Return of Mining to El Salvador Awakens a Quiet Catholic Church
The Catholic Church in San Salvador has gone from blessing Nayib Bukele’s unconstitutional reelection and the state of exception to gathering tens of thousands of signatures against his unilateral decision to reactivate metals mining. Bukele has responded testily, drawing from a smear playbook in Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, where priests are imprisoned or exiled and mass is held under state surveillance and veto.
Thursday, April 3, 2025
Yuliana Ramazzini and Roman Gressier
On March 24, on the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, social movements marched to the Supreme Court in San Salvador carrying a banner of the iconic San Salvador archbishop and human rights defender. With 60,000 signatures, they filed a lawsuit arguing that the December reactivation of metals mining is unconstitutional. These added to the 150,000 presented by Catholic bishops on March 18, calling on the Bukele-controlled Legislative Assembly to repeal the law.
Condemnations of mining are cutting across Christian theological lines. A letter by the Episcopal Conference calls the signatures “the voice of the people who are clamouring for the repeal of the Mining Law, as it is highly damaging to human life and the environment.” Evangelical pastor Mario Vega told El Faro English of his “Christian responsibility to speak out against it for theological, ethical and social reasons.”
“In 2017, we also participated in the collection of a little over 100,000 signatures,” Vega contextualizes. “With that, we achieved the ban on metal mining.” This time around, more signatures were gathered under a state of exception suspending due process rights, in which a majority of Salvadorans express fear of stating political opinions in public and police stop and frisk bus passengers when expecting protests in San Salvador.
The petitions are an explicit rebuke of Nayib Bukele’s November 28 announcement on X that El Salvador would move to reverse the ban, on the claim that “God placed a giant treasure underneath our feet: El Salvador potentially has the gold deposits of greatest density per square kilometer in the world.”
Moreover, this criticism of a major Bukele policy is a sharp turn for the Catholic church in San Salvador. Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas, in that role since 2006, gave his blessing at Bukele’s unconstitutional inauguration in June 2024, having called reelection “a request that the people have repeatedly made.” State media was quick to highlight when he said in September 2022, six months into the suspension of constitutional guarantees, that Salvadorans “now see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202505/el_salvador/27800/return-of-mining-to-el-salvador-awakens-a-quiet-catholic-church