El Salvador: a country between a ban and its first concession
The Ley de Prohibición de la Minería Metálica of 2017 made El Salvador the first country to ban metal mining outright. In December 2024 the Assembly repealed it and passed a Ley General de Minería Metálica; a constitutional challenge filed in 2025 was unresolved in March 2026 and protests were still running in June 2026. In February 2026 the government announced it would explore critical minerals for a United States strategic reserve. No metal mining concession has been publicly reported as granted under the new law. The regulator is the Dirección General de Energía, Hidrocarburos y Minas inside the Ministerio de Economía.
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- The DGEHM's authorised-quarries table, live HTML, 65 quarries with project name, holder, department, municipality, district and material: the only concession-shaped record in the country, none of it metallic, with no ids or dates.
- The DGEHM's procedures pages (concession transfer, temporary authorisation, exploitation concession, exploration licence).
- Concessions: the DGEHM's section on the national transparency portal exists, is correctly labelled, and reports zero found, zero in force.
- A current legal library: the DGEHM's page of applicable laws still lists the 2017 ban and not the December 2024 law, nine months after the biggest change to its mandate.
- Any accident, inspection, sanction or production dataset.
- A live signal: 47 Google News items on Salvadoran mining carried zero fatalities; the coverage is law and politics.
There is no metal mining to die in yet, and quarry deaths reach no record. The count on this site is none, and that is a fact about publication, not about safety.
The Ley de Acceso a la Información Pública, with the IAIP as oversight and transparencia.gob.sv as the portal; a request goes to the institution's Oficial de Información. The statutory deadline was not verified against the statute (the Assembly's decree search 404s and the case-law search 403s), so it is not quoted here. The realistic ask is the concession register the portal section is meant to hold, once there is anything in it.
The first metallic concession granted under the new law, where it is published, and the outcome of the constitutional challenge. When a concession exists, the quarry table plus the concession makes El Salvador a register country.
DGEHM, authorised quarries (live table). →
Transparency portal, DGEHM concessions section (empty). →
IAIP, Instituto de Acceso a la Información Pública. →
Each source was opened on 15 September 2026 from a US egress; a host that answered differently that day is described as it answered.