Contesting Trade in Central America: Market Reform and Resistance

5. After CAFTA: Anti-Mining Movements, Investment Disputes, and New Organizational Territory

CHAPTER 5 After CAFTA: Anti-Mining Movements, Investment Disputes, and New Organizational Territory Local communities and NGOs, including amici, in reflection of their hardfought empowerment and awareness of their own rights, and in a legitimate exercise of the democratic process in the post–Civil War political environment, refused to accept Pac Rim’s plans to dig mines under their own lawfully owned land, build dangerous waste ponds, and otherwise threaten the continuity of their environment, livelihoods, and way of life. mesa naCional FRenTe a la mineRía meTáliCa de el salVadoR (2011) By 2010, four publicly disclosed complaints had been filed against Central American governments under CAFTA-DR, two of them by gold mining companies against the government of El Salvador (Antell, Carlson, McCandless 2010). As gold mining turned controversial and the Salvadoran government halted its advance, Pacific Rim Mining Corporation and the Commerce Group brought their cases to the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. As elsewhere in Latin America, mining controversies in Central America provoked new forms of resistance and innovation. In Building Transnational Networks, Marisa von Bülow (2010, 17) concludes that trade-resistance coalitions “are often fragile and remain valid for short periods of time.” Analyzing anti-FTA movements in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and the United States over a twenty-year period, von Bülow found that not only did transnational networks tend to lose strength over time, but so did their domestic building blocks. Chile’s anti-FTA organizational hub faded out several times during the U.S.-Chile FTA process and the FTAA debate, for example, and the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC), an umbrella coalition opposed to NAFTA and the FTAA, also declined, in part due to its leaders’ unpopular efforts to centralize authority (133–142). After CAFTA 159 My analysis, which focuses not just on particular resistance networks but also on the broader mobilizations against the neoliberal project, points to a different conclusion. While alert to the organizational challenges of maintaining cohesion and adjusting to change, this book argues that neoliberal resistance movements, as opposed to specific alliances, demonstrate remarkable adaptive capabilities. Repeated defeats can be dispiriting, and mobilizations are commonly punctuated by lulls. But in the absence of forceful repression, opposition movements can prove quite resilient, even in the face of recurring failure. Advances in market reform, to the extent that these measures result in displacement or create unrealized expectations, fuel successive iterations of resistance. The decline of one opposition network is often followed in quick succession by the development of others, sometimes more specialized as subgroups form, and sometimes broadened by frame bridging as subgroups coalesce . As Cumbers, Routledge, and Nativel (2008, 186) note describing the fluid history of global justice networks, “people, actions and ideas spill from one network to another.” Informed both by the shape of prior connections and the development of new opportunities, resistance movements regenerate through the shape-shifting and protean processes that underlie movement persistence. As El Salvador’s anti-CAFTA forces registered their defeat in 2004, new issues arose from within the broader neoliberal resistance canon and reconfigured their work. Concerns deepened over water access, fueling a broad-based movement for water rights (Haglund 2010). Resistance to pressures for labor flexibilization merged with an ongoing push for improved labor conditions, sometimes, ironically, using CAFTA-based rules and resources in the process (Anner 2011; Asociación Movimiento de Mujeres Mélida Anaya Montes 2010; Quinteros 2005). Unresolved debates about health rights fed into mobilizations over health care delivery and the price of medicine (Smith-Nonini 2010). Threats to local communities and environmental deterioration fueled yet another debate, this one focused on the development of metal mining. This chapter uses the case of the anti-mining movement in El Salvador to explore two phases in the resistance process following CAFTA implementation . It begins by tracing mobilization at the domestic level, as the movement pressured its own national government for ongoing adjustments in the market model. It then moves to the international level, as the movement challenged mining investors in an international investment-dispute tribunal. The first part uses politically embedded campaign analysis to examine the intersection of resistance activism and formal politics at the national level. This approach analyzes standard agentic features of movement campaigns (networks, resources, opportunities, frames, brokers) but embeds them within 160 ContestingTrade in Central America political processes to explore linkages between social mobilization...