Soiled Gold
Seven years after El Salvador banned metal extraction, the bloody fight over mining appears poised to return.
MARCH 12, 2024
PHOTO: In November 2016, in Sensuntepeque, Cabañas, a man attends a celebration of the ICSID ruling to dismiss the mining company's claims (Danielle Mackey)
On the afternoon of May 17, 2023, in the rural state of Cabañas, El Salvador, Vidalina Morales' cell phone rang. It was her 33-year old son, Manuel, but his voice sounded strange. “They have me here in the police station,” he said, rushed. He'd been arrested while playing soccer with friends on a local field. Morales tried to breathe. This had long been her worst fear: that her loved ones would be targeted on account of her work.
Morales, 55, is one of the most visible leaders of Salvadoran environmentalism. Only about 5 feet tall, slight with long black hair wrapped into a sensible bun, she often wears the blouses and long skirts traditional to rural Salvadoran women. As the president of a development organization in Cabañas called ADES, she is also familiar with the halls of power. In March 2017, she and her colleagues, after years of activism, won a national ban on metal mining, the first such ban in the world. Mining posed an existential threat to the Salvadoran water supply. Worldwide, the industry often overrides local laws and regulations and leaves violence and environmental destruction in its wake. For Salvadorans, a ban was the only way to protect their resources.
But their victory may be short lived: after El Salvador’s current president, Nayib Bukele, took office in 2019, there have been signs that the government is considering allowing mining again. In 2021, the administration created a special public entity to oversee extractive industry operations and joined an intergovernmental forum that advises countries on mining. These moves made Salvadorans fear that the administration would sacrifice natural resources in exchange for profit, and pushed Morales and her colleagues back into their old roles as national faces of resistance.
After she learned that the police had taken her son, Morales rushed to the station where Manuel was being interrogated. The officers accused him of being a gang member. “But you know me!” he protested. “You know where I live, you know my family!” It didn't matter; they had whisked him to a regional police hub, further into the prison system, before Morales arrived. She admonished the inspector on duty for targeting Manuel. The inspector insisted that the police had a photo of him on file, she later recounted, as if that were evidence of some wrongdoing, and that people called him by a nickname, as if it must be a gang pseudonym. She knew many people who had been through similar ordeals of arbitrary detention; more than 70,000 Salvadorans have been arrested under a state of exception declared by the Bukele administration in March of 2022, and those behind bars had no due process and were in great danger.
Morales spent the ensuing hours raising alarm in the tight-knit rural community, Santa Marta, where she had spent her adult life. Her son’s detention was the latest in a string of high-profile arrests in the town. Four months earlier, five community leaders had been jailed, all of them environmentalists like Morales. One was her colleague Antonio Pachecho, the director of ADES; another, Saúl Rivas, was ADES's legal advisor. From the time they were taken, cars with polarized windows and no license plates — Santa Martans later discovered they were police detectives — began passing through the small community at odd hours. “Harassment,” Morales called it.
She and her colleagues sacrificed so much to convince the politicians in the capital that mining was a disease that would consume El Salvador. Now, it may all come undone, creating incalculable losses for the land and its people.
The five men were hit with bizarre charges of participating in the murder of a woman during the country's civil war, in 1989, when they were guerrilla fighters battling the Salvadoran military. Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado presented little evidence, beyond the testimony of an anonymous witness who admitted to having no first-hand knowledge of the three-decades old murder. Another striking aspect of the charges: the Salvadoran government has long refused to investigate horrendous mass crimes perpetrated during the war, the massacres and disappearances of thousands upon thousands of civilians. The vast majority of those atrocities, according to the United Nations, were committed by the Salvadoran military and police forces. Why investigate a single murder now? What did the state have to gain from incarcerating the Santa Marta Five, as they came to be known?
Morales and her ADES colleagues traveled to San Salvador to hold press conferences and rallies declaring that they believed the men had been arrested for defending the environment. Others agreed: On May 16, the U.N. condemned the arrests as an apparent “attempt to intimidate” those who "defend against the negative impacts of mining,” and stated that, “they must be freed.” The next day, the Bukele administration reacted not by freeing the Santa Marta Five, but by taking a sixth prisoner – Morales’ son.
About twenty-four hours after he was taken, Manuel was freed without explanation. Morales felt relief. But she knew this made his case exceptional among the many innocent people arrested in the state of exception. “The majority aren’t so lucky,” she told me in December, unable to finish the sentence without breaking down, sorrowful for the many mothers. The episode had also triggered past traumas — scenes from the hardest parts of the first battle against mining, beginning in the early 2000’s when a Canadian firm called Pacific Rim arrived in Cabañas and tried and failed to establish a mine in the region. Now that Bukele has rebuilt bureaucratic scaffolding for mining and locked up leaders who mobilized resistance to it, Morales feels haunted by memories. She and her colleagues sacrificed so much to convince the politicians in the capital that mining was a disease that would consume El Salvador. Now, it may all come undone, creating incalculable losses for the land and its people.
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Despite his human rights record, Bukele is overwhelmingly popular among Salvadorans. In February, he ran for a second term in office, in violation of the Salvadoran constitution, and yet he retained the presidency with more than 80% of the vote. But Bukele's hold on the country has a lurking vulnerability: the economy. The coronavirus pandemic, which hit only about nine months after Bukele assumed office, brought massive, unplanned expenditures — and also thousands of dollars allegedly siphoned away in acts of corruption by high-level officials. Beginning in the summer of 2021, the administration spent hundreds of millions more state dollars buying Bitcoin. It lagged paying tabs owed internally, to contractors, public schools and municipalities, and struggled to pay debt externally, in bond-buybacks. To get by, it has taken loans from a regional development bank called CABEI and raided Salvadorans' pension savings, among other measures. But the government still has a dire need for cash. One of every three Salvadorans can't cover their basic monthly expenses for food, health, housing and education, the highest percentage of the population to face such poverty in recent years, even in the depth of the pandemic.
Shortly after Bukele became president, residents in Cabañas began to notice strange things, and to report them to Pacheco, Morales, and the rest of the ADES staff. Multiple people who lived around the site of Pacific Rim's failed mining project claimed that outsiders, usually foreigners, were cajoling them to rent or sell their land, sometimes at inflated values. Two mayors in Cabañas reported in private meetings that they had been informed by the national export and foreign investment office, PROESA, that Bukele was bringing mining back.
In May 2021, Bukele quietly joined the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, an international group that advises governments on industry best-practices. “We are seeking to take advantage of the benefits that the IGF makes available to member countries for training and capacity building," Salvadoran Minister of Economy María Luisa Hayem Brevé said in a press release. Five months later, congress, run by Bukele‘s party, created a new public office for Hydrocarbons, Energy and Mines, and subsequently allocated enough funding to support 140 staff. In the 2023 national budget, the Bukele administration set aside $4.5 million to “revise and modernize” the ban on mining.
Even a minor spill would be disastrous. A common effect of gold mining is something called acid drainage, which occurs after split rock liberates dangerous substances that leach into the surrounding area.
It's not clear how much money the administration may believe it would gain from gold. But, according to past estimates, there are nearly 1.5 million ounces of it below Salvadoran ground. At the current value of $2,022 per ounce, this represents a hypothetical profit of more than three billion dollars for whatever companies extract that material. Such firms leave a small percentage of the profits to the host country as royalty payments that are typically in the single digits, often around one or two percent. In cold financial terms, the enrichment for El Salvador would be nowhere near three billion dollars. And, as the environmentalists point out, the costs of mining would be enormous, and potentially catastrophic.
The Bukele administration, PROESA, and the Ministry of the Economy did not return requests for comment.
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In the early 2000s, Pacific Rim began searching for gold in Cabañas. Morales, Pacheco and the ADES team learned of the company’s presence after they heard whispers about foreigners showing up in the area's remote villages. At first, it seemed to them that mining might be a good thing: the natural wealth of their country could be alchemized into better living for their people.
But the potential environmental problems with Pacific Rim's plan quickly became apparent. Mines require high volumes of water to function, and El Salvador does not have enough potable water for what its population needs, according to Andrés McKinley, a specialist in water and mining at the University of Central America in San Salvador. “Gold mining competes with the human being for an essential resource,” he said. There was also the matter of the cyanide that Pacific Rim would use to strip gold from rock. Even a minor spill would be disastrous. A common effect of gold mining is something called acid drainage, which occurs after split rock liberates dangerous substances that leach into the surrounding area, McKinley explained. The process is basically impossible to stop, and it renders the affected bodies of water unusable: no human consumption, no fishing, no raising animals nor watering crops.
Then the violence began.
In 2004, Pacific Rim submitted a report to the government outlining the impact of its proposed mine. In response, ADES hired an independent U.S. geologist, Dr. Robert Moran, with more than 40 years of experience to review the report. He found it inadequate and not transparent about real risks the project posed. Pacific Rim's then-CEO, Tom Shrake, later argued in a press release that the company would create”"the single most progressive mine ever built in the Americas when considering environmental protections.” He promised that "any waters flowing out of the proposed mine will be cleaner than the waters flowing into” it. The company estimated that Cabañas had more than one billion dollars' worth of gold, and, although Salvadoran law mandated that the company would only leave 2% of the profit to the government as royalty, a report that Pacific Rim commissioned from a former Salvadoran finance minister projected the mine would raise the GDP of Cabanas by 8.4% and drop extreme poverty by 23%.
But in the meantime, the ADES staff and other local leaders had alerted their neighbors, mostly subsistence farmers, to Pacific Rim's plans. They began a nation-wide education campaign that lobbied to protect El Salvador's water. They stood between Pacific Rim and millions of dollars. By 2007, a national poll found that 62.4% of the population opposed mining. In Cabañas, the growing support "gave us more strength," Morales said.
Then the violence began. The first to disappear was Marcelo Rivera, who, together with his younger brother Miguel Angel, had founded a community organization that often collaborated with Morales and Pacheco at ADES. On the evening of June 17, 2009, Miguel Angel and Marcelo sat at home strategizing how to test local water before any mine was built to establish a baseline quality that the company would have to uphold. The next morning, they set out for separate meetings with plans to see each other later. Marcelo never arrived.
[Read: El Salvador’s “Regime of Deception”]
The Rivera family began their own informal investigation. A man told Miguel Angel that his nephew had seen Marcelo on a public bus the morning he disappeared. A 7-year-old girl told her mother she had seen Marcelo tied up in a field.
Finally, some days later, a neighborhood shopkeeper phoned with a story she'd heard from a customer: that Marcelo had been the victim of a hired hit, and that his body was in a dry well in a village called Agua Zarca. The family reported the tips to the prosecutor in charge of the case, Rodolfo Delgado, who is now the Salvadoran attorney general. In late June 2009, the police, morgue officials and a prosecutor team went to Agua Zarca with Marcelo’s family. The well was one hundred feet deep, and at the bottom, they found Marcelo.
For Morales, it was horrifying to absorb the fact that the price for their environmentalism might also be exacted from their loved ones.
The police arrested a handful of local gang members, and before long, prosecutor Delgado shared his theory that Marcelo was drinking with gang-member friends and a fight broke out, during which someone killed Marcelo. The Rivera family roundly rejected that Marcelo would be casually downing beers with a gang. (Delgado did not reply to a request for comment.)
Shrake, of Pacific Rim, emphasized in a press release that the company had no involvement in the murder. “Pacific Rim is saddened and outraged by the horrible death of Marcelo Rivera,” it read. “We have always respected the rights of Marcelo and all others to participate in the mining debate, which he did in a non-violent manner,” it said. “Let us be very clear, the company has no knowledge of the crime ...but welcome[s] any and all investigations.”
To this day, the state’s explanation for Marcelo Rivera’s murder has nothing to do with his activism, and instead places the blame for his death on spontaneous gang bloodshed.
On July 30, two weeks after Marcelo’s funeral, a journalist named Isabel received a threat. She worked at a nearby community radio station, Radio Victoria, which closely covered the environmentalists' struggle. Isabel was alone in the office – the rest of the staff had gone to cover a municipal event -- when the phone rang. She answered and heard a man’s voice: “Isabel?”
“Yes, I’m Isabel, what can I do for you?” she asked.
“Ah, you ended up alone, mamita,” he sneered. “I’m here outside,” he said, “and I’m going to kill you.”
Groups of neighbors took turns guarding the Radio Victoria office every night for months thereafter; some would sleep on the floor inside the office, while others made rounds outside. “We come because we know this radio belongs to us,” one woman said at the time.
The threats mounted against the faces of resistance, so frequent that Radio Victoria journalist Elvis Zavala remembered times when he’d board a public bus and people were reluctant to let him share their seat, lest that be the place and time when he was gunned down.
In late December 2009, in the hamlet of Trinidad, two more activists were killed. The first, Ramiro Rivera, was slain on December 20, shot by assailants as he slowly scaled an unpaved road in his truck. Six days later, Dora Recinos Sorto, the wife of an activist — eight months pregnant and carrying her two-year old child in her arms — was hit in the back with bullets. Her child was shot in the leg but survived. “The message was that any member of our families that they could catch they would kill,” Radio Victoria journalist Oscar Beltrán later told me. At Dora's funeral, her six children, the oldest a teenager and the youngest a toddler, were inconsolable, throwing themselves over her body. For Morales, it was horrifying to absorb the fact that the price for their environmentalism might also be exacted from their loved ones.
Opening a mine involves a series of regulatory steps. First, companies apply for permission to explore the land. If they find minerals, they must then fulfill a slate of requirements, including a rigorous Environmental Impact Assessment, before requesting to begin mining. Pacific Rim had received permission to explore for gold in El Salvador during the administration of right-wing President Francisco Flores, who left office in 2004. The next president, Tony Saca, was from the same conservative party, but he announced that, for reasons of “principle,” he would “not grant a single permit.” When the left-wing Mauricio Funes subsequently took the presidency, in 2009, he reiterated that policy, prohibiting Pacific Rim from digging for gold.
In 2009, Pacific Rim claimed that the government’s mining ban amounted to a breach of contract, and that El Salvador owed the company $77 million to make up for their losses. The arbitration took place at the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a trade tribunal in D.C. run by the World Bank. After the arbitration began, the firm revised the amount it sought to upwards of $300 million. In 2013, Pacific Rim floundered and was acquired by an Australian company called OceanaGold, but the suit against El Salvador continued.
The Salvadoran government chose Luis Parada as its lawyer, a round-faced man with grey hair and a soft voice who had been a captain in the Salvadoran army during the civil war and still carries himself like a soldier. Based in Washington, D.C., Parada bore into issues of jurisdiction and Pacific Rim’s inability to meet the requirements that the Salvadoran state had set, like the fact that it held but a fraction of the titles it needed for the land at the site of the mine.
Mining has not yet returned, but in Cabañas, the fears that it may loomed large in the February presidential and legislative elections.
Throughout the arbitration, the environmentalist movement of Cabañas came up repeatedly. In her witness statement, an official from the Salvadoran Ombudsman's office said that she had “read the complaints and actions of resistance by the inhabitants of the area as a desperate cry in the face of the threat” of mining. A Salvadoran anti-mining coalition argued in an Amicus Curiae brief that Pacific Rim's mining attempt was just plain illegitimate; it simply did not have the right to Salvadoran land.
On October 14, 2016, the tribunal dismissed Pacific Rim's claims. El Salvador had won. It would not be forced to pay a foreign company hundreds of millions of dollars after prioritizing its water over their profit. The victory was an important one in the ICSID tribunal, where corporations typically prevail in more than fifty percent of cases. Five months later, the bitterly partisan Salvadoran congress unanimously approved a law banning all metals mining in the country. On the streets surrounding the legislature in the capital, people sang out, “No to mining, yes to life!”
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Mining has not yet returned, but in Cabañas, the fears that it may loomed large in the February presidential and legislative elections. For months beforehand, polls handed an easy victory to both Bukele and his party, Nuevas Ideas. Even before the election, Nuevas Ideas held a supermajority in congress, a power it used to push through everything the administration wanted. Given the president's apparent predilection for mining and the arrests of the Santa Marta Five, the people of Cabañas were worried about what Bukele and his acolytes would do when the few remaining democratic constraints were gone.
In his first term, Bukele had directed a destructive assault on democracy. The long list of aggressions included the persecution of opposition politicians, journalists and jurists with thinly-veiled excuses. His party had also concentrated power by erasing 70% of publicly elected mayoral and congressional seats, and redrawing the national map, reducing the number of municipalities from 262 to 44. Cabañas will lose seven municipalities — of the nine it currently has, it will only retain two — and it's unclear how this will affect the communities' ability to intercede democratically in plans for projects like mines.
[Read: Photos Inside Argentina’s Lithium Industry]
To counter Bukele in the election, a loose opposition coalition chose Parada, the anti-mining lawyer who won the arbitration against Pacific Rim. Parada was forced to conduct an odd kind of presidential run, tailored for an authoritarian climate. Campaign events were not splashy but low profile, because people were afraid to be seen as supporting a challenge to Bukele. Companies that may otherwise have donated to his campaign didn’t want their names on a non-Bukele roster. Before entering meetings, Parada nested his phone in a signal-blocking pouch to fend off attacks from spyware, which, since Bukele became president, has been used liberally against journalists and democracy activists. Parada had no campaign bank account and no campaign headquarters. He had one paid staff person — he paid her salary himself — and one volunteer. Running against Bukele was “like a chained dog fighting a free one,” Parada told me.
On election day, shortly after polls opened, alerts of anomalies began pouring in from voting stations around the country, which were dominated by Nuevas Ideas members. That evening, when the counting began, there were reports on X of poll workers allocating ballots for Nuevas Ideas even though they were clearly invalid. When the time came to submit results into the national digital system, the software errantly duplicated votes in some stations, and the internet went out in others, and amidst the mess of problems, many teams abandoned the digital system and instead recorded everything on paper.
That night, with fewer than 13% of the presidential votes analyzed, Bukele proclaimed himself winner in San Salvador. He mounted the terrace of the national palace and addressed thousands of supporters below, railing against journalists and the international community, whom he accused of being funded by George Soros and of wishing for Salvadoran bloodshed. He trumpeted that, according to his numbers, Nuevas Ideas legislators had swept 58 of 60 congressional seats, although the source of his calculations was unclear. The elections authority had issued no results, and the legislative vote count would continue for days. One week after the election, the reports of apparent fraud, including possible ballot tampering, had grown. Parada said in an open letter to international observers that he had participated in the election, despite a sure loss, because he saw it as his “responsibility to use this last opportunity at elections before this space begins to close off in the most boorishly authoritarian way.”
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Since the election, an eerie official silence continues around the renewed specter of mining. In January, a group of Central American, U.S. and Canadian experts released a report citing “compelling evidence that President Bukele desires to violate a unanimous 2017 vote in the Salvadoran legislature to prohibit mining, a move that would endanger the country’s water supply and violate the public will.”
Still, Morales fears that a next round in the mining battle will be more harrowing than the first.
The experts cited speculation that, in addition to economic woes, another reason for Bukele's interest in mining might be China, a country heavily invested in mineral extraction worldwide that has also gifted a series of megaprojects to El Salvador, including a library and an ocean-side theme park. El Salvador has joined the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, and in November 2022, the two governments also announced that they're negotiating a free trade agreement.
International pressure on the Salvadoran state for the case of the Santa Marta Five yielded a small victory: the men were awarded house arrest to await their trial, which has not yet been scheduled, with their families. In July 2023, six months after the five had been jailed, a group of U.S. congressmen sent an open letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressing "serious concerns" about the arrests, which they called “politically motivated.”
Still, Morales fears that a next round in the mining battle will be more harrowing than the first. “Before, we were hearing about evidence of activity by transnational companies,” she said. “But now, we're seeing the threat come from the state itself — the state reaching to companies and pulling them in, 'Come to us, come to us,'” she says, recalling the outsiders who have shown up coveting mining land.
She thinks constantly, often involuntarily, of the funeral of Dora Recinos Sorto, the mother of six. In witnessing those children’s grief, Morales had to face a reality so cruel that she sometimes questioned if she could carry on. Her son is keeping a low profile, fearful of additional retribution.
✺ Published in “Issue 14: Money” of The Dial.
A Spanish version of this story will soon appear in Gatopardo.