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When Nayib Bukele launched his presidential campaign in the eastern department of La Unión in 2018, the new outsider politician stood in a street packed with supporters and promised a new airport. La Unión and the rest of El Salvador’s eastern region have historically been neglected by governments, with few infrastructure projects and widespread poverty.
Just a month later, Bukele travelled to Germany to lobby for his project. “Munich airport is interested in operating our new airport that we will build in La Unión,” he said.
A few years passed and the airport plan seemed to fade. Until last year: as the hardline president pushed for re-election, his government began to fast-track the project. After being re-elected in February 2024, Bukele – who has called himself the “world’s coolest dictator” – started clearing the way for a runway for the new Pacific Airport in the middle of one of the few remaining mangrove forests in the country.
For the Salvadoran government, the airport isn’t just an isolated project, but one that fits into a grander plan: the “Bitcoin City”, another ambitious promise from his government. Bukele envisions a tax-free economic hub, with the airport a key part of making it accessible to international investors and crypto entrepreneurs.
Elmer Martínez’s family was among 225 households displaced from his community, Flor de Mangle, and neighbouring El Condadillo to make space for the 3km runway.
Martínez, a local representative of the movement for the ancestral peoples of El Salvador, and his neighbours were first approached in 2022 by government officials. In the following years, they went through what they considered “predatory negotiations” for the agricultural-based communities to sell their homes in exchange for “inadequate compensation”.
Mangroves have suffered in the past century. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, at least 20% of the world’s mangrove forests have disappeared since 1980. El Salvador’s percentage is far higher: 60% in the past five decades.
One of El Salvador’s last saltwater forests, La Unión’s mangrove is part of the Gulf of Fonseca conservation area. It shelters abundant wildlife, including the critically endangered yellow-naped amazon (Amazona auropalliata).
Mangroves are nutrient factories, says Olga Tejada, a biologist at the University of El Salvador. “They feed the entire ecosystem and the communities that depend on them and absorb massive amounts of carbon dioxide, helping to fight climate change,” she says. “But they are fragile. Even small changes in soil salinity can kill them from the roots up.”
Studies show that intact mangrove forests can significantly reduce hurricane damage. Scientists have found that deforestation in Guerrero, Mexico, worsened the devastation caused by Hurricane Otis in 2023. La Unión’s mangroves serve a similar protective role, shielding coastal communities from extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent due to the climate crisis.
The risks of building an airport on former mangrove land go beyond environmental damage, as they could threaten the project itself. “Mangroves grow in soft, unstable soil,” Tejada says. “Even if sediment hardens over time, an airport built on it in a highly seismic country like El Salvador could be dangerously unstable.”
She points to the 2001 earthquake, a 7.7 magnitude disaster that liquefied parts of the mangrove forest.
While the government touts the La Unión airport as a gamechanger for the region’s economy, critics argue that the benefits will be concentrated in the hands of a few.
Bukele disagrees. “In 10 years, it is expected to generate 50,000 direct and indirect jobs, contributing 1.5% to the GDP annually, according to feasibility studies,” he said at an event to lay the foundation stone, last month.
According to the president, the airport would be a key resource to make Bitcoin City an attractive place for crypto-enthusiasts to live, and an express train line will connect the city to the airport and port.
But many residents say they are being shut out of the opportunities that corporate tourism giants will seize. “They tell us this will bring prosperity, but we can’t invest. And the little money they’re offering us to leave barely buys a house, let alone land to farm,” says Adan Sosa, an agricultural worker who says he was offered $75,000 (£58,000) for his home and a separate plot where he grows crops.
The rising cost of land near the airport has made it almost impossible for small businesses and local vendors to establish themselves in the new economy, leaving many to ponder who will genuinely benefit.
Land prices in the area have soared by up to 3,200% since 2000, making ownership unattainable for most residents.
For Dimas Bautista, one of the community’s founders and a lifelong fisher, the impact is already hitting home. “A few months ago, the government banned us from passing through the construction site to reach the mangroves, so now we have to take longer, riskier routes,” he says.
Bautista says the airport threatens people like him, whose livelihoods depend on the mangrove’s resources: “The animals are already leaving. Those that can’t move will probably disappear too. And when they do, so will our way of putting food on the table.”
The Bukele administration has followed a pattern of environmental deregulation, such as the reversal of El Salvador’s mining ban, the $1bn (£770m) increase in construction projects since his first term, and the continued push for monoculture crops such as sugar cane.
Tejada says mangroves are an easy target, as they are government owned and can be leased to private interests. “A lot of mangroves have been owned by individuals, and no one paid attention to a concessioned area being handed in with 100 acres [40 hectares] of mangrove and being returned with half of the forest mass,” he says.
Along with rising sea levels and agrochemical pollution, campaigners say unchecked urban development is a mounting threat to El Salvador’s mangroves. Bukele’s administration has already fast-tracked major projects, including the railway line, which will link La Unión to the rest of the country. Conservationists fear the rapid expansion will come at the expense of ecosystems that have safeguarded coastal communities for centuries.
For Martínez and his neighbours, the destruction of the mangroves isn’t just about trees – it’s about survival. “They turned our home into a cemetery,” he says, looking at the barren land where a freshwater spring once flowed. “First the forest dies, then the water. Finally, we do too.”
