The Salvadoran construction firm Fénix Investments and Real Estate has secured the retrial of a sick and unemployed 64-year-old campesino prosecuted by the Attorney General’s Office as the company develops Eco-Terra Hacienda, a million-dollar housing project in Hacienda La Labor, in Ahuachapán, after facing protests for three years from the residents of several communities for illegally drilling wells.
Adonaldo Antonio Artero, a day laborer who has worked at the estate all his life, will newly stand trial for allegedly violently occupying the property where Fénix was drilling wells to supply the 1,789 houses of the Eco-Terra project, even though it did not have the environmental permits to do so. On Apr. 24, 2024, the Third Chamber of the Western Section annulled a judgment in which the campesino —agricultural worker— was absolved for lack of evidence. The appeals court ordered that he be tried anew.
On the other hand, the Third Chamber upheld the acquittal of the six other residents who were tried on Oct. 3, 2023, for the crime of violent occupation of communal, living, or working spaces. Of their group, only Adonaldo will continue to confront Fénix in court.
Fénix started operating in March 2014. The company was founded by Rodolfo Joaquín Recinos de León, a lawyer who has worked for the Salazar Romero construction company, and Víctor Manuel Molina Chamagua, a motorist from Ahuachapán. Fénix started with two thousand dollars in capital, but it has continued to grow year after year, according to the balance sheets submitted to the Commercial Registry. By 2022, the company reported assets of $86.6 million, and the following year that figure increased to $143.4 million.
Fénix owns several properties in Comecayo and La Empalizada, in Santa Ana; Los Amates, in San Sebastián Salitrillo; in Chipilapa (the Eco-Terra Hacienda project); and in downtown Ahuachapán. Another of their projects is Acropolis, a middle-class residential development in Sonsonate, with which they destroyed the archaeological site Tacuscalco. The Ministry of Culture imposed a fine of $300,000 citing irreparable damage.
This company that reports millions of dollars on its balance sheets and that paid a fine of thousands of dollars for violating the Special Law for the Protection of Cultural Heritage is the adversary of a campesino named Adonaldo, a small black-haired man whose skin is weather-beaten by the sun and who earned between five and six dollars a day when he was working at the hacienda. Three years ago, the Attorney General's Office ordered his arrest, but he was granted conditional release. Since the case against him began, Adonaldo has stopped working in the fields; he says that he is physically ill with worry and he forgets everything now, but he has not been able to see a doctor because he has no money. “Financially, I can’t make ends meet. Remember that I don't fend for myself; I don't earn a salary. I live humbly,” he says.
The residents’ protests against Fénix began on Mar. 8, 2021. Hundreds of people blocked a street and managed to stop construction for a few days, but the Attorney General’s Office intervened with a series of arrests that disrupted the community organization. That cleared the way for Fénix to continue its construction without any resistance. Three years after the clash between the residents and the company, there are a hundred houses that are already for sale on the plain where sugar cane, corn, and sorghum used to be grown. The landscape has changed from green to cement gray.
The communities organized because Fénix did not have environmental permits to drill wells, and they feared that it would affect the only spring that supplies them with water. Despite filing complaints with the Ministry of the Environment, the Attorney General’s Office, and an environmental court, the seven residents were the ones who ended up imprisoned. The Attorney General's Office resolved the case in a record 20 days, and the company continued building.
On the side of the main road leading to Ahuachapán, the façade of the Eco-Terra Hacienda project is finished. On one side, there is a row of shops with fast food franchises and a pharmacy. On the other side of the road, Fénix continues to build more houses, without anyone questioning the project because displeased community leaders are afraid of being arrested under the exception regime. Adonaldo says that the company has already achieved its goal, which is why he does not understand why the Salvadoran Attorney General’s Office insists on prosecuting him.
“Why are they doing it? And haven't they already won everything?” he asks. “They themselves say it: they have already won everything, they have already been served, and [now they’re] having a person [prosecuted] who does not even have enough money to eat. What is their problem with poor people?”
A Neighbor, Enemy, Witness
On Mar. 8, 2021, fifty residents from the communities of La Bomba, Pega Pega, El Llano de Doña María, the canton of Río Frío, and the main house of La Labor Hacienda gathered on a dirt road next to the Fénix property to demand that employees turn off the pumps that had begun to extract water. “Turn those bolados [things] off!” they shouted, as seen in videos they posted on social media.
The residents decried that drilling wells would affect the only spring that supplies water to their communities. They also complained that the company did not have a permit from the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) to do the work. Campesinos and workers closed the dirt road as a measure of protest and managed to stop the work for a few days.
The residents' confrontation with the construction company was the visible tip of the conflict. But another element made the problem more complex: a divided community. Some residents supported the real estate project because the company had given them formal employment, which is difficult to find in this impoverished rural area. Thus, the struggle against the company was also a fight between neighbors who were for or against Fénix. That is how Geovanni Antonio Pineda Cabezas, a resident of La Labor Hacienda and a security guard for the construction company, became one of the witnesses of the alleged violent invasion. It was neighbor against neighbor. Pineda Cabezas testified in the Attorney General’s Office against his lifelong acquaintances.
“When we arrived at the place, about 30 or 40 meters away, a group of people in the place were preventing entry; Mr. Adonay Artero was there” (sic), he told prosecutors. The 50-year-old witness, who has lived in La Labor all his life, did not say Adonaldo Artero’s correct name, though they live in the same sector of the community, separated only by a couple of houses. That proximity, Artero says, has left him unemployed since the case against him began three years ago. He is afraid to go out on the street with his work tool because his neighbor could baselessly denounce him again.
“Now I can't go around looking for a way to earn a peso, I can't carry a machete to go dispose of a stick. And that is my job: to cultivate the milpa [crops], to prune trees,” says Artero. “Today I can't carry my corvo [machete]. Why? Because he [Pineda Cabezas] comes and goes. He lives over there, and I come from up there. One is already subdued [because of the trial].”
Although Pineda Cabezas claims that he was the victim of violent protests, the videos that residents uploaded to social media only show dozens of people carrying banners with messages like the following: “Who authorized you to leave more than 22,000 people without water? Water is a right, not a commodity.” The videos also record people shouting things like “get out,” but no violent action. Artero points out the lack of evidence in a trial that he considers unjust: “Those things [cell phones] are very nice because they are recording everything; if that [the accusations of violence] had been the case, Don Geovanni would have taken pictures, but he has nothing. God knows it's not like that.”
On the night of Nov. 25, 2021, the police carried out an operation to capture those they considered to be the instigators of the protests against Fénix. The officers went to the wrong house and, for that reason, Artero was not captured. He stood trial on probation and kept the machete as a precautionary measure; for the last year, he has thrown himself into caring for his grandchildren because one of his sons, who worked as a prison custodian, died in a traffic accident. When we spoke at noon on June 25, 2024, Artero was with his grandchildren and had improvised a little house for them on a dirt slope with black plastic, supported by pieces of wood and bamboo. The children ran happily around the imaginary house.
“Here, the girl [his deceased son’s widow] gives me my tortillas,” he told me. “In my house, I just lock the door and come to see the children. That's my job now, to give them a hand. What the child can’t do, I do for him; he asks me for a toy, and I make it for him. Look, there it is, ha, ha, ha,” he says, pointing at some black plastic on the floor.
The Attorney General’s Office says that Artero and other residents “shouted slogans as a mechanism of intimidation” against the Fénix construction company. They claim that it was in that context that Pineda Cabezas was hit in the ankle with a rock, although they do not name anyone responsible for that alleged injury. Artero believes that the events are being exaggerated to benefit the company.
“I believe they are things of no importance, but he [Pineda Cabezas] gave it importance through the company. God knows it did not happen that way. What he wants is to make himself bigger, to make the problem bigger and to get involved with the company, just as you hear it, before God. What he says is a pretense, and, if I had a photo in my hand, how nice it would be. I would repay him, but God knows I wouldn’t. One is already subdued [because of the trial].”
El Faro has attempted to contact Pineda Cabezas since January 2022, when the first report on the water dispute was published, but he could not be located. Since that time, interviews have also been requested with Fénix Real Estate to grant them their right to reply, but they have not responded to the requests. On July 10, 2024, the newspaper sent an email to the company employee who receives the notifications from the Registry of Commerce, but so far they have not responded.
The following day, on July 11, 2024, El Faro called the company's offices. The person who answered the call said that the person in charge of responding to requests from the press was not there at the time but promised the following: “I will pass on the information when they return and let you know if they can be reached.” As of press time, there was no response to the request.
The Reversal
On Mar. 10, 2023, Ahuachapán Sentencing Court Judge Claudia Pérez de Méndez found no evidence against the seven La Labor residents accused of violently invading the Fénix construction company’s property. “It was not possible to identify the accused, and it is impossible to see where the accusations against the accused are coming from. In the witness statements, no direct accusations have been made as to the defendants’ conduct. They only mention names and not even full names.”
The judge acquitted seven defendants: Jorge Alberto Zúniga Artero, José David Miro Escalante, Rosa Miriam Cinco, Erika Rosmery Solórzano de Guerra, Kevin Josué Méndez Girón, Mario Antonio Cinco and Adonaldo Antonio Artero.
Prosecutor Carlos Iván Carballo Ramos appealed that decision on the grounds of “non-observance of the rules of sound criticism.” The prosecutor complained of an erroneous evaluation of the testimonies and of the allegedly violent context of the protests. The case reached two magistrates who decided the appeal on Apr. 24, 2024. The Court upheld the acquittal of six residents, but it annulled the exoneration of Artero, finding that the court had not taken into account that a witness had recognized him in a photo lineup.
“Defendant Adonaldo was singled out and identified by witness Pineda Cabezas and by judicial photographic recognition. To say that he was acquitted because no witness pointed him out, or that there was no lineup recognition, was not grounds for reaching such a judgment… We must declare the public hearing [trial] null in the case under examination,” the Court ruled.
The Attorney General’s Office is not satisfied with only prosecuting Artero again. On May 28, 2024, the prosecutors filed a cassation appeal with the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ), requesting that the verdict in favor of the other six defendants also be reverted.
“And don't be surprised if this Court sends them back to trial,” says Ricardo Martínez, one of the lawyers defending the La Labor residents. “I’m sure there are economic interests involved. They [Fénix] told the people that if they did not stop their protests, they were going to talk to the government. I have no doubt that they could do that. Have you ever seen them investigate a case and order arrest warrants in 20 days? I have filed complaints for falsehoods, with expert evidence, and they have been waiting for over a year and a half in the Attorney General’s Office. The way things are now, a case cannot be resolved in 20 days without the support of the government and the Attorney General,” the lawyer insists.
Artero believes that the trial against the residents is not only about water exploitation but also land tenure. “In Salitre, as members, they left us a piece of inheritance, but ISTA [the Salvadoran Institute of Agrarian Transformation] has not had the chance to go and register it. That is in a separate part of Salazar Romero, they are divided lands and therein lies the problem. Did you know that they are humiliating us? The government can tell the Chamber, and it could free us, but maybe there is something going on between the government and Salazar Romero. We are humiliated as citizens, as campesinos. I, a humble person, am talking about this, and that is already difficult for me.”
Attorney Martínez also believes that real estate interests and control over the residents are behind this long legal process. “The main financial interest is that they [Fénix] have more land in this area and want to continue developing, and do not want the people to raise a stink. It is a way of telling them that if they continue [with the protests], we have the power to put them in jail.”
The end of the dispute between the residents and the construction company seems a long way off. Artero says he holds out hope that the company will get tired and drop the charges. But on May 28, 2024, Fénix confirmed through the Attorney General’s Office that it wants to extend the case to its logical conclusion: the cassation appeal before the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ). Even so, Artero vindicates his protest activities: “I was fighting for the land; since the land belongs to God. It is not for the rich, it is for the campesino. I understand that, and it has hurt them.”
*Translated by Jessica L. Kirstein
