronger forestry law and resisted extractivist expansion (Cole, 2007). Her replacement, Tomás Vaquero, severed communication with the Civic Alliance for Democracy (refashioned as the Civic Alliance for Mining Law Reform) and made connections with the National Metal Mining Association (Truth Commission, 2013). While the movement had secured legislative gains and the support of some bureaucrats, the weight of mining (and associated hydroelectricity projects) in elite accumulation strategies, coupled with the disciplining power of Canadian foreign policy, ultimately meant that these gains failed to translate into more stringent regulation of extractivism. In retrospect, some members of the Civic Alliance have lamented having focused on reform through the state apparatus instead of organizing at the grassroots level to exert more national pressure (CIDSE, 2009).
A Settlement Around Predatory Extractivism and the Weakening of Mobilization
While Zelaya was ambivalent about reining in mining expansion, the coup removing him in 2009 turned national policy toward extractivism. The three subsequent administrations have recentered neoliberal hegemony and a pro-extractivist settlement, most recently with the authoritarian populist Juan Orlando Hernández. The National Party has consolidated power on the right with military support from the United States. In this political settlement, mining has been reinvigorated with the passage of a new mining law, an executive decree creating mining reserves, and a broad suite of complementary extractivist initiatives. While the 2009 coup was driven by much more than just mining interests, these interests took full advantage of the overthrow (Salomón, 2009; Truth Commission, 2013).
As a first step, Congress and Micheletti’s interim administration took advantage of the postcoup chaos to pass a new general water law. This law enabled further privatization of water resources, which had begun in 2007 with the Zelaya administration’s renewable energy law promoting private hydroelectric dams. Since mines rely upon constant supplies of electricity and water, their privatization has ensured the 24-hour operation of mines (and other private enterprises) while citizens regularly go without power and running water.
In 2013, the Lobo administration—with Hernández as president of Congress— passed a new general mining law that closely resembled the unconstitutional 1998 law. The state sought to legitimate the policy-making process by offering token participation to environmental organizations, but these pulled out when their demands were not met (ICEFI and IBIS, 2014). Under the new law, open-pit mining is permitted, there are no closure requirements or limits to water use, declarations of mining-free territories are not permanently recognized, and rejections of projects through community consultation are valid only for three years. Royalties remain low (2.5 percent for nonmetal mining and 6 percent for metal), and 33–40 percent of royalties are directed to a security fund for the police, the military, and the newly created military police. In addition, the law paves the way for mining reserves 8 that do not require consultation and whose financial, social, and environmental regulation is unclear. While it prohibits forced expropriation, its nods toward consultation are far from promoting anything resembling free, prior, and informed consent (Fash and Sellwood, 2017; Philips, 2015).
Already weakened, hopes of progressive mining policy reform have gone farther into hibernation since Hernández won a second term in highly controversial elections in 2017. After many years of shrinking exports, a conservative media article reported that mining showed growth in 2017, crediting better international prices and increased operations thanks to “efficient” processes for concession granting (La Prensa, January 7, 2018). While the law fast-tracks exploration licenses, the expansion of mining also owes a debt to severe repression by U.S.-backed enhanced militarization in the name of antinarcotics national security (see Paley, 2015, for an analysis of this process in Colombia and Mexico). 9 Hernández, who has been tied to drug cartels (Dudley, 2016), has vastly expanded security forces and appointed military leaders to government leadership positions normally held by civilians, including in the penal system, the national ports, housing administration, agricultural development, and special economic development zones (Dudley, 2016). Notably, in order to advance the law on special economic development zones passed when Hernández was president of Congress in 2012, Congress dismissed and replaced four Supreme Court judges who had declared it unconstitutional, and these zones are now scheduled for implementation in 2018 (Philips, 2015).
Bureaucrats and technocrats within the state apparatus have occasionally worked against these legislative initiatives by doing such things as releasing mining concession data to researchers and NGOs. This has allowed groups like ERIC (2016) and Oxfam (2017) to commission reports analyzing the impacts of the 2013 law. These analyses, supported in the Oxfam case by a spatial analysis of downstream hydrological impacts in different scenarios of mining expansion, sound the alarm about the significant risks of mining and make the case for sweeping reforms to mining policy. In collaborative efforts to promote transparency, researchers from Clark University, Oxfam, and the Honduran National Autonomous University collaborated on an interactive map that has seen use by activists in various parts of the country. 10 However, the level of government bureaucrat support for such initiatives is not comparable to the situation in El Salvador since 2009.
At the same time, the constituent parts of the antimining movement have weakened. Since the coup, social movement actors who had worked together on issues splintered over strategic approaches, personal relationships, and electoral politics. The power of the Church in the movement has also become compromised. While Cardinal Rodriguez and the Church had taken strong positions against foreign debt, the IMF, and mining, they lost many allies when they released statements in favor of the coup. Meanwhile, Father Tamayo supported resistance to the coup only to be removed from his post and have his Honduran citizenship revoked. The Church lost further ground amid sexual abuse scandals, with Cardinal Rodriguez himself accused of sexual abuse and placed on an international blacklist of cardinals who protect pedophile priests (Telegraph, 2013).
Organizations in the Honduran indigenous movement have been strong on individual territorial issues but have not had much success swaying national policy. They are also weakened by schisms dating to the 1990s between the radical groups that now make up the Platform of Social and Popular Movements of Honduras and the groups more aligned with the government’s move toward neoliberal multiculturalism (Hale, 2005) in the national indigenous confederations (see Anderson, 2007; 2012). These schisms are reflected in the three-year controversy surrounding bills that specify a process for free prior and informed consent for development and resource extraction projects on indigenous lands (see Sellwood, 2018; Tauli-Corpuz, 2016). Resistance to mining is also complicated by the lack of unity in the communities surrounding the two most significant mines in the country today: San Andrés and El Mochito. At San Andrés, neighboring communities have been divided anytime the company looks to offer compensation for controversial issues such as displacement, contamination, or the removal of a cemetery. At El Mochito, residents have grown so dependent on mining that when the companies have threatened to close the mine, communities have occupied it demanding guarantees of employment.
While Honduras preceded El Salvador in securing a moratorium on mining, this was due to a strongly networked movement and a successful campaign, coupled with support from select judges and bureaucrats. It was not due to any significant shift in the national settlement or even a progressive government of the moment or a step-shift in national discourses on water security and development. This and the increased weight of mining in elite accumulation strategies rendered the moratorium vulnerable and help explain the failure to move it from temporary arrangement to legislated change. Since the 2009 coup, Honduras has shifted toward a predatory extractivism even cruder than that existing before the moratorium of 2004 and more dangerous for activists (Forde, 2017; Global Witness, 2016; Middeldorp, Morales, and van der Haar, 2016). While Honduran activists now look to learn from the movement in El Salvador, the comparison between the two countries is salutary: it suggests more limited room for maneuver in Honduras than in its neighbor and a series of risks to which activists in El Salvador need to be alert if the mining ban is to be sustained.
Conclusions: Political Ecologies of Mining Regulation
El Salvador’s legislation to ban mining was passed because many stars were aligned. This is a policy that has had a dramatic effect on access to subsoil mineral resources (it bans access for all), and it was passed in part because mining is not an important part of the model of accumulation in El Salvador. National economic elites were not especially convinced of the potential for mining in the country, while national religious and many political elites were either opposed or skeptical. Transnational actors—mostly small companies—linked to mining were weak. The Canadian embassy, though it had expressed its support for mining to the minister of environment, has been disinclined to fall on its sword for Pacific Rim (Canadian foreign policy was much more interested in fostering an expanding mining sector in Honduras [Shipley, 2013]). Finally, over the years a combination of actors in the public, business, and civic sectors (on both the left and the right) had constructed a discourse around water that framed it as both precious and vulnerable in El Salvador, and some of these actors also crafted a narrative that these vulnerable water resources would be especially threatened if mining investment were to occur. This discourse circulated widely and was formalized in various documents.
These alignments created a political economy and political settlement environment that favored stringent regulation of mining and created a context in which social mobilization around such regulation was more likely to be successful. Even so, such regulation was far from guaranteed. Some senior officials in the first FMLN government worried about the signaling effect of a ban on mining, while the ICSID process also made a ban higher-risk. During the second FMLN government some in the cabinet wondered out loud whether mining might be an option for a country with a profound public budget problem (others were opposed). In these contexts, three parallel but interacting processes unfolded to create the bases for the mining ban—one with roots in the Mesa and Oxfam America, one through the Ministry of Environment, and one in the Church. The trump card was ultimately held by the Church and drew directly on its authority in a religiously conservative country (Nadelman, 2015). The culmination of these processes in the mining ban had much to do with the work of boundary agents and their learning how to convert a principled argument into legislation.
Elements of this context also existed in Honduras. A strong movement around the adverse impacts of mining had helped pressure the government into passing the 2004 moratorium on mining. Indeed, the Honduran mining movement was historically the stronger of the two. The Honduran Catholic Church also assumed a position on the social and environmental consequences of mining and helped make the call for the 2004 moratorium. However, mining and closely linked hydroelectric projects weigh much more heavily in the accumulation strategies of Honduran elites, and the Canadian embassy has been forthright in its support for the sector and for policy reforms that would favor the expansion of mining. There is also a strong national discourse around the role of mining in national development. While there appeared to be a political opening for more stringent regulation of the sector during both the Maduro and Zelaya governments (and the moratorium was an indicator of this opening), efforts to pass new legislation ultimately unraveled, apparently because of the continuing strength of national elites unwilling to see their interests compromised and Zelaya’s own ambivalence. The underlying settlement, then, notwithstanding electoral changes, created too little space for reform, and this in part reflected the national discourses on development, in which mining was becoming increasingly significant. The sorts of boundary agents that were able to exploit political space in El Salvador also seem to have been less prominent in Honduras. Movement actors and the Church have become substantially weaker, caught up in their own internal crises and political party differences. Finally, militarization has enabled mining companies to operate and pro-extractivist regimes to remain in power.
This interpretation of struggles over mining policy in the two countries suggests the importance of analyzing socio-environmental policy processes in terms of the political economy of the environment, the nature of national political settlements, and the detailed forms of network and embeddedness that cut across (or fail to cut across) the boundaries between civil society, government, legislature, and religious institutions. While such a reading makes capitalist dynamics and politics central to any analysis of how the environment is governed, this is not the same as saying that the environment is governed in ways that are merely at the service of capitalist interests or an interest-based politics that always devalues nature in favor of elite interests in controlling rents or access to resources. While such factors are real, the Salvadoran experience with mining governance and even moments in the Honduran case demonstrate that scope for stringent regulation always exists and can be expanded, even within the terms set by the national settlement and the national political economy.
For the conduct of political ecologies of extractivism, this suggests the importance of combining analysis of the effects of movements on mining policy with a finer-grained reading of elite politics and of the ways in which public officials and activists maneuver within this politics. The analysis also makes clear the importance of actors, including institutions such as the Church, in political ecologies of extraction—actors that are not always accorded the attention they merit (Arellano-Yanguas, 2014). At the same time, our analysis endorses research that recognizes the limits on mobilization, including limits that may derive from the internal fissures within movements. Such readings become important both for analysis and for activism as part of the crafting of viable strategies. They are important also for the broader project of developing a political ecological analysis of resource extraction in Latin America. We hope that this paper suggests the value of approaches that seek to hold in tension structural and agency-based analysis and that, in addition to addressing the structural conflicts between emancipatory movements, states, and capital, consider the shifting dynamics within bureaucracies, among elites, within movements, and within religious and other institutions. While this can make for messier analyses, it may provide a fuller account of how progressive change can happen and also be undone.
Footnotes
Notes
Anthony Bebbington is Australia Laureate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne, a professor of geography at Clark University, and a professorial fellow at the University of Manchester. Benjamin Fash is a Ph.D. student, an NSF graduate research fellow, and a Fulbright student researcher in geography at Clark University. John Rogan is a professor of geography at Clark University. They acknowledge an Australian Research Council Australia Laureate Fellowship to Bebbington (grant number FL160100072), a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to Fash, and an Oxfam America grant to Rogan and Fash. They thank the four reviewers and Scott Sellwood for comments. They are grateful to colleagues in El Salvador, Honduras, and elsewhere, in particular to Herman Rosa, Andres McKinley, colleagues in PRISMA in San Salvador, David Kaimowitz, George Redman, Sara Martínez, Maria José Chanut, Rafael Corrales, Claudia Mondragón, and colleagues at the Coalición Ambientalista de Copán. Linda Farthing and Niki Fabricant were immensely supportive.