Church urges El Salvador’s president to keep ban on gold mining

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The Roman Catholic Church has added its voice to calls on El Salvador’s present to retain the country’s ban on gold mining.

Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas on Sunday made the request to President Nayib Bukele, saying: “It will damage this country forever.”

Msgr. Escobar’s intervention follows concerns aired by civic and environmental groups after the president on Wednesday called the seven-year-old ban on metals mining “absurd”, saying on X that unmined gold would be “wealth that could transform El Salvador”.

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.

El Salvador in 2017 banned all metals mining above ground and below. A broad coalition of sectors, including the Roman 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.

The highly popular and recently re-elected Bukele said in 2019, during his first campaign for the presidency, that he supported the mining ban so his recent comments mark a reversal in his attitude.

Bukele on Wednesday suggested a form of “modern and sustainable” mining that would care for the environment.

However, environmentalists have been quick to criticise the president’s current enthusiasm for the project.

“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 Privatisation of Water.

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