El Salvador’s Santa Elena mine once belonged to a US company, Butters Salvador Mining, which between 1904 and 1954 extracted 32 tons of gold from it. Abandoned by Butters during the country’s lengthy and bloody civil war, the mine is now worked unofficially by artisanal miners, among them the 67-year-old José Hernández.
Hernández began working at Santa Elena with his father at the age of 12 and continued until the 1980-1992 Salvadoran civil war, which claimed 75,000 – mainly civilian – lives and pushed many people to leave the country. Hernández spent a decade living in the US before returning to El Salvador after the 1992 ceasefire. He resumed mining – this time working Santa Elena independently.
In 2019, he should have stopped mining. Two years earlier, the government of El Salvador banned all forms of mining for metal – artisanal and industrial – due to its adverse effects on health and the environment. The artisanal miners were given two years to transition away from extraction.
However, the promised programmes to support former mine workers, intended to go alongside the ban, failed to materialise. So Hernández and others continued their search for gold – the primary source of income in this region. “The truth is, sometimes we can earn the equivalent of a week’s income in a single day, and if you’re lucky, even enough for an entire month,” he says. “So, getting a job in agriculture where you only earn $8 a day simply isn’t worth it.”
The 2017 legislation was a milestone victory for the environmental movement throughout Central America. Yet, just six years later, encouraged by multinational companies, the government is preparing to reverse its ban and reintroduce mining, artisanal and industrial.
On Sunday Salvadorans go to the polls. President Nayib Bukele is expected to retain power in the controversial elections, and he has been sidelining environmental issues in his political campaigning. Last year his administration arrested environmental activists and, in 2021, announced the creation of a directorate-general for energy, hydrocarbons and mines, as well as joining the Intergovernmental Forum on mining, sending signals that it intends to reauthorise mining projects in the country.
Mining has permanently scarred El Salvador. In the eastern La Unión department, a river runs through a community where the mining industry has been active for more than a century. Running red and giving off the putrid odour of heavy metals such as cyanide, arsenic and magnesium, the San Sebastián River embodies the degradation caused by the industry.
In the early 2000s, amid growing interest in Salvadoran resources from mining companies, grassroots environmental movements started organising. But the struggle against mining brought severe losses to communities defending their territories.
In the Cabañas department, the Canadian company Pacific Rim hoped to extract 1.4m ounces of gold and 9.4m ounces of silver. In 2009, during a period of protest against the mine, three community leaders were assassinated.
Vidalina Morales, 54, was a prominent member of the Cabañas resistance movement. Now she is having to take up the fight against industrial mining once again.
“We thought we had destroyed this evil, but the ghost of mining is coming back to haunt us,” she says. This time, the community is fighting to preserve the anti-mining laws and free five activists from Santa Marta, leaders of the Social Economic Development Association who were arrested in January 2023 on charges dating back to the the civil war.
The communities are aware of the dangers of pushing back against the mining industry, but are supported in their struggle by artisan miners such as Hernández, who would like to continue small-scale mining.
“If the big mining companies come back here, it could be a good way to bring back jobs, but they would definitely finish extracting the little gold that is left in the mountain,” says Hernández, who fears the return of industrial mining will endanger his livelihood.
Luis González, the director of the Salvadoran Ecological Unit, says that since the ban came into force, there has been no proper oversight, so mining projects could operate in the shadows and the government would never know. “They never sent a police officer to check if anyone was still exploring or extracting gold, so it’s really up to the communities to fill that role. They’re the only ones interested in not having their territories damaged,” González says.
According to Edgardo Mira, an environmental consultant, the government needs income sources after failed or controversial financial policies, such as approving bitcoin as legal tender. “Gold mining is extremely profitable,” Mira says. “Back in 2004, when Pacific Rim studied the possibility of exploiting the El Dorado mine, gold was around $400 (£314) an ounce. Now it’s worth more than $2,000 an ounce.”
González says the mining industry is showing intense interest in theseSalvadoran communities. “Since 2022, mining advocates from different nationalities started showing up in Cabañas, where Pacific Rim had explored the land to exploit it,” he says. “They’ve been approaching people to rent their land for much more than the market price.”
“It’s hard to know what players might be lobbying for, since this is done through investment funds, but many Canadian and Australian companies have wanted to chip in, and the possibility of a free-trade agreement with China would probably include mining,” Mira says. “It can be a testing ground to check what the response from the population and environmental movements might be.”
When the government approved the creation of the energy, hydrocarbons and mines directorate in October 2021, Elisa Rosales, a congresswoman from the ruling Nuevas Ideas party, seemed to confirm the new direction of the Bukele administration’s thinking on the environmental movement.
“We should not be a country following the agendas of minority groups. Previous governments didn’t have this vision. The approval of this law is part of El Salvador’s development process,” she said at the time.
Then, in March 2023, Rosales said the directorate and the Thorium Energy Alliance would sign a memorandum of understanding to promote thorium-powered renewable energy. No details were released on whether they would allow extraction of the mineral.
In December 2023 the Salvadoran congress approved a bill allowing hydrocarbon exploration and processing, and which would keep the details of all exploration plans confidential for two years. “This is a historic moment. The urgent modernisation of the energy matrix is a task that cannot be postponed,” says Sandra Martínez, a Nuevas Ideas congresswoman, after voting for the bill on 4 January.
“This is the toughest time for the environmental movement in the history of El Salvador,” González says. “We’re dealing with a government that not only does not want to have an open discussion about environmental issues but that threatens activists with applying a state of emergency to jail everyone that opposes them.”
Morales echoes his sentiments. “Even though there is legislation prohibiting mining, as long as we have gold beneath us, there will be an industry that wants to take it away regardless of the damage it causes,” she says. “Unfortunately for us, having gold in the subsoil [has become] a curse.”