When Salvadoran legislators last month made their country the world’s first to ban all metal mining, they embraced an environmental movement sparked in 2004 by a Canadian company’s request to extract gold and silver in El Salvador’s north-central department of Cabañas. Targeting a deposit known as El Dorado, the company, Pacific Rim, sought to unearth millions of ounces of the precious metals in what would be the country’s first-ever large-scale mining operation. But green groups and social-welfare organizations banded together with academic and religious institutions to warn about the project’s environmental impacts, forming the National Coalition Against Metal Mining in June 2005. The movement attracted growing support in the ensuing 12 years, culminating in last month’s unanimous vote by El Salvador’s... [Log in to read more]