The book reviewed here begins with a murder of a man named Marcelo Rivera in El Salvador. It was an intentional killing, and particularly brutal. Someone was sending a message. Rivera was an environmental activist, as are many such victims, most of whom never draw a headline. The year 2019 saw a record number of 212 assassinations of environmentalists, making up 40 percent of all assassinations around the world.

Latin America has been a particular hotspot. Of the 212 killings worldwide, two thirds were in the Americas south of the U.S border. Of these, the most rampant were in Brazil, whose Amazon resources have long been a Wild West of gangs and pistoleros-for-hire by domestic and foreign corporations. The second most frequent killing grounds are the small countries of Central America, including El Salvador, the location of The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed, by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh. This time, and not uncommonly, the book presents an acute conflict over the two substances most sought after by human beings: water and gold.

Conceptually speaking, they make an odd mix. Water is the staff of life for nearly all civilizations, and those that run short do not run for very much longer. We cannot survive without it. Gold is a different phenomenon, and we can survive quite easily without it. It’s primary use is in the form of gold bricks that line the basement floors and vaults of international banks. They are shuttled by little fork-lifts from one side to another, from the Britain corner to the China corner, in order to guarantee the banks’ solvency though we abandoned the gold standard a century ago. The rest of it goes into jewelry that we wear (or for gold teeth) for no reason other than to show how rich we are. We pay thousands, of dollars for an ounce of gold. At the same time, we pay pennies for even a jug full of water. Just think of the profitability of an operation that mines gold and uses lots of water to process it. A Canadian corporation called Pacific Rim thought of it too. Whether it would kill to get them we’ll never be absolutely sure.

Here we have the underlying conflict of Water Defenders. Pacific Rim, a shell company of another shell, Ocean Gold, had struck it rich in the mountains of El Salvador. It would strip the cover off the deposit (euphemistically called “the overburden,” as if the soil and trees removed were somehow burdening things), crush the rock to powder, and use a solution of one of the most deadly poisons on the planet, cyanide, to bleed out glittering specks of the precious metal. It may take an entire side of the mountain to produce one gold brick for the banks to buy, and then put back underground.

The entire gold mining process is inordinately destructive, from the operations just described to the leaching of these toxic cocktails from containment ponds into the groundwater, or the direct discharge as with Pacific Rim into the Lenga River, which “winds through El Salvador like a snake,” providing drinking water, bathing water, and irrigation water every meter of the journey.

Why do we do this? Because we have and have always had a belief that gold has great, indeed overriding, value. What other value does it have? The Bible refers to it more than 400 times, from “cities of gold” to “streets paved with gold,” always in adulation. Setting aside raids by gold thieves for a moment, consider how long those cities of such a soft metal would remain standing. Or how long the gold streets would withstand the pounding of hooves or truck tires without needing to be resurfaced . . . with yet more gold. Perhaps a month? The question is hypothetical, of course. Those who invest in gold follow its price swings as closely as others do the stock market, which ends the discussion. Inter alia, it makes money and it’s fun.

Returning to the plot of Water Defenders, its chapters document what became a war, as vicious as any waged in history, homicides, torture, and all. Its first victim, the above-mentioned Rivera, disappeared suddenly from the face of the earth. No explanation. He was just another desaparecido in a region full of them — usually at the hands of right-wing dictatorships, as in Argentina, or paramilitary esquadrones de la muerte as in Chile. After weeks of anxious waiting, his family received an anonymous tip. There was a body at the bottom of an abandoned well one-hundred feet deep just west of Rivera’s hometown. The corpse was his alright, more or less. Mostly less.

The book continues: “So extensive was the torture that the body was unrecognizable. The face was grotesquely disfigured — no jaw, no lips, no nose. The fingernails had been ripped off. The testicles bound. The trachea had been broken with a nylon cord. In the assessment of the coroner, the death had been caused by asphyxiation.” The public prosecutor disagreed, concluding that the death had come from blows to the head by a hammer.

Not that the disagreement mattered. What mattered was that Marcelo, alive, had been an active and effective threat to Pacific Rim’s gold mining plans. He was an outspoken leader of the movement to stop them. The gold wasn’t worth it, he argued, and it would soon be gone. The cyanide in the water and now the bottom sediments would be there for centuries, leaving a wake of victims, many of them children, behind. It was an emotional pitch, and it quite probably led to his death by violent means almost too gruesome to describe. Someone was very interested in the success of Pacific Rim, and a dead Marcelo was no threat at all.

The killing of Marcelo — whoever ordered it — turned out to be a major tactical error. It caught the attention of the minister of the environment and, shocked by its brutality, he came out against Pacific Rim’s mining plan. Far from ending the matter, however, it turned out to be only the second shot of many, each pointed at another sector of society: Pacific Rim against its opponents, the government against its citizens, wealthy Salvadoran Whites against Indigenous Salvadorans, sticks, arrows, and rifles against tanks, airplanes, and machine guns. And last but not least, because without him this would be a different story, was a an attorney committed enough to go up against a phalanx of three-piece suits from El Salvador and abroad.

The setting of the fight to come, the World Bank, could not have been more incongruous, nor was the lawsuit that prompted the bank’s involvement. The opponents of Pacific Rim did not sue the corporation, which is the usual scenario for these kinds of cases. Instead, Pacific Rim sued the El Salvadoran government and demanded, gangland-style, that either the government grant it the permit to mine, as applied for, with no conditions and no further ado, or it would sue the government into bankruptcy.

Equally incongruous, the case would be heard by a panel of the World Bank which existed for the sole purpose of funding economic activity in less-developed countries. Mining activity and related industrial development featured large in the bank’s portfolio, fitting Pacific Rim like a glove. The notion that the bank’s review panel in this case would turn down funding for a kind of project it had routinely supported up to now occurred only to a handful of Salvadorans at the beginning.

A book reviewer’s dilemma here is that Water Defenders is very much a thriller, its suspense building with every chapter. On the other hand, a reader has to know that David will eventually beat Goliath or the book would never have been written, much less subtitled How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed. So, the outcome is known from the get-go but the reader remains in suspense to the end.

The suspense in Water Defenders comes with a series of setbacks that are jumped like a hurdles event, or simply endured like the shock of a bomb. As the story evolves, a strange admix of parties meets on common ground, Catholic bishops and their parishioners, for example, who had often found the bishops siding against them and with the military and wealthy classes. The government itself, for another, which all too often allied with the same conservative interests and against those of the pueblo, and particularly Indigenous people, whose lands were the first to be appropriated for the mines.

Most striking and improbable, however, is a de facto cease fire, and then alliance, true peace, between the FMLN and ADEM, the two highly militarized parties of El Salvador’s long civil war. It was not El Salvador’s war alone. The United States financed and ultimately directed both military and right-wing paramilitary operations of ADEM that, per the independent findings of a post-war truth and reconciliation commission, wound up killing an estimated 85 percent of the 75,000 dead in the war, including the assassination of Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 and the rape of nuns associated with his cathedral. The left-leaning FMLN, et al., including their Soviet and Chinese supporters, were found responsible for only 5 percent.

When it came to the Pacific Rim mine issue, and yet more importantly a subsequent vote in the nation’s congress on a proposal to ban all mineral extraction in El Salvador — a country chronically desperate for foreign investment — ADEM and FMLN stood together, lobbied together, joined with the Catholic Church and its parishioners, and the government and its president and legislators, to approve the ban. When the vote came up on the screen it read 69 yes, 0 no, 0 abstentions. No one asked for a recount. Oceana, Barrick Gold, and other major gold mining corporations have since gone on to more accommodating places such as Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico.

When it comes to finding out exactly who pulled the trigger on Marcelo Rivera, we do not know and probably never will. But what Rivera helped start was and is rather amazing. It is certainly worth the read.

Oliver Houck is professor of law at Tulane University. www.oliverhouck.com.