Latin America and the Caribbean

The Popular Liberation Forces (PLF) uses a machine gun to attack the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. This attack was stated by PLF to be part of their war against U.S. imperialism. Demands included the reduction in the cost of water, as well the cost of housing, fertilizer, rents, agricultural land, and electric power, as well as for the release of a number of prisoners assumed to be held for political reasons.

A hydroelectric dam project proposed for the Dulcepamba River in Ecuador is the target of local community opposition and protests are staged to block the project. Clashes between the local communities, hired security guards, and state police leave several protestors injured. The communities also receive violent threats from police. Two community members are arrested. In 2015 the construction of the hydroelectric dam begins, flooding properties and destroying farmland.

Samir Flores Soberanes, an indigenous environmental activist from Mexico, is killed in his home for his opposition to the Proyecto Integral Morelos, a thermoelectric plant and pipeline that threatened local water and land resources. The Moreles state prosecutor claims that the murder has nothing to do with the thermoelectric plant project. The People’s Front in Defence of the Land and Water for the states of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala (FPDTA) state that the only enemies that Soberanes had were those…

Over 100 villagers and farmers from the local community near Lake Paron in Peru use force to remove employees and take over the outlet controls of the lake after the lake had been drained by nearly 50% by the operator of the controls, a subsidiary of Duke Energy International, for hydropower operations.

Four months after internationally known Honduran environmental activist Berta Caceres is murdered, a second woman and environmental activist from the same organization is also murdered in Honduras. The second murdered woman, Lesbia Janeth, was working to stop the construction of a dam in La Paz, Honduras.