Over the last decades, Indonesia has experienced the salt complex problem. The government has developed various alternative policies to solve this problem. One such policy extends salt land. The government has argued that salt land expansion is necessary to produce more salt in Indonesia. This study aimed to investigate how salt crisis narratives have been employed to release land from customary tenure. Additionally, this paper highlights the long-term agrarian dynamics and state enclosure that remain as contested as the dynamics within the state–society–capital nexus. Our findings, based on empirical evidence from rural Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia, suggest that salt crisis narratives successfully mobilized various levels of state institutions to legitimize large scale salt land investment. Although the political regime in Indonesia has transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy, the government continues to dispose of peasants from their land.