The true cost of El Salvador’s new gold rush
On the afternoon of 17 May 2023, in the rural El Salvador state of Cabañas, Vidalina Morales’s mobile 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. He’d been arrested while playing football 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 the Salvadoran environmentalist movement. About 5ft tall and 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 organisation in Cabañas called the Association for Social and Economic Development (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: since 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 operations, and joined an international 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. She later recounted that the inspector insisted that the police had a photo of him on file, 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 exceptional measures declared by the Bukele administration in March 2022. Many of those behind bars have had no due process and may be in great danger.
Morales spent the ensuing hours raising the alarm in Santa Marta, the tight-knit rural community where she has 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