SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) – The Roman Catholic Church called on El Salvador’s president Sunday not to lift the country’s ban on gold mining.
Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas asked President Nayib Bukele not to restore the ban that has been in place since 2017.
“It will damage this country forever,” Msgr. Escobar Nhamo said in another homily. Those views were also expressed by civil and environmental groups.
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On Wednesday, Bukele called the seven-year-old ban on metal mining “absurd,” and said unmined gold would be “an economy that can transform El Salvador,” in a statement on social platform X.
Bukele’s party controls the Congress of El Salvador by a wide margin and his political opposition has been destroyed, so the proposal to end the ban is unlikely to meet with much opposition.
In 2017, El Salvador banned all surface and underground metal mining. A large number of sects, including the Church of Rome, supported the ban in order to protect the small country’s water resources from being polluted.
At that time, exploration had revealed deposits of gold and silver, but there were no large ore mines. It is unclear what its gold reserves might be.
Bukele on Wednesday recommended “modern and sustainable” mining that can protect the environment.
Environmentalists were quick to criticize the president’s proposal.
“It is not true that there are green mines, which are paid for by life, kidneys, respiratory problems and leukemia that are not urgent,” said Amalia López with the Alliance Against the Privatization of Water.
Their concerns include the amount of water needed for mining and the storage of water contaminated with heavy metals.
It marks a return to the popular and recently re-elected Bukele, who during his first campaign in 2019 said he supported the ban on mining.