El Salvador president proposes bill to overturn metals mining ban
In 2017, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban forms of metals mining.
El Salvador, which became the first country in the world to ban metals mining, could be losing out economy-changing wealth due to its massive unearthed gold deposits, says its President Nayib Bukele.
In a speech earlier this week, Bukele said that the Central American nation is sitting on unmined gold worth as much as $3 trillion, which is roughly over 8,800% of its current GDP. “We’ve also found gallium, tantalum, tin and many other materials needed for the 4th and 5th industrial revolution,” Bukele said.
This lost value, Bukele said, could be used to help clean up El Salvador’s rivers. According to government data, about 95% of the rivers in El Salvador are contaminated, and Bukele argues that the focus should be on cleaning up those rivers, instead of preventing further pollution by banning mineral extraction.
His predecessor, former left-wing rebel Salvador Sanchez Ceren, imposed the mining ban in 2017 following pressure from rural communities who had expressed concerns about harmful chemicals like cyanide and mercury used in mining practices.
Now, Bukele, the first President not elected as a candidate of one of El Salvador’s two major political parties since 1989, has set out to revoke this ban. Through his official X account, he has been repeatedly pointing to the massive economic benefits of the nation’s natural resources.
Prior to his recent speech, Bukele made a series of posts highlighting El Salvador’s gold potential, including an uncited study which showed the country has “potentially” the largest gold deposits per square kilometer in the world.
“God placed a gigantic treasure underneath our feet,” he wrote on X, adding that the mining ban was “absurd.”
Bukele went on to say that mining just 4% of the country’s gold deposits would bring in $131 billion, equivalent to 380% of its GDP.
“If we make responsible use of our natural resources, we can change the economy of El Salvador overnight,” he wrote a few days later.
However, as his predecessor and other Central American nations have recently found out, any pro-mining proposal would be met with strong opposition.
“It’s one thing to put a mine in the Atacama Desert (in Chile) and another thing to open an open-pit mine in Chalatenango,” Pedro Cabezas, leader of the Central American Alliance Against Mining, told AFP this week.
A potential lift of the mining ban would not be the first radical change under Bukele’s leadership. In 2021, he passed a law that made bitcoin legal tender, making El Salvador the first nation to do so.
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