Human Rights Crisis in El Salvador and Mexico over the Right to Water

Yesterday, UUSC staff worked to respond to an urgent action request about the case of 14 peaceful protesters, students, municipal workers, community members, and men and women detained and tortured under an antiterrorism act in El Salvador on July 2. The protesters were demonstrating peacefully against the planned privatization of water services.

Today, we received a request for an urgent action to write about UUSC program partner the Mexican Coalition for the Right To Water (COMDA) and the International Habitat Coalition of Latin America (HIC AL), about human rights lawyer Santiago Perez Alvarado. Perez Alvarado was detained under kidnapping charges while on his way to file papers in a challenge to a large dam project that will divert the water resources of a rural community in the state of Mexico to Mexico City.

The feeling of cutting and pasting from one letter about El Salvador, to another about Mexico, was one of horror and foreboding. I can sense that we will be writing many of these letters until and unless we strongly support all efforts to defend the right to water. Cutting and pasting the content of an urgent letter to government officials about the violation of the civil and political rights of citizens concerned about their right to water.

How soon before we are called to mobilize for a Mexican Darfur in an indigenous region in Mexico because the water is being taken to Mexico City? Or for agribusiness ? I am not comfortable writing such personalized blog messages, nor alarmist ones, but I find myself not being able to take another tone, nor able any longer to read the screen.