Mining the New El Salvador
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.”
Read the article at: https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/beyond-the-iron-fist-mining-the-new-el-salvador/