ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents the El Salvador case, integrating his original findings with contemporary scholarship and sharing lessons that potentially might be utilized in other contexts by those seeking an alternate future to one reliant on extraction industries. El Salvador's choice to not unearth its gold resources makes it an outlier in Latin America. Immediately after the 1992 peace accords that brought El Salvador's civil war to an end, the Salvadoran government courted international mining firms, like Johansing's multi-national employer, to jump-start the industry. The spark for El Salvador's opposition to industrial mining came from within provinces possessing gold resources, ignited by local citizens who had come to believe that their country was not suitable for metals mining. There is no question that it was the community-based movement against mining in El Salvador, with some international support, that challenged the regional "extractive imperative" and ignited the local-, and then national-level, struggle that had the earliest influences on policy-makers.
