El Salvador President Nayib Bukele proclaimed himself in favor of mining gold in the Central America country Wednesday and called his nation’s 7-year-old ban on metals mining “absurd,” immediately putting in jeopardy the historic prohibition.
The unmined gold would be “wealth that could transform El Salvador,” he wrote 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.
