El Salvador president proposes ending country’s metals mining ban

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has proclaimed himself in favor of mining gold in the Central America country and called his nation’s 7-year-old ban on metals mining “absurd.” It immediately puts in jeopardy the historic prohibition. He wrote on the social platform X Wednesday that the unmined gold would be “wealth that could transform El Salvador.” Bukele’s party controls El Salvador’s Congress by a wide margin and his political opposition has been devastated, so a formal proposal to end the ban is unlikely to meet much resistance. In 2017, El Salvador banned all metals mining above ground and below.