Duke University Award Ceremony for: The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed by Robin Broad, professor, American University, and John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies.

Moderated by: Professor Robin Kirk, Duke University.

Duke University has awarded Broad and Cavanagh the 2021 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. The selection is made by a committee of the Duke University Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Human Rights Archive at Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscripts Library.

Broad and Cavanagh will accept the award and talk about their book and the lessons of the 14-year struggle of people in El Salvador that culminated in El Salvador becoming the first country in the world to ban mining to save their rivers. As the authors note, while this story is about El Salvador, as importantly, it is “also about how global corporations—be they Big Gold or Big Pharma or Big Tobacco or Big Oil or Big Banks–move into poorer communities in countries all over the world.”

The Water Defenders was also listed as a Best Book of 2021 by Foreign Affairs magazine and by the Progressive Magazine. A Philippine edition has been released by Ateneo de Manila University Press, and a Spanish-language edition is forthcoming (Grano de Sal in Mexico City) as is the paperback edition (Beacon/Penguin Random House).

RSVP and register for this virtual event.