SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on Wednesday declared himself a supporter of gold mining in the Central American country, calling his country’s seven-year-old ban on metal mining “absurd.” which immediately endangers the historical situation. ban.
The unmined gold would be “wealth that could transform El Salvador,” he wrote on the social platform termination is unlikely. encounter a lot of resistance.
In 2017, El Salvador banned all metal mining above and below ground. A broad coalition of sectors, including the Catholic Church, supported the ban to protect the small country’s water supplies from contamination.
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At that time, exploration had revealed deposits of gold and silver, but there was no large-scale metal mining. It is unclear what the gold reserves might be.
Bukele proposed on Wednesday a “modern and sustainable” mining industry that takes care of the environment.
Environmentalists were quick to criticize the president’s boosterism.
“It is not true that there is green mining; it is paid for with lives, kidney, respiratory problems and leukemia that do not occur immediately,” says Amalia López of the Alliance against the Privatization of Water.
Their concerns include the amount of water required for mining operations and the storage of water contaminated with heavy metals.
After achieving 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 ties since March 2022, Bukele has said he is looking for a similar turnaround in the economy.
It is a turnaround for the very popular and recently re-elected Bukele, who said he supported the mining ban during his first campaign for president in 2019.
In 2021, Bukele proposed using El Salvador’s geothermal energy to mine the cryptocurrency bitcoin, which requires massive amounts of electricity — but not actual mining — to power computers that make complex mathematical calculations that verify transactions day and night.
