The Water Defenders
The Lempa River reservoir in El Salvador In late June 2009, the two of us received deeply disturbing news: Marcelo Rivera had been disappeared. We had never met Marcelo, but we had been looking forward to doing so. He and four other “water defenders,” as they would become known to many, were scheduled to travel to our city, Washington, DC, to receive a human rights award.
At that point, we had never been to Marcelo’s home country, much less to his hometown or the old house he was renovating. Nor did we have any plans of going there. To be honest, we did not know the difference between a tortilla and a pupusa.
For nearly two weeks, Marcelo Rivera’s family could not find him. Then, on June 29, they received the phone call they had been dreading. The anonymous caller was brief. There was a body in an old, abandoned well just west of the Rivera hometown of San Isidro, Cabañas. The well was near the spot where Marcelo had last been seen some twelve days earlier, getting off the bus at a turnoff to the capital city.
During those twelve days, Marcelo’s family and friends had been at wit’s end, searching frantically, desperately, for him. They had spread news of his disappearance in all the barrios of
