Catholic church calls on president of El Salvador not to lift ban on gold mining

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- The Roman Catholic Church called on the president of El Salvador Sunday not to lift the country’s ban on gold mining.

Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas asked President Nayib Bukele not to reverse the ban, which has been in place since 2017.

“It will damage this country forever,” Msgr. Escobar Alas said in a homily. That view has also been voiced by civic and environmental groups.

On Wednesday, Bukele called the 7-year-old ban on metals mining “absurd,” and claimed unmined gold would be “wealth that could transform El Salvador,” in comments 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.

It marks 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.