We’ve seen this claim on social media in the recent days about gold mines being found in El Salvador. According to posts such as the one below, which garnered over 17 million views, this is a new discovery and is worth $3 trillion.
As an industry, gold mining has been critiqued for its detrimental impacts on the environment (with high water and carbon footprints), eco-systems and human health. In 2017, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban metal mining. This has been a contentious issue in recent years, with the current government (under different leadership from 2017) seemingly making moves to reverse the ban even as environmental groups and anti-mining groups continue to advocate against it.
Despite the numerous posts with similar headlines making the same claim about the $3 trillion gold discovery, our research suggests that the source of these claims is less than reliable – this despite the source in question being the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. Bukele posted a thread on X on 28 November about gold mining and later delivered a speech on the same topic on 3 December.In his speech, Bukele is translated as saying, “the potential amount of gold that El Salvador has is $3 trillion…it is over 8000% of El Salvador’s GDP.” This number appears to be derived from findings Bukele previously mentioned in his X posts – taken from an (as yet) unnamed study that assessed 4% of an area being proposed as a potential gold mining site.
According to this study, 50 million ounces of gold were identified in the area – valued at around $131.6 billion. By extrapolating this figure to calculate the potential amount of gold in 100% of the proposed area, it is possible to reach a value of over $3 trillion.Although El Salvador has regions with large deposits of minerals, this figure is, at best, a projection or speculation that cannot be treated as fact. For one, there is no guarantee that the 4% area studied is representative of the entire area. And, Bukele has not cited the study, which does not appear to be currently published anywhere –making it impossible to verify and fully assess for credibility.
While Bukele’s post and speech does include qualifiers such as “potential,” this has not been adopted by the platforms and posters who have focused on the large $3 trillion figure and shared it as “BREAKING NEWS” across social media.
Therefore, we give the claim that El Salvador has discovered $3 trillion worth of gold a rating of mostly false. There is no widely accepted evidence (although this could change) that such a vast amount of gold exists, and posters on social media are misrepresenting speculative projections as a real discovery.