On 26th December, Dora Alicia Recinos Sorto became the third victim of a wave of violence against environmental campaigners in the Cabañas Region of El Salvador, where community members are protesting against the re-opening of a Gold Mine by Canadian Company Pacific Rim.
Dora Alicia was a member of the Cabañas Environmental Committee, and had been active in opposing the mine. She was eight months pregnant when she was shot dead, and her two year old son was also wounded in the attack.
Her murder comes six days after the fatal shooting of Ramiro Rivera Gomez, Vice President of the Cabañas Environmental Committee, who had survived being shot eight times in August this year. A passenger in his car was also killed in the attack, and a teenage girl wounded. In June, another environmental campaigner, Gustavo Marcelo Rivera Moreno, had been tortured and killed. Many other members of the community have received death threats, including youth workers and journalists for the local community radio station Radio Victoria, and the local priest Father Luis Quintanilla narrowly escaped an attempted kidnapping. Despite the clear indications that these murders and threats have been politically motivated, and organised, the local prosecutor has refused to investigate adequately, putting the initial attacks down to 'common delinquency'.