Bukele to ask congress to repeal El Salvador's mining ban

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele confirmed that he will send a request to congress to repeal the metal mining prohibition law, which was passed by the Central American country's lawmakers in 2017.

"We announced a few days ago that we would send the legislative assembly the repeal of the mining ban in El Salvador, and there was a lot of opposition saying, 'How can you do that?' But I told them there is no country that has banned mining," the president was quoted as saying during a meeting with senior representatives of development bank CAF by newspaper Diario El Salvador.

On December 1, Bukele announced that, in addition to gold deposits, El Salvador's territory hosts “metals of the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions,” news agency EFE reported. The president stated that studies have identified cobalt, lithium, nickel and "rare earth elements used for advanced electronics," as well as platinum, iridium, tantalum, titanium, gallium and germanium, among others.

The president's liberal, populist and reformist party, Nuevas Ideas, has the votes needed to repeal the mining ban at any time.

"We need to exploit our natural resources responsibly, as every country in the world does," Bukele said. He cited examples such as Qatar, Israel, Canada and Switzerland, and reiterated that "there isn’t a single country that has done something as foolish as banning mining."

His statements have drawn criticism from environmental organizations and political groups aligned with such agendas, including the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), one of the proponents of the law that prohibited mining in the country.

"I understand the concern. El Salvador has 95% of its waters polluted. Imagine if we pollute them further; we'll end up with 97%, 98% contamination. The reality is that when 95% of your rivers are polluted, you shouldn’t focus on saving the remaining 5%, but on recovering the 95% that was lost," Bukele argued on Thursday. "If we had 95% of our rivers clean, then we could focus on maintaining the status quo."

"The only thing we can do is invest billions of dollars to clean up the polluted waters. And to have those billions, we need resources that can easily be obtained from mining," he added, according to Diario El Salvador.

The president had previously claimed that El Salvador potentially has US$3tn-worth of gold resources alone, in addition to other strategic metals. However, the claim seems significantly exaggerated as it would be highly unlikely that the country would have that level of gold resources.