"Environmentalists acquitted after contentious murder trial in El Salvador", 19 October 2024

...Six former guerrillas, whose trial for a civil war-era murder was criticised by fellow environmentalists as politicised, have been acquitted by a court in El Salvador.

Prosecutors had sought up to 36 years in prison for the former rebels of the hard-left Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.

But the judges acquitted them “due to the statute of limitations” and ordered their immediate release, the defence lawyer Carolina Herrador said after the hearing in the city of Sensuntepeque. The court upheld arrest warrants for two other fugitive suspects, Herrador said.

Prosecutors accused the eight former guerrillas, who were arrested in January 2023, of killing a woman in 1989 because they suspected she was an army informant. Five of them had also been part of an environmental campaign for a ban on metal mining that was introduced in 2017, which activists fear the president, Nayib Bukele, wants to reverse...

The United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders and other experts expressed concern in a letter to Bukele’s government after the 2023 arrests that the case was an attempt to intimidate environmentalists...

The case was motivated by “powerful political and economic interests” targeting opponents of mining, David Morales, of the nongovernmental organisation Cristosal, said...