Key facts:
Finance Minister Alejandro Zelaya accused the media of being biased.
Zelaya denies that they have lost money because they have not sold the bitcoins.
The fact that El Salvador became the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender brings with it the attention of the eyes of the world for better or worse. The fall in the price of bitcoin to 2020 levels now generates criticism for the purchases of the cryptoactive made by the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele.
In this sense, the Minister of Finance of El Salvador, Alejandro Zelaya, stepped out of the comments that they assure that the Central American nation has lost more than USD 40 million of national reserves in that crypto asset.
Zelaya clarified that “they speculate with a supposed loss of USD 40 million that has not occurred, because we have not sold the coins, they have not been alienated,” he told a local media.
the official targeted some media for making “biased reports” and denied that the country faces a fiscal risk. “Oh my God! Our budget is almost USD 8 billion; USD 40 million does not even represent 0.5% of our budget », he limited.
He also maintains that they do everything to attack bitcoin and not El Salvador. In his opinion, the country is what interests them the least (the media), just as they are not interested in what happens to the economy, they are not interested in what happens to the people or what happens to inflation.
“When they say that the fiscal risk of El Salvador for Bitcoin is very high, the only thing it does is make me laugh, and I think that any serious economist should do the same, because it is an extremely superficial analysis and they speak from ignorance,” Zelaya said. .
Criticism grows against Bukele and bitcoin
The dramatic drop in the price of bitcoin, whose lowest point was USD 20,800, during this day, aroused the criticism from other sectors of Salvadoran life.
As reported by CriptoNoticias, the political scientist Inés Martínez, president of the NGO D’Politic of El Salvador, criticized the Bukele government’s decision to buy bitcoin and spoke about the promises they have made.
“He promised 50 schools ‘with the profits from bitcoin,’ but all he did was lose more than USD 50 million to date, money from the Salvadoran people,” said Martínez.
The truth is El Salvador has accumulated 2,301 bitcoins valued at an average price of USD 44,189which represents an investment of more than USD 100 million, according to the announcements made by Bukele on the social network Twitter.
So far, ten bitcoin purchases have been made between September 6, 2021 and May 9, although there is no access to public data with details about crypto asset purchasesThere is no way to officially confirm it. It is also not possible to check if they have sold bitcoins, according to Salvadoran bitcoiner and developer Nelson “Ishikawa” Garay.