In El Salvador, Catholic bishops and President Bukele are at odds over mining

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Speaking at Mass two days before Christmas, Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas of San Salvador turned to a sensitive subject: politics. The archbishop did not mention any politicians by name—much less El Salvador’s popular president, Nayib Bukele, who pillories critics on social media and lets few slights go unchallenged. But he voiced deep opposition to a proposal being pushed through the National Assembly that day to roll back a ban on mining in the Central American country.

“We are not interested in politics,” Archbishop Escobar said. “We are interested in people’s lives, people’s health. That is why we ask the honorable deputies not to repeal the law that prohibits mining.”

The archbishop had put the issue in more stark terms the day before, saying in a social media video, “We’re facing a life and death situation.”

“This is not a partisan political discussion; it is about protecting people’s lives, people’s health,” the archbishop said, noting that mining activities leave behind “a large amount of poison, which would cause so much harm to the population.”

El Salvador’s assembly ultimately ignored the archbishop—along with pleas from El Salvador’s bishops’ conference, environmental groups and populations in areas previously impacted by mining activities—by reversing its ban on extractive activities.

The assembly, where Mr. Bukele’s party holds a supermajority—54 out of 60 seats—approved the new mining law on Dec. 23. Only three assembly members voted against it. The new law overturns a seven-year prohibition on all metals mining, while putting the state in charge of extractive activities.

It also promises to prioritize best practices to avoid environmental and social exploitation. “As a country, we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past, where these types of activities are left to the discretion of companies that seek profit and do not care about the well-being of the people,” said Elisa Rosales, a lawmaker with Mr. Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party, said in a speech before the assembly.

Mr. Bukele promoted the mining law as an opportunity to produce a bonanza of riches for El Salvador, where poverty and the emigration it encourages remain common realities. The president took to X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, where he has 6.8 million followers, to claim that El Salvador occupies a privileged place in the Central American gold belt. In November he had insisted that studies of just 4 percent of the national territory showed possible gold deposits worth approximately $132 billion—equal to 380 percent of the nation’s current annual gross domestic product.

“We are the ONLY country in the world with a total ban on metal mining…Absurd!” he wrote on Nov. 27. “This wealth, given by God, can be harnessed responsibly to bring unprecedented economic and social development to our people.”

Civil society groups expressed skepticism about the president’s claims of mineral and metal riches in El Salvador, along with Mr. Bukele’s insistence that mining could be conducted without causing environmental damage.

“The studies that Bukele is talking about…that say there is gold in El Salvador, nobody knows anything about them,” said Juan Melendez, country director for the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy.

The assembly’s haste to approve the new mining law also provoked disquiet among El Salvador’s bishops and many in civil society. The new law lacks widespread support, despite Mr. Bukele himself enjoying an approval rating of more than 90 percent.

A poll from the University Institute of Public Opinion at the Jesuit-run Central American University José Simeón Cañas found lingering misgivings over mining in El Salvador. The poll, published on Dec. 23, found 59 percent of the population agreeing with the statement “El Salvador is not a suitable country for mining.” Some 67 percent of respondents said there was a water crisis in the country.

“The new mining law, promoted by Nayib Bukele without regard for the feelings of the population, goes against programs that seek both human development and environmental protection,” university leaders said in an editorial published on Jan 6. “In the country’s current situation, implementing the mining of metals would be a death blow to our environment,” said U.C.A. vice chancellor Omar Serrano. “Mining requires enormous amounts of water that El Salvador doesn’t have, even for its own people,” he added in a commentary for Radio YSUCA 91.7, U.C.A.’s radio station.

Public misgivings over mining, regional political analysts say, stem from worries over water resources in an arid country of 6.3 million people the size of Massachusetts—the highest population density in the hemisphere, outside of the Caribbean. Ninety percent of El Salvador’s lakes and rivers are contaminated to varying degrees, often by sewage, according to Andrés McKinley, a scholar at the U.C.A., who wrote in an October editorial published by the university: “It is widely recognized that El Salvador suffers from a water crisis of enormous proportions in terms of quantity, quality and access.”

A 2016 study projected per capita water availability to fall 83 percent over the next 80 years, meaning that in under a century, El Salvador could become essentially uninhabitable. It was that anxiety about the sustainability of freshwater resources that led to broad public support for the ban on mining in 2017, according to Mr. Melendez.

The 2017 prohibition—the first in the hemisphere—drew nearly 80 percent support, according to an U.C.A. poll at the time. The Catholic Church was at the forefront of the opposition to mining.

The timing was propitious, according to a Catholic source in El Salvador. Pope Francis had recently published “Laudato Si’,” inspiring Catholics around the world to embrace environmental causes. Oscar Romero, El Salvador’s martyred archbishop, was also at that time on the path to canonization. The country’s environment minister also pushed for the ban.

Church leaders at that time “wanted the church to become more active, and this was one of the issues that made sense to them,” said the source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “It was popular to be against mining, and it was that the evidence [of its ecological threats were] overwhelming.”

The issue was not settled, however, especially with Mr. Bukele sweeping to power in 2018 on a platform of repudiating the political class that preceded him. Mr. Bukele showed little interest in ecological matters. He signed a new 2021 water law, which asserted state control over water, but was criticized by environmentalists for opening the door to privatization of water resources.

Prospectors started reappearing in communities in regions with mining histories, too, and starting to buy land, according to Mr. Melendez. The persecution of environmental defenders also escalated.

Five prominent water activists were arrested in Santa Martha in 2023 on murder charges dating back to the country’s civil war, which had ended with a peace agreement in 1992. Environmental groups deplored these “sham charges,” and a Salvadoran court found the men innocent of them in October.

Observers say the men were detained under El Salvador’s ongoing state of emergency. Mr. Bukele declared the state of emergency in March 2022 to crush gangs, which have been preying on the Salvadoran people, running extortion rackets and essentially controlling entire neighborhoods.

During the president’s round-up of suspected gang members, crime rates collapsed, though human rights groups questioned the strategy of mass detentions without due process. (Mr. Bukele said in November that 8,000 innocent individuals were released from custody, quipping, “No police anywhere in the world is perfect.”) El Salvador has gone from the murder capital of the hemisphere a decade ago to one of the safest nations in the hemisphere, according to the president. Tourism, meanwhile, is flourishing.

Mr. Bukele has a fondness for social media trolling and once listed his online bio as “the world’s coolest dictator.” His popularity and penchant for persecuting political opponents and members of the press has made it hard for Catholic leaders to raise concerns about human rights abuses and the diminishment of democratic norms. Local analysts report that the country’s bishops have struggled for a strategy to respond to the president while some church figures, like many in the population, generally support his ideas and initiatives.

“They almost never speak out,” Mr. Melendez said of church leaders. But they appear to have found their voice on at least the mining issues since the local church has long supported the ban.

But challenges remain in El Salvador. Its struggling economy makes the return of mining at least palatable to many Salvadorans. El Salvador reached a $1.4 billion debt deal with the International Monetary Fund in December to shore up its shaky public finances. The deal required the country to abandon a policy to elevate Bitcoin to the status of legal tender in the country. That move had made Mr. Bukele a celebrity in cryptocurrency circles and brought him enormous international attention.

If in his first term, Mr. Bukele prioritized security issues, analysts see the mining decision as part of a focus on the economy Mr. Bukele intends for his second term—he easily won re-election in 2024 despite a constitutional prohibition on presidents serving multiple terms.

“Bukele’s narrative started to change in two ways when he was sworn in a second time,” said Ana María Méndez Dardón, the director for Central America at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank. “One was fighting corruption, the second was improving the country’s economy,” she said.

Church officials have scoffed at the suggestion that mining will bring riches to El Salvador. Archbishop Escobar said at a press conference in December that multinational mining companies in Central America “take everything.”

“What they have left to these countries [where they have extracted resources] is 1 percent of what they declare. How is that possible? It’s plunder.”

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