The main leader of the Catholic Church in El Salvador on Sunday asked the government of President Nayib Bukele not to repeal a law in force since 2017 that absolutely prohibits metal mining in the Central American nation, because doing so, he warned, “will damage to this country forever.”
The archbishop of the capital, Monsignor José Luis Escobar Alas, reacted in this way for the first time after Bukele recently spoke out in favor of gold mining and described as absurd a ban in force for seven years on the extraction of metals for being an environmental threat. .
His exhortation adds to the rejection formulated by environmental organizations of the Salvadoran president’s proposal. Environmental activists recalled that the ban on metal mining was a triumph for social organizations and the Salvadoran church.
With this rule, El Salvador became the first country in the world to prohibit metal mining after a petition supported by Catholic priests. Congress considered this activity an environmental threat due to the excessive demand for water and the drainage of heavy metals and toxic waste such as mercury and cyanide.
Hours later, Bukele defended his proposal for the reactivation of the mining industry in the country and asked the population for confidence, comparing the measure with the bitcoin law, one of the actions of his government that has generated the greatest opposition.
“We are not going to do what previous governments did, excuse me,” he said.
“Do they trust us on this? If we do it wrong, well, they punish us in the elections. We are going to do it well and we are going to take care of the environment, we are going to improve the environment,” he added.
The Salvadoran president maintained that responsible mining generates development, and even argued that this income would serve to protect the environment.
Monsignor Escobar Alas stated at a press conference that metal mining “will always cause damage” and that the greatest damage is when it is underground, because – he explained – they are large injections of poison, of cyanide, which lasts hundreds of years and “that It will mean contaminating all the aquifers…”.
However, Bukele – when speaking out in favor of mining exploitation on social networks – highlighted that all the potential wealth in gold that exists in El Salvador could be equivalent to “3 trillion dollars”, which would be equivalent, according to his calculations, to 8,800% of the national Gross Domestic Product, which closed in 2023 at 34,015 million dollars.
“We are the only country in the world with a total ban on metal mining, something that no other country applies. “Absurd!” wrote the president on the social network X, formerly Twitter.
The Salvadoran archbishop, who expressed his confidence that the law will not be reversed, described mining exploitation as looting by international companies that, he stated, take everything and destroy the environment.
He insisted that the population could be harmed by contamination with cyanide, mercury and other lethal toxins, which will worsen health problems and premature death irreversibly.
“If, due to water contamination, caused by pesticides (used in agro-industrial activity), a large part of our people suffers kidney failure, the suffering due to serious damage to other vital organs would be even worse,” he warned. .
In his government plan presented in January 2019, during his first presidential campaign, Bukele promised to assume powers to achieve “the effectiveness” of several regulations, including the law prohibiting metal mining.
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