That was then.

President Nayib Bukele is now calling for a reversal of the landmark ban, claiming that beneath the country's fertile soil lies an untapped fortune. According to Bukele, the small Central American nation sits atop an estimated $3 trillion in unmined gold reserves—a potential jackpot that could radically transform El Salvador's financial future.

"We potentially have the largest gold deposits per square kilometer in the world," Bukele declared on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). He claimed that extracting just 4 percent of the country's gold deposits could generate approximately $131 billion, a sum equivalent to 380 percent of El Salvador's current GDP.