SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) – El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced his support for gold mining in Central America Wednesday and called a 7-year ban on metal mining “absurd,” and a historic threat. ban.
Unmined gold will be “an asset that can change El Salvador,” he wrote on social media X. Bukele’s party controls El Salvador’s Congress by a wide margin and its political opposition has been destroyed, so the idea of officially ending the ban is doubtful. struggle with a lot of opposition.
In 2017, El Salvador banned all surface and underground metal mining. Many groups, including the Catholic Church, supported the law in order to protect the water in the small country from being polluted.
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At that time, exploration revealed areas of gold and silver, but there were no large iron mines. It is not known what his gold reserves may be.
Bukele on Wednesday offered “modern and sustainable” mining that can take care of the environment.
Environmentalists were quick to criticize the president’s persistence.
“It is not true that there are green mines, they are paid for by lives, kidneys, respiratory diseases and leukemia that do not happen immediately,” said Amalia López with the Alliance Against the Privatization of Water.
Their concerns include the amount of water needed for mining operations and the storage of water contaminated with heavy metals.
After achieving what he called a “security miracle” by weakening the powerful street gangs in El Salvador by jailing more than 80,000 Salvadorans accused of participating in the gangs since March 2022, Bukele said he wanted to bring about economic reforms there.
It is also a change for the highly popular and recently elected Bukele, who during his first campaign for the presidency in 2019 said he supports banning mining.
In 2021, Bukele decided to use the geothermal energy of El Salvador to mine the bitcoin cryptocurrency, which requires a lot of electricity – but not actual mining – to run computers that make complex calculations day and night that confirm transactions.
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