
In a revealing interview on the program “Las Cosas Como Son” (The Way Things Are) with journalist Natan Vaquiz, Mrs. Mélida Villatoro, a Salvadoran native of Jocoro, Morazán, who has previously served as a deputy in the Legislative Assembly, shared her experiences and memories about the gold mining that took place in her community and the country in the last century.
She particularly highlighted how the mining company responsible for extracting gold from El Salvador took virtually all the gold to London (United Kingdom) in the form of gold bars, conducting a historic plundering of El Salvador’s wealth.
The Plunder of Gold Bars to London
The experiences and testimony she recounts date back to the 1950s, a time when Mrs. Mélida Villatoro was a child and lived near the famous mines of Montecristo, San Sebastián, and El PotosÃ.
In those times, mining activity was a crucial economic driver for the area. However, according to Mélida, the fruits of that wealth in the form of gold bars were not seen by El Salvador, as they were taken to London. In other words, they merely looted the gold from El Salvador to take it to the capital of the United Kingdom.
“Suddenly, that stopped (referring to the suspension of mining in the gold mines), and I asked my father, who worked in the San Sebastián mines taking care of them: ‘Dad, what happened to the mines?’ ‘Well, you see, daughter,’ he told me, ‘they took everything (the gold), leaving nothing in El Salvador. No one talked about anything else; they just took everything to London, large amounts of gold.'” These are the words of Mrs. Mélida Villatoro as a testimony of what happened in the 1950s in El Salvador, specifically in the mines near where she lived.
The mines were exploited by foreign companies, mainly British and Canadian, which sent the gold bars directly to London. If you want to hear the words of Mrs. Mélida Villatoro as a witness to what happened, we have attached the full interview. The part of the interview we are interested in at the moment starts at 25:10 minutes.
Mélida recalls how Mr. Thomson, a British manager, lived in Jocoro and was responsible for supervising the transport of gold to London. This testimony solidifies the fact that Salvadoran natural wealth enriched other nations that were already wealthy, exploiting their power to plunder weaker and smaller nations.
Other Mentioned Points
In addition to reflecting on these historical injustices, Mélida Villatoro also briefly mentioned Pacific Rim, a company that operated in El Salvador about 20 years ago, which was later acquired by another mining company called OceanaGold. The company Pacific Rim did not benefit El Salvador at all. During the interview, Mélida also underscored the urgent need to adopt modern mining technologies, eliminating the use of mercury and cyanide.
Mining that does not pollute the rivers could represent an opportunity to improve conditions in El Salvador, provided it is managed ethically and fairly. Mélida’s words also lead us to reflect on the positive economic impact of mining in local communities such as Santa Rosa de Lima, towns that have historically grown around this activity.
The people of these communities have traditionally extracted gold without any companies like those mentioned earlier. This extraction of precious metals has helped the population in these areas.
Final Words
In El Salvador, the Constitution of the Republic in Article 103 establishes that everything in the subsoil belongs to the State, so no foreigner or foreign company can come to El Salvador to buy lands for the purpose of exploiting subsurface resources.
The companies that took advantage of El Salvador’s wealth did what they did with the concession of the Salvadoran government of that time, but when it was discovered what they were doing and how they were stealing the gold, they were denied the continuation of their mining operations.
In the end, that gold they took has never been seen by the Salvadoran people to this day.
El Salvador’s goal should be to never again allow another country to take advantage of and plunder it. Every country in the world has the right to utilize its own natural resources without people from elsewhere coming and claiming as theirs what does not belong to them.