 And now I'm going to open up the webinar and we'll have quiet on the side. Good afternoon friends. Welcome YouTube viewers. We will get started in a moment. Welcome. We're going to let the opportunity for the room to fill up and welcome our YouTube viewers and we'll get started in just a moment. I am Anisa. I'm your host and tech host today. Here is a link to today's document and as our speakers present any resources that come up I'll try and add them to this document especially if we can get them at SFPL. So we'll just give it one more moment. Welcome. Welcome everyone. We're going to get started in just a moment. Let's get started. I know more people will join us and I want to welcome our YouTube viewers today and thank everyone for being here. I'm Anisa. I'm a librarian here at San Francisco Public and we are happy to be able to share such amazing attendees in our virtual library. As I mentioned there is a link with today's document and I'll keep up with it as our presenters present. I'll try and add the resources that come and anything that comes along with it. This is being recorded for YouTube and so we have a lot of virtual programming you can check out on our YouTube channel. Our library wants to acknowledge that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramya Chisholony tribal people who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland and as uninvited guests we like to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramya Chisholony community. This Thursday at 4 p.m. we're going to have the amazing all-women-led indigenous organization out of Oakland, the Seguritay Land Trust and that is also going to be in our virtual library. I 100% encourage you to come join us for that event. If you don't know about Seguritay Land Trust and you don't know about Karina Gould, you're about to be like amazed. She is a powerhouse. She's amazing and they're doing just amazing work in land-back movement. So come check that out. Don't miss it and pay your shummy tax. Find out. All right, without further ado, I'm so happy today to be able to host some amazing humans, Jorge Cuiar, assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Caribbean studies at Dartmouth College, who's going to be talking on contemporary water issues in Central America. And we'll be in conversation today with International Center Librarian Shema Avalos, AUC Berkeley Librarian for Central Latin American Studies and Latinx Collections, Dr. Lilidar Pendesi. As a Central Americanist, Karina's work addresses the politics, culture and history of the Ishma and diasporas. So thank you all for joining and I'm about to turn it over. Jorge, thank you for being here. Thank you so much, Anisa. So good afternoon, everyone. And again, thanks so much to the San Francisco Public Library for this kind of invitation. I speak to you from the lands of the Abinaki peoples and so it's great to be here and to speak on Central America, specifically the water crisis as we just celebrated Earth Day this weekend, yeah. So I'm honored to be asked to address on these urgent issues. And before I launch into the talk, I'd like to begin by thanking the various organizers. First and foremost, thanks to Librarian Shema Avalos for making this connection and with whom it is so great to be in touch again. You guys know this, but probably the crowd doesn't. Shema and I went to graduate school together at USC. So un abrazo fuerte, Shema. Also to Lilidar for serving as a discussant on the panel. I really can't wait to think alongside you around these critical issues. Finally, I wanted to send a huge thank you to the Zoom room for all the folks who are here on the Zoom and on YouTube. I'm humbled to be invited to speak on these topics. Central America, as you are no doubt aware, is routinely in the headlines. And it often, for the wrong reasons, it's usually there for these endless insecurity concerns, right? Policing and gangs to transnational migration, to even governance problems, right? As state leaders adopt, you know, really funky policies like Bitcoin or are legislating and running governments by tweet, right? Or even in Honduras, right? Governments that are found to be narco trafficking and more. So, but I'm grateful today to be able to focus my attention on the centrality of water to the present and the future of the Central American region. I'll proceed by using El Salvador as my starting point and my primary case study. But given that water is a transnational issue, I'll gesture towards neighboring countries and other national contexts at different points throughout. So in my limited time today, I want to tell the contemporary story of water in Central America through three but interrelated lenses. The first is by sharing what water looks like in Central America as a source of everyday life. Here I want to underscore how water is both the vital and the material basis for life itself, for community and for Central American society to even exist. Plentiful water resources are a prerequisite for making a dignified life in Central America and its present scarcity is in fact a vector for contemporary outmigration from the region and the source for a variety of social problems. The second, of course, is to explain how water is a concern for capitalism as water remains a lucrative and increasingly scarce commodity that stresses the accumulation strategies of capitalists and governments. Water levels signal a limit to economic growth, to healthy democracies and as an attempt to avoid social unrest. Water is also an indispensable resource for the coming energy transition for Central America which have started to again foreground the inequities around water use and care. In Central America, we might soon experience similar situations such as that in Cochabamba, Bolivia, from the early 2000s where citizens took to the streets to protest a privatization of public water. These water conflicts, known to the United Nations, will soon become more common in the future and here is a map of this kind of resource stress around water due to deforestation and drought-like conditions that impact the countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, all the way down to Costa Rica and Panama. Lastly, I'll try to bring these two thoughts together to explore water's political dimension. In other words, what is at stake in Central America around water, as well as identifying where water as a vital life-sustaining substance sits in a complex web of transnational political struggles that are waged by a variety of social actors across the region. And here I want to zoom in on the experience of the Santa Marta water defenders from Cabañas in El Salvador to explain how these folks are in the crosshairs of aggressive forms of development and how the gains of environmental justice movements past are being actively rolled back by contemporary governments. So hopefully together we can arrive at a fuller portrait of what is taking place in and around water governance in Central America and how struggles over it, over its use, reveal that there's a developmental model in crisis. So firstly, the use of water in Central America has always been a contested issue. Water infrastructure in Central America is and has remained informal, and local groups have often administered water for themselves to provide for the home with the blessings of municipal governments. However, historically, there has always been an aggressive exploitation of water and land by governments and by capitalist actors, principally by large landholders who use this resource in common to sustain their growing commercial agricultural operations. So here we have to think about ranching, we have to think about coffee, rice, soy, sugar, cotton, and varieties of fruits and vegetables such as bananas, corn, and beans. This has been water's typical use, where the gifts of nature, right, water, are simply resources to be exploited by those with the ability to do so. So as a quick example, the story of industrias la constancia in El Salvador, this is the country's major beverage bottling company. And this, the story of this corporation, this national corporation, actually, you know, tells the broader story of water exploitation in the region, showing how we get to a contemporary situation where business as usual is skirting environmental concerns, ignoring community input, and avoiding impact reports by climate and climate scientists and geologists, right. This is how we arrive at a present day situation where water provisioning is a matter of winners and losers, right, a struggle between the quenched and the thirsty of conflicts between the hydrated and the dehydrated. Today's juntas de agua or water boards, and here a kind of select number of them, they're found all across the region, or an example of how communities themselves are practicing alternative forms of water governance that have risen at the local level in response to this over exploitation by a business sector that puts profits over public use. It has also response these highly visible transnational corporations, like the Coca-Cola's, like the Nestle's, the Mexican juicer, Humex, for example, who continually drain national freshwater for bottling and then to sell it back to Salvadorans as packaged products. For ordinary people, water, you know, the rivers, the lakes, the streams, the ponds, which are traditionally used for all matter of household work, washing dishes, you know, clothes, fishing, recreation, are no longer usable due to contamination. These waters have, for past generations, served as an indispensable element to people's survival and to the reproduction of households. As the hydrological health of national waters has sharply fallen and portable underground aquifers, these, you know, these basically sedimented rock that filters rainwater, they have dried out and actually lost their capacity to filter pollutants and purify rainfall, right? People have began to rely on collecting stormwater for household use, but even this process of rainwater capture has started to reach an exhaustion point due to decreasing short and unpredictable rainfall. So Central America is barreling towards a breaking point. You know, long before the COVID pandemic, Central America had already been experiencing one of the most intense and prolonged droughts in modern history, lasting more than five years in this case, that contributed to incredible crop loss and was affected the entire regional food chain. It led to unbearable, near lethal temperature extremes as well. For countries dependent on their agricultural productivity, like many of the Central American countries, export profits as well as the base of the national diet, you know, were affected by this incredible drought. It also led to families experiencing hunger through the economic challenges to secure the basic food basket as due to crop loss, available food also spikes in price, right? So things such as beans, rice and flour, became very difficult for, you know, the popular Salvador family to attain. Practically, you know, though costly, people now rely on bottled water for more and more of their everyday activities, especially for drinking and for cooking, right? So this has added cost to household economics. Further adding to food insecurity, this drought has also fueled the internal displacement and bankruptcy of small and medium-sized farmers who can no longer reliably count on staple food yields, right, year over year, or nor can they provide, you know, food in moments of economic shock for local populations, for townspeople, which there are around which they, which they plant, right? So in the cities too, the drought has dried out underground aquifers, which remain essential for providing water to growing towns and cities that experience intermittent water coming out of their tap, you know, and also it's of varying quality. So returning to the farmers and what I really mean here is, is farming reliant families, so campesino and peasant families who likely have a few chickens, a cow, maybe a goat, right, in a small plot to harvest some beans. These folks are now forced to move into cities where they attempt to make a living, right, in big cities like Guatemala, Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, San Jose, Manawa, but end up being unable to do so. To secure survival, these economic needs, right, prompt people to actually migrate regionally first, right, within Central America for work and actually become this kind of floating seasonal labor force that sometimes cuts sugar cane in El Salvador, picks coffee in Costa Rica, logs in Guatemala, or serves as migrant mining labor in Nicaragua, right, or even works in building apartment complexes in Panama. This phenomenon remains an understudied aspect of the water crisis of how global warming in Central America, you know, affects and is transforming regional labor habits, right, so for me, this actually tells me that Central America is on life support and that governments have no response to this compounding and accelerating emergency, you know, and like clockwork, and as these seasonal labor migrations become ever more routine, development continues unabated, willfully neglectful of the emergency around them. Despite this reality, there are record numbers of corporate concessions being given to extractive businesses for exploration, you know, speeding up the transfer of those resources held in common, right, into private hands. Across Central America, and this has been a phenomenon for at least the last 20 years, gated communities with their own private water sources are increasing, advertised as a good investment to Central Americans everywhere, both in the country and abroad, right, as it seemingly ensures security, comfort, and guarantees access to water because of private reservoirs. The idea, right, is that these reproduce a lifestyle reminiscent of that found in the United States and that you will be shielded from social insecurities like gang predation and water instability. These water systems within these developments are also not truly private as they tap into public wells and use pipes of the national aqueduct system. Even if they perforate their own wells, these draw from shared underground fresh waters and actually contribute to the drying out of aquifers because they overexploit them. So like a straw, as if like, you know, they're using this kind of straw, these developments pull water into their sisters and to their reservoirs to ensure a steady flow for the people that live inside the gated community, right, and to fill these swimming pools as you see in this mock-up, right, often by pumping water overnight or intermittently throughout the day. You know, also their wastewater that's coming from these gated developments tends to go into the public sewage system or into nearby creeks and minor waterways that are, you know, at this point, fully contaminated. In Central America, about 90% of all surface water is contaminated. The gated community phenomenon is one way that the water crisis expresses itself via the highly acute dynamics of inequality, revealing that the access to water is fundamentally about privilege and wealth distribution, right, where the privatization of water by construction companies in this case, right, and management groups, real estate management groups, is by definition opposed to the needs of a thirsty public, whom unable to afford this kind of private living must rely on dated intermittent service from the national public water system. Through my own direct experience of Central America, living both in El Salvador and Panama specifically, I was subjected to water shortages, unable to take a shower outside of designated hours, sometimes experiencing laughably low water pressure, right, and having to leave faucets open for a long time to fill up buckets, to then be used later to do such simple things as like flushing the toilet, you know, so, so further, you know, in an article that I wrote for, for not glad during the early part of the pandemic, I also documented so many stressful water habits that were impacting the Salvadoran poor, where ordinary people were forced to venture out of their homes and risk contracting the virus to both fill buckets and jugs with water, you know, for household use, you know, in the Salvadoran context, overexploitation by private developments and businesses betrays the notion that water must be a shared good available to all. The corporate pillaging of water sources connected to a transnational corporate food chain and other forms of toxic agriculture have led to rampant pollution and dumping that has irreparably damaged groundwater, made new well perforation go ever deeper and deeper and deeper to locate usable and sizable uncontaminated sources of water for private use. Sometimes private entities will place their own wells close to community wells, right, which effectively means that these private wells are stealing from community managed systems. Waste management and the widespread use of cheap plastics, too, has contributed to the contamination of the region's rivers, lakes and streams, and has made the recuperation and immense transnational challenge as governments passed the buck to make clean up the responsibility of neighboring nations of civil society or of, you know, of NGOs. The poor state of transboundary watersheds, the major Central American rivers also double mostly as borders for many of the countries in the region, have yielded citizen cooperation efforts in river recovery, in clean up remediation and protection. Organizations, numerous organizations, are typically, that are typically locally organized, offshoots of community-based collectives such as the Red Agua in Guatemala, Hades in El Salvador, and numerous indigenous organizations, too, that mobilize to prevent extractive projects are plentiful in the region and they're responding to this ongoing crisis and to the erosion of the biosphere on which they depend. So ironically, too, as is usually the case with many social issues in Central American and Latin America in general, you know, USAID is present too, right, actively funding initiatives, you know, like the Upper Lampa Watershed Project to restore the Lampa River, which is a shared waterway between El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. And the Lampa, you know, is also an important part of regional hydroelectric power generation as well. So, you know, the COVID-19 global pandemic exposed the fragility, the fragile safety net, around water needs in the region. It revealed the critical state of water as it was simply not enough to respond to the public health crisis. In El Salvador, for instance, the national water stress was made glaringly evident and evidence what I referred to as a hydro-social crisis where the lack of water across society underscored how inequality is precisely what determines water access. In the COVID moment, one that I think is actually not fully over, the Salvadoran government could simply not deliver enough water to people now under mandatory quarantine, who were relying, of course, more on water because they were at home all the time. Right here in poor communities, and this shot is from a community called Soya Pango, people were left without water for weeks, right, and we were just talking about California as well, were left without water for weeks as the public water supply focused on delivering water to other areas of the city. And what I mean by that is more affluent areas of the city, right. In some cases, people were forced to violate what, at that point, was a very harsh military quarantine, one of the toughest and most aggressive in all of Latin America to seek out bottled water, which itself was in short supply. To look for water, people risked their exposing themselves to the virus, as well as being detained at a government checkpoint. Instead, many protested on the streets of their neighborhoods, demanding local governments to respond. Thus, one way that people received water was by waiting on water trucks to arrive that were coming from Honduras and Guatemala. Many were forced to travel long distances, as in one of the slides that I showed, over four kilometers to go to these pumping stations where they could fill up these jugs and these bottles, these public faucets, that also are also very unreliable in many cases. This corporation here is a national entity, it's called ANDA, and ANDA is the name of the Salvador National Water Company, and it's an organization that's meant to maintain meat and expand access to water for the public. However, due to underfunding and understaffing, it struggled to meet its most basic mandate and to maintain its infrastructure, pumping stations and aqueducts, which have at this point fallen into disrepair. ANDA is an underfunded public utility company that is tasked with delivering water to most of the Salvadoran population. The challenge, right, coupled with the accelerated pace of urbanization in much of Central America, it's made difficult for these kinds of national water entities to really keep up. In El Salvador, for example, under President Nayib Bukele, the current president, with his budget cuts and fiscal discipline, these public entities have been pushed to privatize and are being forced to run as commercial entities to ensure their own survival. They have to prove that they're not obsolete, basically. This has already pushed an entity like ANDA to sell water rights to corporations and to enter agreements with developers that seek to exploit pre-existing public water systems, sewage systems, and also perforate new wells. At the same time, right, ANDA in its new form as a for-profit entity is now motivated to delegitimize community-run local water projects that have, for some time already, organized around collective water governance, right? These water collectives, which I also called the juntas de agua or, you know, water boards, describe the community-developed ways that folks have devised to manage local water use, to provision themselves. And while they've been largely left alone for generations prior, today, right, with this turn to ANDA as a for-profit entity, they now represent a roadblock, right, for accessing water resources that ANDA now wants to reclaim as belonging to them, right? And so they label them these community systems as illegal and unsanctioned. They want to create the conditions so that they have access to them to be able to sell them off. So at present, there are about 2500, 2500 water boards in the country, and they provide service to roughly 25% of the Salvadoran population or some 1.6 million people. Much of them in areas that are incredibly remote and to where organizations and entities like ANDA don't even have access, don't even have pipes going in that direction. So this state, you know, the state and local tension around water, right, these dynamics of appropriation and dispossession are at the heart of water issues in El Salvador and in other parts of Central America, where local ways of satiating water needs, right, are under attack. They are being aggrieved not for their dysfunction or wastefulness, but because they stand in the way of commercialization. Community water governance that ensures locals have continued access to fresh water remain under attack, as they prevent the state from selling off the rights to water or then claiming them to then sell back to Salvadorans, right, as we saw with the Coca-Cola example. For years, these collectives that are now under attack have ensured that water and forest resources are protected from developers, right, from bottling companies and from other extractive projects that seek to exploit them for commercial purposes. They also function as a mechanism for local control, right, that must be consulted with, should a developer or a business seek access to those resources. As part of broader environmental justice movements in the region, you know, the fight for water is largely comprised by rural people, right, specifically rural women. Water, you know, as the source of all social reproduction and as a key element in household life, has activated long subordinated social actors, peasant women specifically, to mobilize around environmental issues, right. In El Salvador, there's a deep understanding that it is the poor, rural Salvadoran woman that is the most impacted by water scarcity, right, because it complicates the dynamics of the home. It adds stress to social situations and patriarchy and water scarcity combined in violent ways to affect women's well-being. So to focus more directly on the political dimension of the water struggle and to deliver on my third promise, let me now turn to the experience of the Santa Marta community leaders in Cabañas El Salvador and their organization, Organization ADES, the Association for Social and Economic Development, based out of Cabañas, El Salvador. ADES is an organization was established in 1993 after the closing of the Salvadoran Civil War that left over 75,000 people dead, right, and countless migrants that went towards the U.S., Australia, and Europe. And so they were formed after the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992 that ended armed combat and enabled the establishment of civil society organizations like ADES, nonprofit groups, and other kinds of issue-based collectives to emerge, right. This new opening after the end of the armed conflict allowed displaced communities to return to their abandoned hamlets and homes to rebuild. So referred to this in Salvadoran history, we refer to these as repopulated communities. So groups like ADES sprang forth from this need from people who were displaced during the war and then came back, right, and from this need to restitch community and to organize local efforts among the displaced returning from the country to the country from the other side of the border. Many people fled to Honduras to evade the U.S. funded military that was incredibly indiscriminate with who was repressing. ADES, right, is thus an important example of how a community resist the encroachment of capital, right, and it's also evidence of historical project that took bold steps in making a life after the war. Groups that formed ADES returned to Santa Marta as early as 1987, while larger numbers would return after the 1992 Peace Accords, as they narrate themselves, quote, by accompanying processes of political formation and popular communication, promoting organic agriculture and respect for the environment, to the defense of human rights as a fundamental basis for development. ADES has fostered partnerships across generations that have supported community-focused work across the country in places like San Vicente, Cuscatlan, Cusolutan, basically all across El Salvador. The work of entities like ADES is critical to building local power and to developing resilient strategies for weathering insecurity, climate change, food scarcity, and the general lack of public investment in the well-being of rural Salvadoran communities. In the middle of the night of January 11, 2023, this year, five local Santa Marta community members were rounded up by the Salvadoran National Police with the military in tow. After being surrounded by locals who protested these arrests, officers claimed that the men who were gathered up, who were detained, were accused of murdering a local woman during the Salvadoran Civil War, with vague charges and little evidence to speak of, resting the entirety of their case on a single second-hand account, the men were detained. Now, three months since that arrest, none of what the state claims has been verified by members of the tight-knit Santa Marta community or by anyone else, nor has the government provided any added proof to link these men to this supposed murder. Even if, though, however, they were guilty of such a crime, the amnesty law of the peace accords in 1992, right, forgives all crimes that occurred in the 1980s war, and this is how many military officials got away with committing, you know, with repression and with genocide and have never been tried for such crimes. But despite this, it remains clear that this crime that these folks are accused of is a fabricated accusation, and it's actually an attack because of their regionally recognized role, right, as environmental defenders and as members of ADIZ. So to put a finer point on it, the reasons that ADIZ is being attacked today by the Nayib Bukele government is because they represent a key node in the anti-mining movement and the struggle for water in El Salvador. Mining, especially for precious metals, has historically been a widespread and growing industry in El Salvador, incredibly active across the latter half of the 20th century, but which was legally prohibited, right, and has been prohibited through a historic decision in 2017. For generations, however, mining remained a largely unregulated industry, which enjoyed many freedoms to exploit Salvador in nature. And as you are no doubt aware, mining utilizes a lot of water in its extractive process, pulling ore from the earth through processes such as heap leaching, a kind of filtering process that uses water and cyanide to form a solution, or hydraulic mining, for example, and of course, waterway dumping. These are central aspects of mining. Even the exhaust of mining machinery, for example, the air pollutants in the liquid waste need a place to go, and these pollutants often end up in local rivers. Across Central America, communities have spoken out about mining's effect on local waters where river water and groundwater assume a kind of copper-like color and is no longer safe to drink, to bathe in, to wash anything. ADIZ's work has been to systematically draw attention to these local issues and to alongside other organizations that we saw in an earlier slide, such as the Foro de Awa or the Water Forum, they valiantly pushed back against metallic mining and were instrumental in getting that decision, that ban on metallic mining back in 2017. Their work has also consequently raised the consciousness of the general population around environmental issues and about the specific risks that are posed by mining. As elements of organized civil society, ADIZ poses a threat to the state that seeks to make room for the mining industry once again. Thus, the attack against ADIZ and similar organizations like it in other places like in Guapinol, in Honduras, for example, remain unignorable examples of how present governments aim to weaken community power with hopes that it can make way for metallic mining to return to these countries once again and roll back the victories of environmental activists past. So this national ban against mining, which was the first in the world, was a hard-fought victory and now is back on the chopping block. The shallow case against ADIZ community members is part of an ongoing state backlash to the wind of 2017 and a frontal attack on local forms of community power. Back in 2017, which now seems like forever ago, due to this kind of pandemic time dilation, environmental justice movements earned a huge victory against transnational corporations and national mining interests. This wind also emboldened regional counterparts to pursue similar objectives to varying success, but also intensified violence against environmental defenders. We can think of Berta Cáceres and the work that she did in Honduras. It enabled new activist tactics and open movements to focus the struggle on closing mines and remediating the environment. Under the 2017 law, most visible was this legal victory against the Pacific Rim Mining Corporation, now known as Oceana Gold, a corporation that was forced to shut down operations in El Salvador after the passing of the law that prohibits all metallic mining. Pacific Rim Oceana Gold utilized, and this is the egregiousness of corporations, utilized the provisions in the Central American Free Trade Agreement that was passed in 2004 to sue El Salvador for revoking its permit to mine in the Cabañas region where the Santa Marta folks are located. And this is also a place where there's a lot of high-grade gold underground. So as organizers still say today, el oro no se toma, el agua sí. Gold is not drinkable, water is. And this is from a recent memo here, which announces a call to preserve the anti-mining ban right now because of what it would mean if it were to be overturned, it would exacerbate what is already a water stress nation. Today, via the introduction of these new laws that are being passed by the Salvadoran government, this energy and hydrocarbons law, or the general water law that the government passed a couple of years back, the present government is attempting to overturn the mining ban and create new processes for mining capital to return to the country. It is also creating loopholes in the water law to enable it to sell access rights to companies, to developers. As part of the state's financial strategy, the return to mining aligns with the democratic backsliding of a government that just celebrated a year of its state of exception, which actually means the suspension of all constitutional guarantees and citizen freedoms in the country. And under this rubric, the state of exception, is how they were able to so frivolously detain the Santa Marta water defenders. This moment of a politics of exception has created a situation where it can intimidate organizations, arbitrarily detain community leaders, and effectively engage in a kind of political cleansing to rid itself of political opponents, and as well to silence dissent. Environmental and water defenders stand strong and reject the government's legislation and have issued communiques such as this one on screen right now to this effect. And even just this morning, I read of a transnational gathering in northwestern El Salvador in a place called Metapan, where people were protesting the reopening of a nearby mine that would contaminate shared waters. Here's that. Right. And so, you know, what people say and what one of the slogans has has been in this instance in Metapan is that Todamina Contamina, right, every mine contaminates. And so as I tried to argue, I guess, or share in this talk, water is at the basis of all social reproduction of the fragile foundation of community life in Central America, the phenomenon that we see in the media, in the media, right, such as caravan migrations, unaccompanied minors, have underneath it as a kind of motivating force, the society-wide water crisis, as it impacts food insecurity, hunger, precipitates the collapse of small scale and subsistence farming. It is also about the criminalization of alternative forms of water governance and community level rationing, where people are designing democratic systems to satiate themselves in a reality where the state is largely absent. Without water, right, as movements proclaim, there is no possible life. On the one hand, right, we have capitalists and government interests that seek to dispossess people of water resources to sell them off to the highest bidder, while communities resisting these efforts valiantly struggle against these violent dispositions. In Guatemala and Honduras, too, these struggles take on an important racial character, as indigenous and black people comprise a large percentage, right, of land defenders. As one damage assessment report put it in an extensive study of the Canadian silver and gold mining operation next to a Maya-Mam community, quote, chemical pollution not only impacts human health but has deeper impacts on the cultural fabric, end quote. Similar situations are found all across Central America and the stakes of the struggle are shared. There's an obvious pattern here, right, transnational alliances between local and international extractive capital, groups interested in profit over preservation, unashamedly pillaged the delicate biospheres of Central American territories that are still occupied by people, flora, and fauna. Uncaringly, these projects pollute rivers, destroy forests, and expose communities young and old to toxic chemicals in the water supply, right, pushing people into the market to buy water or to risk using contaminated waters. From the Petén, right, the Petén jungle to the Darien, these exposures have led to the spikes in rare forms of cancer, suspicious skin rashes, hair loss and respiratory problems, as well as forced displacement, migration and joblessness. And this image here is from it's an insecurity phase classification report that really shows the intensity of food scarcity that is of course linked to agriculture and to water. So most of Central America, Northern Central America in this case, in this image is basically in crisis, which is what the orange represents. And in fact, it's sliding all the time towards emergency and towards famine. COVID actually brought it into a moment of emergency. So the water struggle in Central America is linked to anti-mining, anti-logging, and anti-damming. And they have become the fundamental site for land defense strategies, for livelihood struggles, such as food sovereignty and agroecology, that also double as climate action. People responding, right, to the fact that no water comes out of the tap. Vulnerable populations, you know, who have been bullied, they've been bullied by development, must today defend their ways of living that have been eroded by the production needs of global commodity chains, by robbery, agriculture and development. Palm oil plantations in Honduras, metal and mineral mining in Panama, but also everywhere, to the water privatization problems outlined here in El Salvador, but that are also in Nicaragua, to the petroleum drilling, right, that is taking place in Coastal Belize, Central America is the site of new extractive frontiers where foreign and local capital take advantage of lax environmental protections, advantageous tax situations, corporate protection vis-a-vis these free trade agreements, like CAFTA, and the systemic overturning, right, of hard-won environmental protections. And yes, there are efforts to establish region-wide protections for environmental defenders who are being murdered at higher and higher rates, as well as attempts to curb the effects of drought of water stress and extractive projects. Supernational policies like the Treaty of Escasu, for example, responds to put hard limits on extractive operations to augment community resilience and to guarantee institutional and financial transparency. The Escasu Agreement, which is based, the name comes from a place in Costa Rica where it was signed and where it was first articulated, addresses ways to seek to clarify violence against environmental activists by fostering a cultural transparency and judicial process through independent verification and mediation to ensure accurate representation of community demands, by informing and enshrining the rights of land defenders to defend water, to defend territory, to defend forest, to defend river, right? Escasu aims to protect the lifeways of the vulnerable, of groups battered by climate variability, of so-called natural disasters and of structural neglect. Immediately, the agreement provides organizations with a useful legal instrument to add to their movement toolkits and to slow the brutality against environmental justice movements. Other important proposals include the staunchly anti-capitalist and movement-driven bottom-up pacto-ecosocial del sur, the eco-social pact from the south that proposes guiding principles and a shared regional agenda for social struggle and a just energy transition that promotes the development of care economies, agroecology, food sovereignty, and Buen Vivir as a politics, right, inspired by the rights of nature and centering their analysis and their view, right, on indigeneity as a guiding principle. Yet as these projects incubate, Central America remains the most dangerous place to be an environmental defender, a place where brave people will continue to heroically struggle for life and for water, since, as we all know deep down, right, only the people will save the people. Thank you. So much to take in after what you said. I want to just ask a really quick clarifying question. Early in the talk, you said 90% of all surface water is contaminated. Where and what exactly is surface water? You know, sorry. Yeah, no, surface water is rivers, lakes, ponds, streams. All of these are contaminated. Everything that's not the ocean and everything that's not the ocean or in underground aquifers that again, you know, deeper and deeper ones are remain uncontaminated. And this is what, you know, folks are fighting over. This is exactly what the struggle is all about. Having access to that or giving that up to corporations who are coming to, you know, make sodas out of it. So this is precisely it. So basically all rivers are polluted. Fish that you get from many of these bodies of water are also contaminated. And yet people still fish, still eat that, still rely on them. And that's what leads to, you know, these health problems and just, you know, developmental issues in children, right? All these kinds of things that come from people being forced and having no other option, right? Then to continue to use these sources of water despite them being extremely, extremely harmful. And another question. I noticed when you shared the poster for the development, you know, that had promised its own private water, I noticed that if they accepted Bitcoin, and, you know, here in San Francisco, we hear about Bitcoin. We've heard about Bitcoin more than once. And thinking about how that makes the financial transparency more difficult or how does that tie into all of that? Yeah. So I think that the Bitcoin question is really, really useful to think about. Not only because it's bringing in a whole set of sort of financial actors from Silicon Valley, right? From these kinds of, you know, radical libertarian capitalists to Central America to park their money and to invest in whatever. So that's happening. But what's really interesting is because the government made it legal tender, which is why they're accepting payments in Bitcoin for real estate, right? There's an incentive for people to come to El Salvador. They actually, I think they get citizenship or residency if they bring at least three Bitcoin, I think, to El Salvador. And so there's an incentive to sort of repatriate your capital to El Salvador and not be taxed on it. So there's all these kind of financial incentives. That's one thing. And the other one is the fact that because El Salvador made into legal tender, it's actually been building out volcanic geothermal plants all over the country in order to mine Bitcoin. So it's mining in both senses, right? Mining metallic stuff, but mining Bitcoin as well, right? Which is energy intensive, requires a ton of water as well for cooling, for cooling computers and things like this, right? So there's a lot of water use in that as well. And it's displacing people very similarly, a lot of farmers are losing territory in order to make room for these kinds of server farms that are going to be mining Bitcoin using geothermal energy. But because the geothermal energy isn't yet fully built out, they're relying on hydroelectric power. They're on the same stuff that fossil fuels, right? All of this stuff because that transition is very, very slow. It's very glacial. But that's how Bitcoin sort of fits into the proposed energy transition that this government is pushing forward that is, again, very anti-people. And it's not really because Salvadorans themselves don't use Bitcoin. They don't care for it. They don't know what it is. There's no real financial literacy around it, right? It seems for an ordinary Salvadoran, it's a scam, right? It's a scam. And so it's precisely these kinds of things, right, that are bound up in the Bitcoin project, but that are also connected to the struggle for land and the struggle for water because they need to make room for these projects, these mega projects, to take place. And that inevitably impacts small farmers and poor people who live in the countryside. So thinking too, you talk about migration, you know, forcing these people who would normally subsistence farm and use the water in their communities to do the farming for themselves and to provide enough food for themselves and their families, they, because of water and security are forced to move into a city and become a sort of migrant workforce. But it seems like these developments then, especially from the Bitcoin side, are encouraging migration in a different direction, in a direction that we haven't really discussed, but maybe from the global north to the global south and that kind of displacement of priorities and the displacement of, again, the indigenous or a woman who is a local person, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I think that that's a fair characterization of what's happening in terms of like, you know, to make room for Bitcoin, like real estate developments, like the one you saw there, and I'm glad that you caught that part in the flyer. It's displacing people who have historically inhabited those lands, right? So these are often fishing communities, right? These are fishermen, these are people who, you know, woodworkers, you know, carpenters, like, ordinary kinds of laborers, right? Small business, you know, the anditas, little local shops, you know, things like that, all these folks are being displaced because their neighborhood has been sold, basically, it's what's happening, right? It's been sold and it's making way for these kinds of, you know, private villas and, you know, Airbnb's basically, right? In Central America for a certain kind of clientele, right? And that clientele or that, let's call it, you know, financial, financially, financial migrant, right? That's coming from the global north is for them to take advantage of, right? It's for them to utilize, it's for them to take, to have fun in, it's for them to be serviced, right? By a cheap labor force that exists, that's still, that survives around it. But in general, those, the majority of people aren't, yeah, they're going into the cities, they're going into, they're going to other countries, as it's kind of like, I called it a kind of floating labor force, right? That end up working in different seasonal industries all across Central America, like, I know people who, you know, they hear news that, you know, Panama's building a new high rise. And so they just get on, you know, tea caboose and they head down to Panama to work for a few months. And then they come back to El Salvador, you know, so these things are happening all the time or, like, you know, there's, there's, there's a need for, let's say, workers to log, you know, in Guatemala, in the forests of Guatemala, which are plentiful, right? And so Salvadorans will go over there, you know, poor Costa Ricans will go over there, poor Honduras will go over there to work, you know, make some money and then go back home. So that's, that's what's happening. And, and, and Bitcoin is feeling some of that, right? The, the different like, you know, development, special development zones in Honduras, for example, that are creating these like, you know, kind of gated resorts on, on the Caribbean coast, also are doing the exact same thing. And this is the same kind of Silicon Valley, you know, Bitcoin capital that's, that's going down there and doing this, right? And so it's, this is precisely what you're seeing, you know, expressed all across Central America in different ways, right, in different ways. But it's the same, it's the same cast of characters, right, that are, that are the ones who are doing this. And they're being enabled, right, by these kinds of flexible, flexible governments that are, that are inviting them to come and do this, because at the end of the day, these governments don't care about their people, right? They don't care. They simply don't care. They, they only care about, you know, making a hospitable investment climate for global North investors. And that's precisely what, you know, Naib Bukele, for example, said, said as, as a, as a, as a presidential candidate when he came, you know, to the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC and told them, I want to make El Salvador great again. I want to make it, you know, a financial and fiscal paradise for, for, for investment to take off. And, and so, and he's delivering on that through Bitcoin, right, which a lot of people I think do not like, but nonetheless, he's delivering on that campaign promise. If I may interject, Zima, I had a couple of questions to Professor Queer. One of the things I noticed that you provide a very detailed historical, social ethnography of what water means to the people who own the lands or who are living off those lands. We call also like you touched upon concepts like indigeneity, right? I'm still trying to understand the differences from our North American scholarship when we often use words like, oh, they are refugees. They are economic migrants. They don't have political threat, no matter what civil war was 40 years ago, and Salvador has recovered. Now these concepts are quite confusing for our audiences. And then on the other hand, we call our own North American brethren who goes, who go to Costa Rica or to Salvador to create the sustainable communities, right? Because then we make a big documentaries, Zac Efron goes and he says, oh, I'm showing Costa Rican communes where the expats and uses the word expat. And these categories for me are very amorphous and they're very difficult to understand. Could you please a little bit expound or explain to our audiences how these categories have come into being in the light of privatization of water? Because water is a natural monopoly of any nation state. It belongs to people, right? And the Colombian state appropriates it and uses it and privatizes it. So there's a water mafia, right? Of a sort. I'm using this word very carefully. Could you tell us its effect on, no, because we are in a very sensitive atmosphere and we have to respect everybody and I don't want to be disrespectful to anybody in our audiences, right? Given the sensitivities. Somehow we find it very easy to judge others. But when we participate in the process, we don't like to judge ourselves. How can you then create this cohesive narrative where El Salvadorian people have land to their rights, to their water supplies, and renewable water I'm talking about, right? So surface water. Could you please tell a little bit about what you think about it, how people should understand all these complicated processes? Zima, sorry, it's a very academic question. That's a lot. That's a lot of questions in there. You know, I'll begin with the rights to water by Salvadorians. I think what we see in the country and we see it all across Latin America, but Central America specifically, which is like a really heightened conflict zone around water, is that people, there's usury rights. So people have used water in such a way historically, ancestrally, since their arrival to these places, that that becomes the basis for an articulating of a politics of ownership, right? That these belong to the community. That's one way that that's taught. And that's understood and that mobilizes people through that belief system, basically, of usury, that in fact, because they're the ones who use it, they maintain it, they care for it, their identities are linked intimately to it, that they are the rightful caretakers of the water, of the river. They're the river people. They're the lake people. This is how indigeneity and indigenous identities become so central to the struggle over water. Folks mobilize their identities, but their identities are linked to territorial forms. That's maybe a particular kind of tree, maybe a particular kind of forest, right? These kinds of variabilities of topography and of nature are so central to who people are, right? And so that becomes a galvanizing force when that's under attack. It's as if the integrity of the community is under attack, right? And so this is what mobilizes folks to act and to participate in and these dynamics of land defense, right? At risk, at great personal risk, you know, putting their lives on the line. So that's what happens. And in El Salvador specifically, like these community water systems that I talked about, these juntas de agua, right? These water committees, water boards, they're actually physical things. So it's like, it's pipes, right? It's faucets. It's like actual infrastructure that was bought and paid for and built with the hands of community members, right? They're actually the ones doing all of this. And so because it's this autonomous thing that they, you know, all pitched in to construct and to help each other, right? This is also another kind of ownership, right? They literally built the infrastructure and for the state who now wants to sell off the rights to come in and say, hey, that's illegal and now belongs to us, right? Is an absurd claim. And so that's, so it's the actual, like, physical environment that has been transformed to help communities secure their water. And it's that part too that also motivates people to say, hey, this is ours. We made it from scratch. You have no right to it, you know? We are, we have been the most peripheral people to, you know, the national water system. And now that we built these things and, you know, we're doing, we're doing okay, you want to come in over here and appropriate it. And so this is, this creates the conflict, right? But otherwise, if this wasn't the case, you know, entities like Anda or the Salvadoran government would not be interested in servicing those communities. You know, they're okay with not, you know, building infrastructure in that direction. And so that's, that's, that's part of it. The other questions that you asked about sort of the categories of migrants, right? The economic refugee, right? The, you know, the assaili, right? All these different, different categories, I think need to be, we need to, we need to be more critical of those categories and really understand, understand more of the motivating and driving factors that make them, you know, that make them legible in a certain moment in American society. So for example, like, because of the Salvadoran Civil War, the refugee, right, becomes a master category to understand Salvadorans and to understand Guatemalans, to understand Nicaraguans, right? All under this kind of idea that, you know, they're experiencing hardship due to war, right? And it's, and it's, I mean, and it stayed that way for the last 30 or so years. And so we often, because of that master category, it has become very difficult for people to argue, right? That, you know, that the war is over, then now the war actually exists in different kinds of ways, you know, it exists in insecurity with gangs and it exists in, you know, hostilities from being a sexual minority or racial minority, you know, it exists in all these different kinds of ways. Yet the concept of refugee is not elastic enough to allow for that, right? And so people don't, aren't able to sort of compute, right? And make sense of, wait, what are these other problems that folks have? And are they actually, are they, they're just economic refugees though, you know? And so, and so then the economic refugee and the refugee category in general becomes this like, almost tautological, where, like, when you say it, and it kind of proves itself, you know, without actually taking into consideration that conditions in Central America have shifted completely, there are new social problems that have emerged, right? And they're not necessarily always linked to wartime. They're linked to contemporary forms of governance and development, right? That don't look like war, right? One might say it's climate war, you know, might look at it that way, but it's not necessarily the same driving factors that are pushing people out. So that's why for me, like this thinking about climate as a climate refugee or a climate assayee, right, is a more, it's more factual and more accurate, right, rather than the economic refugee or the war refugee, right? It's much more accurate because you're actually getting to the heart of like, what's making Central America inhospitable in the 21st century, right? Not in the 1980s, right? And so it's much more useful to think about the category of climate and of course, link to water and link to land, right? And how that's the prime mover, right? That's the prime mover of people, you know, experiencing all other kinds of insecurity, right? And like I tried to say with the example of women specifically, right, how domestic environments, how domesticity itself is impacted by the lack of water, right? They experience more domestic violence, right? More abuse, more sexual assault, right? All these kinds of things come from water and from the lack of food, right? Because it creates a hostile environment. And it's precisely that, that's that missing link, right? That's the missing link. We're not looking at these things as kind of in a chain of causation, right? We're looking at them in a nice, we're looking at them in a nice... Too much self reflection, right? If we go to just water, that's too difficult for, for instance, Californians to say, are we going to be the next Central America? Are we going to have to migrate from California, this place that we think is so unique? And it is and so different and better. Maybe it is, but then any other place to somewhere that doesn't want us, because it's flooded because of drought, because of perpetual drought. Could I be that? No, that's too painful to think about, but let's not think about it as a climate war. And then anything that's a different degree, a slightly from domestic violence from being a sexual minority, that requires too much introspection of what we aren't being open to in our own lives here in the US and here in the lives of people who are writing these larger narratives, right? Which still the US is still involved on many levels, on financial levels, on government, editorial levels, right? Yeah, exactly. The slide with USAID was kind of tongue-in-cheek in that sense that the United States is a key part of the problem in brokering these kinds of free trade agreements with developing nations and causing all this environmental harm of which it'll take generations to recover. And yet they're also part of the solutions. And that's absurd, that's a kind of paradox there that we need to think about more critically. I'm here, I'm also reminded of the great Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear, late Victorian Holocaust, where he tells us that it's historical inequalities, it's colonialism, it's capitalism, and it's imperialism. And here the United States special relationship to Central America, as America's backyard, has impacted like every aspect of these societies, yet we choose, right? This is a political choice that we make in the US, we choose to ignore that and we choose to then think that no, it's actually their bad habits or their intrinsically unable to govern or their bad people or bad hombres, right? What Trump said, right? They're intrinsically this, yet we forget that a lot of the causal things were set into motion by the United States across decades of meddling in the region. Yeah, I mean, what was the CIA school in the 50s? The School of the Americas. The backyard or the playground of this imperialism, right? And this violent militaristic imperialism. So, yeah, it is still a war. It's a climate war and that's too terrifying to verbalize, I think, right? Yeah, and the climate, I mean, the climate war is, I mean, like I said it as like it's a war between the hydrated and the dehydrated, you know, it's a war between the thirsty and the quenched. This is how, that's a class difference, right? Inequality is so central to who gets their needs met, you know, who gets their needs met and whose resources are for whom, like that's what that's what's happening, you know, that and these and this kind of like policy architecture and frameworks that the US has brokered, right? And here I'm going back to the Central American Free Trade Agreement has basically established this inequality as a matter of geopolitical relationships, you know, with these countries that they are tributary nations, right? They give tribute to the US, right? And they should be grateful to do so, you know, and that's so that's and that's that's what we're we're seeing, you know, all across the board. And what has led to a lot of the the destruction of the carrying capacity, right? The carrying capacity of these environments that have been, you know, deforested beyond, you know, like I think El Salvador is like the second most deforested country in the Americas, probably after Haiti, I think, you know, that has led to this, you know, the surface water contaminated that has led to, you know, you know, just the lack of resources for people to make a life there, to simply make a life there, right? Which then drives these kinds of dynamics of migration to the to then, you know, which then creates this kind of view that, you know, these folks are economic refugees or economic migrants. But in fact, it's all these other, you know, details, right, in the societies in those countries, right, that are linked to water and to land that are creating such pressures on people, right? They're pushing them out. But all those that all that all that those that chain reaction is sort of, you know, said it has been sent into motion for such a long time, and nobody's willing to like, really take responsibility for it, right? And so then this is the kind of passing the buck thing where like, what's not my problem, you know, we got to get the corporations to clean up and the corporations are like, well, it's not my problem is the governments that need to do it. And then, you know, and it's just kind of, and this is how we get into a situation where, you know, the rivers are simply like, again, unrecoverable in many instances, right, where these projects like the Rio Lempa project, for example, is a kind of like a utopic project. It's really not going to fully recover, you know, the majesty and the life giving capacity of that river, right, which is one of the most important rivers in all Central America, right? I had a quick question, Professor. Your last image, right, we were just talking about the categories and how they get created artificially to satisfy certain needs, right, of the audiences. One of the things I noticed on that picture is that March, March or June 7, 2002, I saw church representatives in there, walking in there. And I know that we work, all of us work in a secular environment, but we do understand that a certain part of the clergy has played an important role in Salvador's national narrative. Could you please talk a bit about how some clergy are so active, right, activists, they participate because the man, and I'm not trying to say this is a religious theme here. What I'm trying to say is that social consciousness is there and social justice is there. How do they then integrate with the civic structures, and how do they bring forth the water agenda? I'm not using that word very correctly, but how to protect the water sources. That's a great question. The fact that you see friars in the marches or you see priests in the marches is actually part of the long tradition in El Salvador specifically around Catholic social doctrine and the moment of liberation theology and the figure of Monsignor Romero, Oscar Romero, all these radical tradition and commitment to the well-being of poor people, which is the majority of El Salvador and the majority of Central America. And looking out for them, that this is precisely that impulse that hit for some time was discredited in Catholicism as being too radical. We don't touch that. But in El Salvador, it's actually incubated and it's actually been become part of a certain sense of identity, a national identity among a lot of different sectors of the society. And so that's how sort of Catholic values, but this specific kind of socially committed Catholic value is adopted by a lot of people. And it becomes part of a spiritual relationship too within the Salvadoran Church, which I think is much different than other kinds of churches in the region like the evangelical churches, which have a kind of different relationship to this. But Catholics have, because of the tradition established through the 1970s and 1980s and the figure of Romero as a kind of martyred archbishop, right, now saint, that this tradition is alive and well in El Salvador and has folded into other social struggles, struggles around the climate and the environment being one, which you have now echoed by Pope Francis with that encyclical that he dropped two, three years ago, where he actually makes an argument for the planet and for Catholic commitment to the well-being of Mother Earth. Right. So there's also that part as well. But, you know, oftentimes what's very interesting with the church in El Salvador is that they end up, you know, sort of reflecting and following along accompanying is the correct word. Accompanying, and this is Monsignor Romero's word, accompanying the needs of the Salvadoran people. Right. And so that's precisely the ethic of relation between the church and the congregation, you know. And so it's precisely there where if the congregation is interested in protecting the river, then by, you know, by commitment, you know, to the people, the church will follow. Right. And so this is why you have, you know, such a multi-sectoral, you know, caminata ecologica, this kind of ecological march. And you have religious figures out on the streets, alongside, you know, trade unionists, alongside queer folks, alongside black and indigenous people, really coming together for this shared issue. Right. To really push forward this shared issue, which includes, like you said, right, the water agenda. Right. So thank you. I'm not trying to run away from this conversation. It simply just that I'm overseas and my internet is getting crazy in the hotel where I am. So if I get cut off, I apologize to all of the audiences. But I think I should hand over the baton to Zima, simply because maybe the audiences have some questions and we should invite everybody. Right. But Zima is all yours. Okay. And if I get dropped off, please forgive me. And this conversation will continue in September. Again, I guarantee you, you know, with Professor Anu. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions from the audience? Anisa, I don't know if anybody dropped any questions to you in the chat. But we do have a few more minutes. I know we've covered a lot of things. But if anybody has a question for what, hey, or or something they wanted to comment or add, you could put the question in the chat or you could raise your hand, I believe, Anisa. Yes, you can do all of those. I'm also monitoring YouTube. Happy to take back any questions there. And I'll just say thank you. I know a lot of thank yous for really making this such a well-rounded conversation and bringing in all those pieces as you hear. I got a little worked up there when you were speaking. Yeah, just thank you for bringing in like things like domestic violence. I mean, you know, these aren't the things that people connect with water, the water shortages and water wars. So I appreciate that. And yes, any questions, put them in the chat now or happy to take you taken from YouTube. I think that's the 13 seconds. I will say I noticed we had a participant. I don't know if you saw what he was sending some clapping emojis along the way. So yeah, I really want I want I want to know what what section that was. I wish I could remember. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think that like the the objective of narrating the water issue this way was really to give you the kind of the greatest the greatest hits really of how, you know, we get to a crisis moment in the president where where people really like our aren't an at an exhaustion point, right? They're really at an exhaustion point and how, like, you know, governments and transnational corporations are not helping in this regard, despite all these kinds of greenwashing, right, that they do about, you know, social investment and community development, right, and using this kind of lingo of of of being for community well-being, but like then doing the actual activity of of extracting of polluting of not cleaning, right, all these other things of theft, right, and also being being, you know, the entities that will intimidate environmental defenders, right, that will make inhospitable and hostile climates for people to live, right, and then, you know, walk just walk away with profits and that's that's the that's really what's at stake here and I think that's what the what the social movements are are pointing us towards, right, they're they're really forcing us to have this uncomfortable conversation basically, right, of how like, you know, the well-being of others is subsidized by, you know, the the decrepit realities that they have to endure and so it's and I think that is that inequality is so clear with Central America and the United States historically, right, and and it's a and it's a relationship that is not is not changing, right, despite all these conversations is not changing and and and then, you know, Central American people then get blamed or get, you know, criminalized, get stereotyped, right, get, you know, as as these kind of like, you know, single issue migrants, right, economic migrants, when in fact it's never single issue, it's it's all these it's all it's like it's a it's a network of things that that are affecting the individual to take this really difficult decision to leave their country, right, to leave home, to leave family, to leave to leave what they know, right, to come and endure, you know, embarrassment, humiliation, shame, right, struggle, hardship in in places like the US and that there's a there's a real disconnect there because we don't we don't we don't think about that we don't think about you know what are the what are the the the sources of this what are how is the how are how are like corporations from Canada Canada is huge right in this too like these are Canadian corporations that are being pushed out you know Canada has this kind of you know sort of fictional identity that they're the good guys in relationship to the US and that's not true like if we actually look at what folks are are telling us and what we see in these in these events right that no you know Canada doesn't it doesn't have clean hands either like it's it's these is these is these issues that I think the the question of water you know enables us to see and really like with the you know and this is the metaphor of the clarity of water but like it really is a kind of clarifying substance you know that allows us to see how all these social problems are interlinked to one another and they are you know kind of compounding with other things and are causing different kinds of crises for different kinds of people that sometimes get expressed as migration get expressed as you know gendered violence right they get to get expressed as racism they get expressed as poverty right they get expressed in all these kinds of ways but but this this this resource war is at the heart of it it's just one and and then we can cause um went to ask if you can speak to how water issue comes up in discussions around tourism or how tourism has impacted the issue where recently I've noticed that tourism and and it is promoted we often see tourist attractions that promote spots like places with banking water this also has to do with inequality cluster prince etc I just want to hear your thoughts on this yeah yeah that's a great question jocelyn um I think that like the way and I showed it in the in that ad right that like it's that it's that it's that um sort of illusion of of plentiful water right that that is actually being sold unconsciously by some of these ads it's happening in the gated community phenomena it's happening in all the resort making that's happening on on the in the be on the be in the you know the beach zones um in el Salvador right that is again is pushing out these fishing communities that I mentioned but but it's precisely that kind of allure the allure of like plentiful access to water that is the selling point of these um of these gated projects these gated community projects and on the same side right the the resorts like they also they also they also work on this right they also they work they operate on this kind of level they do they do kind of accent the fact that it's a it's a space of of plenitude and you'll you won't be missing anything so stay in this resort and you'll never have to go outside and you'll never have to see poverty you'll never you can go straight from the airport to the resort and you'll never have to see you know uh uh a person on the street trying trying to sell you flowers you'll never have to see that right um uh and so like it's it's that kind of like kind of walled garden fiction that that a lot of the resorts are selling but what's underneath all of that is this development project and the development project is pushing out all those historical coastal communities right um out out from that from those from that zone and so from you know the state of exception that I mentioned which is kind of political moment that interminable endless political moment that we're living a lot of the folks that were picked up were not gang members as the government you know uh propagandizes but it would actually a lot of rural campesino people from these coastal zones because they need them gone to make these developments continue and so like the resorts are themselves predicated on the forced removal of those communities one way or the other and so that's how you know um uh the criminalization aspect comes into play um and and taps into you know those pre-existing you know wells and aquifers and sources of water um in order to satiate the these resorts that are that like go through water you know I don't know the numbers on it but they they're wasteful right they're not they're not these uh eco-friendly you know whatever resorts no they're you know hilton resorts they're the intercontinental the decamera and they're all these like big you know chains that that that just want a piece of that pie you know um and yeah go ahead sorry it's like a new kind of disappearing then with these campesinos right I mean if they're literally washing away or pulling away this this population to make room or something that's going to be so wasteful it's a new kind of disappearing yeah those like the like those livelihoods are disappearing so like being a fisherman right and being self-sufficient as a fisherman is a dying industry is a dying profession is a dying vocation right um that those folks will likely become uh you know surf guides for the resort you know they'll likely become the pool boy for the resort you know like these kinds of things that those are the kinds of labor transitions that are also happening because these these these forms of living are no longer possible right um in the in the present reality and so you know folks still need to make a living and so they need to adapt but that adapt is a forced adaptation that is propelled by these development projects right um that is you know at the same is displacing them but then offering them a job and so you know um it's it's it's a it's between a rock and a hard place kind of thing thank you so much Jorge I think we have to wrap it up um Anisa has some announcements I think wow this was so great I'm so happy that I was your tech host and just amazing conversation and I can't wait to share this with the people in my book club tonight that are reading dry which is about two weeks of no water in LA and um just share it again widely with our youtube viewers and you can watch this again friends and I'm putting the links in the chat box right now um and we'll do a little editing on it and it'll be ready to roll tomorrow and we'll share it with everyone Jorge and Shima thank you so much for being part of our climate action month that we are going to continue with all year around and we hope to have you back soon friends thank you too thank you thank you bye everyone take care