Beyond the Iron Fist

Mining the New El Salvador

Photo: Carlos Barrera

Marching towards what he calls the New El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele has revolutionized many aspects of the country’s reality. His exploits are well-known: the introduction of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 that most recently courted Tether to set up shop in the country, the explosive development of Surf City, Surf City II, the Airport of the Pacific, among other projects.  These innovations have already displaced local communities to make way for foreigner-friendly attractions, alongside other forms of aggressive development such as gentrification in the capital’s historic downtown. This development policy, a seemingly incoherent one, has gone together with a strong push for the extractive industries.

Many other changes, like the gerrymandering of the country’s political map, have given Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party municipal dominance and cemented loyalty networks to the executive. Bukele has even transformed Salvadoran diplomacy, evidenced in the giving of military aid to Haiti to combat gang rule. His mammoth prison—the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT)—is a well-regarded monument to El Salvador’s authoritarian and carceral turn, a model for how to discipline an unruly people. A globally admired figure, Bukele’s larger-than-life political brand often transcends the smallness of El Salvador through trending on social media.

Underneath these applauded advances, Bukele has worn down  El Salvador’s democratic levers, shocked the subsistence economies of many and, despite his denials, has not slowed the runaway dynamics of displacement and migration. Through the cover of revolutionizing El Salvador with an iron fist, Bukele has dismantled community organizations, discredited citizen groups, vilified the press and created a divisive, ahistorical, civic culture. Poverty has increased, unemployment remains high, and there is little economic growth year after year. Seeking to devise new revenue streams to stave off financial crisis, Bukele’s recent designs seek to mine El Salvador—via cryptocurrency and the rush for precious minerals—to address economic stagnation and rising unemployment. The cryptocurrency gambit, for instance, suggests that Bukele has doubled his money, yet this all remains inconsequential as they exist as unrealized gains that remain without material impact. In a similar move, Bukele has recently stated that the grounds near the mother river Lempa hold a whopping $3 trillion of unmined gold. Whether in crypto or gold deposits, this kind of economic speculation is Bukele’s version of “drill, baby, drill.”

Clearing Cabañas

The celebrated anti-crime sweeps that have incarcerated nearly 80,000 persons and which have ostensibly propelled El Salvador out of its gang crisis, continue to serve as a smokescreen for experimenting with the Salvadoran economy and, by extension, ordinary people’s lives. However lofty, the construction boom, the Bitcoin gamble, the future visions of the executive are all underwritten by age-old extractivism and new forms to exploit the country poor.

Indeed, the recent repealing of the 2017 metallic mining ban by the Legislative Assembly that has guaranteed a return to rapacious extraction, has already sent signals to the mining sector—a mix of the state, transnational and Salvadoran capital—to encircle the country and unearth the potential profits interred within. Hastily discarded on Christmas Eve, the hard-fought 2017 law was replaced with a new General Law on Metallic Mining that creates explosive conditions for the ecosystem, and for those environmental and water defenders who have long been in the crosshairs of the Bukele administration. Now completely unprotected, combined with the impunity of the ongoing state of exception, those who stand in the way of the state’s rush for gold, for natural gas, for oil, run even greater risks of standing up to mining interests.

Vidalina Morales, 55 years old and president of the Economic and Social Development Association of Santa Marta (ADES), was one of the leaders who led the caravan “Cabins free of Mining”, ”In this caravan we ask for the immediate freedom of our colleagues who are criminalized under this system of injustice and the other is to continue raising our voice against all mining extractivism in El Salvador,” said Vidalina. Photo of El Faro: Carlos Barrera

There is no clearer example than recent happenings in the town of Santa Marta, Cabañas, where a group of five water defenders, leaders of the Economic and Social Development Association (ADES)— Teodoro Antonio Pacheco, Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega, Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, and Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez—remain in a prolonged trial for their active roles in the anti-mining struggle. Under the guise of pursuing a war crime, the state alleges that the dubbed “Santa Marta 5,” committed and conspired in a wartime murder of a young woman in the 1980s. Despite criminalizing media portrayals, police intimidation and strategies to shake the resolve of the accused, on October 2024 tribunal in Sesuntepeque that I personally attended, they were declared innocent and without fault, resolving that no crime had been committed. Despite this explicit outcome that should have settled matters, the Santa Marta 5 are being retried in what is unashamedly a politically-motivated trial. Revealing an emaciated democracy at the heart of Bukele’s regime where due process is a luxury—here evidenced in the thousands of arbitrarily detained—regardless of the final outcome the struggle of Santa Marta represents something larger: a defiance to Bukele’s developmentalism, a challenge to his totalizing power, an impediment to his steamrolling of opposition voices.

The “Cabañas free of Mining” caravan was called for January 30, 2025 and approximately 300 people gathered who then marched from San Isidro to the center of Sensuntepeque, Cabañas. The caravan was organized by communities of Cabañas and led by residents and leaders of San Marta. Photo of El Faro: Carlos Barrera

The case of the Santa Marta 5 is instructive. While it remains emblematic of the resistance against the mining frenzy, the dogged persecution of this resistance cannot be unlinked from the administration’s broader agendas. In El Salvador, there exists no independent judiciary and checks on executive excess. With the 2021 summary dismissal of judges along with the past Attorney General, Raúl Melara, or the express trials of the arbitrarily imprisoned, the justice system is of little confidence. There are growing cases of human rights violations by police, military, in the prisons, all that are rapidly swept under the rug. Press restrictions and misinformation is rampant, which altogether evidence that loyalism is requisite for a government post, for information, and access. Rodolfo Delgado, the current Attorney General handling the Santa Marta 5 case is a Nuevas Ideas appointee who was confirmed for the job despite being previously linked to drug-trafficking, embezzlement and money laundering. Recently, it has been shown that Delgado uses the office to pursue Bukele’s anti-opposition agenda under the guise of the “War Against Corruption.”

Despite the results of that Sensuntepeque tribunal, the courts are micromanaged and mobilized to rule on fabricated pasts, dredging up historical events to delegitimize present-day community organizations. Clearing the way for the expanding extractive agenda central to making the New El Salvador in places like Cabañas, groups like ADES and the Santa Marta 5 represent the remnants of a mobilized generation that, in the democratic opening after the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992) collectively advocated for social reform, to curb corporate excess and defend their right to a dignified life. Today, crushing ADES and the Santa Marta resistance is of great symbolic value to the administration who sees it to signal the inevitability of Bukele’s extractive agenda. Even the much talked about proposed debt conversion for conservation scheme will be unable to address the coming wastelanding (destroying riverine biomes via non-remediable contamination) of the Lempa, the Goascorán, the Torola or the Sumpul Rivers.

A resident of Santa Marata during a protest against mining, which took place on January 30, 2025 in Sensuntepeque, Cabañas. Photo: Carlos Barrera

The New El Salvador

While militarized security via the state’s unending emergency has brought tranquility to many, these approaches obscure a reality wherein Salvadorans have traded away their most basic rights. For as Bukele’s government pines for new schemes for self-engorgement, using state power for personal gain, ordinary people are experiencing growing poverty, hunger, unemployment and water shortages. Salvadorans are indeed grateful for the boost in security, but these anti-crime operations do not resolve root-level country contradictions. In fact, they exacerbate them. In attempts to resolve the economic hardships of ordinary Salvadorans, where crypto, construction and the revival of mining are touted as infallible solutions that will lift all boats, Bukele’s administration has instead deepened inequality by attacking the livelihoods of many, from criminalizing fishermen, displacing communities like Condadillo in La Unión, from expelling informal street vendors to those impacted by the Valle El Ángel megaproject in urban San Salvador that aims to privatize and contaminate a key water source for thousands of locals.

Much of Bukele’s novelty is a result of his supposed “breaking” with the past. This is achieved by peddling ahistorical discourse that delegitimizes the long, tumultuous social struggle of the Salvadoran people, and chastising that 1992 moment that brought a close to the internal armed conflict via the Chapultepec Peace Accords which birthed the nation’s now distant democracy and fledgling peace. From popular struggles in the country past and present, in the armed conflict, and to the ongoing defense of the environment, the legacy project of self-determination by El Salvador’s people is continually chalked up to a duping of the masses, characterizing that history as corrupted, useless, a wasted past. In strong-arming a New El Salvador, Bukele has not moved the country any closer to democracy, to peace, to a society that supports the needs of its most vulnerable. Instead, these impositions have driven wedges in society and exposed more to the harms of frenzied development, succumbing all to a political vision that papers over inequality and resource limits offering only neo-feudal visions of unrestricted growth, obedience and order.

The struggle over the environment—whether in mining or crypto, both of which are wildly unpopular—represent hinge issues upon which the country’s future depends. This ongoing project to dismantle citizen power crystallizes the poverty of Bukele’s rule where justice, progress, safety and history are in perverse disarray. Bukele’s New El Salvador is a hallucination diametrically opposed to the interests of Salvadorans, neglectful of material realities, and a forsaking of citizen desire for a peaceful and democratic culture. Despite the gratitude for homicide reductions and economic security, Salvadorans did not yearn for an uncivil society where fear, intimidation and self-censorship pass as virtue.

Voices of the Future

Bukele’s revolution has struck at institutional arteries, misshapen democratic culture, and made acceptable a historical denialism that today yields a society conflicted on the very meaning of justice, peace, progress and democracy. Too often is this citizen mass misrecognized as compliant and captured in the Bukele mirage, yet with the recent overturning of that 2017 mining ban, sectors of Salvadorans are reemerging to defend the most basic of needs: water and life.

Protest against metal mining in front of the national library on February 9, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barrera

Responding to the environmental emergency signaled by the return to mining, Salvadorans across generations are rejecting the turning over of their lives and futures to extractive capital. A vibrant, international coalition led to that March 9, 2017, victory, for example. This coalition, the voices of the future,  included campesinos, the Catholic Church, the National Roundtable Against Mining, alongside an extensive network of solidarity groups like International Allies, the Committee in Solidarity with the Salvadoran People (CISPES), as well as U.S., Canadian and European universities. Salvadorans are today becoming newly mobilized by the existential threat of Bukele’s economic plans which aims to resurrect the old extractivism to deliver the new.

On Sunday, January 19, calling attention to the ghastly effects of reactivating mining in El Salvador, nearly 1,000 people took to the country’s historic downtown, in the same zone that Bukele has marked off as his pulpit. Here, next to where he hosts pep rallies and inauguration speeches to lambast his political opponents, on the opposite side of the Metropolitan Cathedral where Saint Óscar Romero rests, Salvadoran students, church-goers, community organizations and environmentalists peacefully gathered to voice their concerns against the disastrous move. Using the steps of the China-donated National Library of El Salvador (BINAES), people stood against Bukele’s plans. For these activists, extractivism is a death-knell to El Salvador’s dwindling freshwater, and spells a huge blow to the citizen resistance and collective work that, for a short seven years, put the destruction of Salvadoran nature on hold.

Attendees at the protest against metal mining in front of the national library. Photo: Carlos Barrera

An online collective, Voces Del Futuro, gathered in peaceful protest to challenge Bukele’s vision of the New El Salvador. Young and old, influencers, passersby, students, clergymen, library-goers, drew their attention to the careless foreshortening of their own lives and of future generations. Water is life, many said—“No to mining, yes to living”—calling out the lack of public consultation to revoking the 2017 mining ban. Speakers, identifying the next hydrosocial crisis, noted that this is not a matter of party politics, it is a matter of ecosystem survival.

In this temporary space of peace, the possibility of democratic culture is still visible. There remains hope yet for reinvigorating that same intergenerational, multisectoral, international, lay and ecclesiastical coalition that, against all odds, once emerged victorious. Under authoritarianism, however, since Bukele has snuffed out much opposition and produced a culture of intimidation, the struggle will need to continue its renewal to activate more of society to defend water and the environment. These efforts, represented by Santa Marta, by Voices of the Future and others, recall the words of Archbishop Romero, who once told us about his notion of peace, “Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of the cemeteries, nor the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all, to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is just and it is duty.”

Attendees at the protest against metal mining in front of the national library. Photo: Carlos Barrera

Jorge Cuéllar is an interdisciplinary scholar and Assistant Professor of Latin American, Latinx & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College where he teaches courses on modern Central America, global migration and social theory. Originally from El Salvador, his work focuses on the contemporary politics, culture and history of Central America.