Salvadorean organization CESTA-Friends of the Earth El Salvador organized a national meeting of Communities Affected by Climate Change and Megaprojects on September 23 and 24 under the slogan “Stronger organization leads to stronger solidarity”.

The event gathered nearly 70 leaders from different affected communities from Ahuachapan department in the west to Usulutan in the east of El Salvador.

“All the participants of the event have been suffering the effects of climate change”, they say in a document issued after the meeting.

Jose Acosta, member of CESTA-Friends of the Earth El Salvador, said that the capitalist system and its neoliberal model are leading to “collective suicide” and in order to avoid this catastrophe “we urgently need to take a different path, the path of solidarity, of organized struggle”.

Acosta says that the governments’ positions in the climate negotiations are more and more distant from the demands of the communities, so we no longer trust these spaces.

He mentioned the next Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change (COP 17) to be held in Durban and said that nothing has come out of this conference yet.

“It is the wrong way to go”. He also said that the meeting organized by CESTA led to the appointment of a commission led by the community leaders.

“It is important to have some kind of international projection and to have closer ties with other groups of the region, also in South America, Africa and Asia the communities affected by climate change are mobilizing. They have the same problems we have here. We aim to create a global movement”, said Acosta.