El Salvador president proposes ending country's metals mining ban

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — El Salvador President Nayib Bukele proclaimed himself in favor of mining gold in the Central America country Wednesday and called his nation’s 7-year-old ban on metals mining “absurd,” immediately putting in jeopardy the historic prohibition.

The unmined gold would be “wealth that could transform El Salvador,” he wrote on the social platform X. Bukele's party controls El Salvador's Congress by a wide margin and his political opposition has been devastated, so a formal proposal to end the ban is unlikely to meet much resistance.

In 2017, El Salvador banned all metals mining above ground and below. A broad coalition of sectors, including the Catholic church, supported the prohibition in order to protect the small country’s water resources from contamination.

At that point, exploration had revealed deposits of gold and silver, but there was no large-scale metal mining. It's unclear what its gold reserves could be.

Bukele on Wednesday proposed “modern and sustainable” mining that would care for the environment.

Environmentalists quickly criticized the president’s boosterism.

“It’s not true that there’s green mining, it’s paid for with lives, kidney, respiratory problems and leukemia that aren’t immediate,” said Amalia López with the Alliance Against the Privatization of Water.

Their concerns include the amount of water needed for mining operations and the storage of water contaminated with heavy metals.

Having achieved what he calls a “security miracle” in weakening El Salvador’s powerful street gangs by locking up more than 80,000 Salvadorans accused of gang affiliation since March 2022, Bukele has said he is looking to bring a similar turnaround to the economy.

It is a reversal for the highly popular and recently reelected Bukele, who during his first campaign for the presidency in 2019 said he supported the mining ban.

In 2021, Bukele proposed using El Salvador’s geothermal power to mine the cryptocurrency bitcoin, which requires tremendous amounts of electricity — but not real mining — to power computers that make complex mathematical calculations day and night that verify transactions.