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Reuters
6 days ago
- Politics
- Reuters
Peru orders mining operations restart in violence-hit north
LIMA, June 4 (Reuters) - Peru's government has restored formal mining operations in northern parts of the country that were affected by violence, Defense Minister Walter Astudillo said at a press conference on Wednesday. Last month, President Dina Boluarte suspended local mining operations after 13 gold mine workers in the northern district of Pataz were kidnapped and killed by illegal miners. Peru is the world's third-largest copper producer and most of its deposits of the key red metal are located in southern parts of the Andean nation, while gold and silver are mined further to the north.
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘Scratch the earth, there's gold!': small miners, big firms and armed gangs fight over Peru's mineral wealth
Deep in the mountains of northern Peru, a bloody war is being fought over gold. As its international price sets successive record highs above $3,000 (£2,220) an ounce, criminal gangs, illegal miners and established mining companies battle over the metal. The conflict is not fought out in the open but in a maze of tunnels that stretch for miles inside the mountains of Pataz, a gold-rich Andean province about 130 miles (200km) inland from Peru's third city, Trujillo. In early May, the bodies of 13 security workers were found shot dead, their hands bound and some showing signs of torture, in one of the tunnels belonging to an artisanal miner linked to the province's largest mining company, Poderosa. After the gruesome discovery, the government imposed a month-long ban on goldmining for all but the company and sent hundreds of soldiers and police officers to enforce a state of emergency and a nightly curfew in the province. Yet, the massacre of the security contractors, who had been hired to expel intruders, was just the most visible example of the brutal violence which, locals say, has left countless dead, many of them forcibly 'disappeared' under rocks and rubble in a labyrinth of 450 subterranean tunnels. Five hundred metres inside one mineshaft, three men armed with military-grade guns emerge from the gloom to speak to the Guardian. 'We are living moments of terror,' says the group's leader. 'Many confrontations; many compañeros [comrades] gone,' he admits when asked about how many gun battles he had fought as the violence surged in recent years. The armed gang's job is to steal mines from small miners or recover mines stolen from their employer and wrest back control, he says. Underground gunfights are inevitable and attacks can come from all sides as armed men known as parqueros steal ore – the gold-bearing rock – by tunnelling in from connecting shafts or invading the mine from other entrances. The gangs burn tyres and pump smoke into the tunnels to drive out miners. Or they attack the security guards, as when the 13 men were killed. One guard, his face masked by a green mining helmet pulled low over his head, rests his right hand rests on an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. 'We're a family,' he says, nodding at his companions in rubber boots and bulletproof vests as water drips from the rocky roof of the tunnel. He does not know much about the international gold price but, as a former soldier, he knows he earns more as a gunman than as a miner – and much more than if he worked back in Trujillo. 'We have the training,' he says. 'I do get scared,' he admits, but the monthly wage means he can support his five young children. 'It's all for gold. Pataz has wealth, which generates violence, so they hire us.' 'Your life is worth more than gold,' reads one placard. 'Without artisanal mining, many families don't eat,' reads another. They are being displayed by families in a well-organised protest against the government's suspension of all but Poderosa's mining in Pataz. For more than four decades, Poderosa has leased a mining concession from the government that encompasses much of the province. Geologically, Pataz is shot through with gold-rich veins of quartz and pyrite in abruptly steep mountains, peppered with hundreds of mineshafts. 'It's a blessing,' shouts José Torrealva, president of Pataz's artisanal mining association, in a fiery, crowd-stirring speech to the hundreds of families assembled on the town's football pitch. 'Where you scratch the earth, there's gold!' Torrealva, whom prosecutors are investigating for allegedly mining illegally, is a firebrand advocate of what he calls 'artisanal' mining. 'Who drives the economy in Pataz? We, the small miners, do,' he cries to cheers from the townsfolk. 'They are taking away our fundamental right to work. They are making laws to 'disappear' the artisanal miner,' says Torrealva, who owns companies that provide explosives and truck hundreds of tonnes of ore out of Pataz to refineries on the coast. Only those on a register of informal miners purportedly in the process of formalisation – known by its acronym Reinfo – can sell gold to Poderosa. In more than a decade, only 2% of more than 84,000 miners registering have completed the formalisation process, which requires them to pay tax and employ clean mining techniques. Earlier this month, the government removed 1,425 miners in Pataz from the Reinfo registry, meaning they can no longer sell their ore to Poderosa nor operate legally. Still, mining without a state permit is common. Many miners, such as Brandon Saldaña, 29, resent that his employer is not considered fully legal, even though he pays a team of miners. 'Everybody criminalises us, saying we're illegal, but it's not like that. They put everybody in the same bag,' he says as he sits with his fellow miners inside a shaft, smoking and chewing coca leaves laced with lime from a gourd. 'Sometimes the informal miner lacks just one document to become formal.' The bureaucratic process is slow and frustrating. Some of Saldaña's friends earn more working illegally for one of the many criminal gangs, from local gangsters La Gran Familia and Los Pulpos to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua that have taken over mineshafts. Sign up to Global Dispatch Get a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development team after newsletter promotion The invasion of criminals and outsiders started during the Covid-19 pandemic when poverty rocketed, law enforcement was focused on lockdowns and the price of gold surged to more than twice pre-Covid levels. Delmatia Jaime, 80, wishes her home town, Pataz, could return to its former tranquillity. 'Life here has changed completely,' she says. 'There is no trust or security. So many people disappear; every day there is death.' Perched on a mountainside with a white colonial church in its plaza, the narrow streets of this once-typical Andean village are now choked with brand-new 4x4s. Poderosa, an $8bn mining company, says it had no affiliation with the 13 men killed in April. But the victims worked for R&R, an unregistered company affiliated with Libmar, a firm owned by the miner Nicolás Cueva. His company sold ore to Poderosa, which buys from about 280 registered artisanal miners in the province, processes the gold on site and sells it to Canada, Japan and Switzerland. Cueva told the local press that Libmar spent 80,000to 100,000 soles (£16,000-£20,000) a month on security. He also said his company was providing support to the victims' families. Since the incident, Poderosa has hired 1,200 security guards, according to Pablo de la Flor, the company's corporate affairs manager. 'That is two security guards for every miner,' he says. 'Despite that, it has been impossible to control this spate of violence.' The organised crime networks behind the gangs of parqueros, who steal the ore, have impressive resources, says De la Flor. It's a 'risky investment' requiring heavy machinery, geologists, mining engineers, hitmen and inside information. 'In some cases, they drill tunnels that are 2km long, costing $2,000 to $2,800 a metre, so somebody is financing that operation.' Hundreds more miners who do not sell to Poderosa fuel a multibillion-dollar illicit trade in gold ore. In the last four years, 33,708 trucks loaded with 674,160 tons of ore, worth $3.5bn, left Pataz and passed police checkpoints to any one of four dozen crushing plants in a maze of industrial lots in Trujillo, according to the mining company's data. Once crushed, lorries transport it to refineries near Lima. The ingots are then shipped principally to India and the United Arab Emirates – importers with laxer standards of due diligence compared with Canada and Switzerland. In a statement to the Guardian, Poderosa expressed 'sincere condolences to the families' and said to be 'in permanent communication with Libmar so that the affected families receive the necessary support'. But Paty Carranza, 23, the widow of Frank Monzón, one of the 13 murdered men, says she has received nothing from Poderosa. She has been receiving anonymous threatening phone calls urging her to remain silent. Her three-year-old daughter still does not know her father is never coming home. 'I haven't found the courage to tell her,' Carranza says. 'She keeps asking: 'Where is Daddy? When is he taking us to the beach?' Carranza is on the second floor of a half-built breeze-block home in El Porvenir, a tough neighbourhood in Trujillo. Monzón was earning a little more than $1,000 a month, more than he could dream of making in the city, and the money paid for their home to be built. ''Your hubby has money. You'll want for nothing,' he used to joke,' Carranza recalls. In May, the suspected leader of the attackers, Miguel Antonio Rodríguez Díaz, alias 'Cuchillo', was captured in Colombia. The ex-soldier was jailed for three years on pre-trial detention while prosecutors prepared charges of organised crime, contract killing, aggravated homicide and money laundering. 'I can't get my head around how [the attackers] could have been so brutal,' says Carranza. Her partner's body was intact save for a gunshot in the back of the neck, but other bodies at the morgue showed signs of torture: broken jawbones, chests opened up, missing arms, legs, some with a head or testicles missing. 'Many people are dead inside those mines; they go inside and are never seen again,' she says. 'They sacrifice people for what? To get more gold? It is as if they need blood; that's what they did with my husband.'
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Yahoo
Peru arrests suspect in gold rush massacre
Police have arrested the main suspect in the kidnapping and murder in early May of 13 gold miners in Peru. Miguel Antonio Rodriguez Diaz, also known by the alias 'Cuchillo' (Knife), was detained in the Colombian city of Medellin on Thursday, the Ministry of the Interior in Lima said. The murders in early May put the spotlight on increasing violence provoked by a gold rush in Peru's northern Pataz district. The burned bodies of 13 missing gold miners were recovered after being reported as kidnapped by illegal miners allied with criminal armed groups. Diaz was detained in a joint operation by the Peruvian National Police, Interpol and the Colombian National Police, the Peruvian ministry stated. He is accused of 'organised crime, aggravated kidnapping, and aggravated homicide' and due to be extradited back to Peru. Colombia's police chief, Carlos Triana, wrote on X that the capture of Diaz was with the support of the United States Homeland Security Investigations agency, which is responsible for investigating transnational criminal gangs. The suspect's lawyer, Kevin Diaz, told local radio station RPP that his client had been in Venezuela for 'a few days' before returning to Colombia, where he was arrested. The wave of violence sparked by the gold rush in Pataz has led the government to establish a military facility in the area. Mining company La Poderosa, which owns the mine where the murders took place, claimed earlier this month that nearly 40 people, including contractors and miners, have been recently killed in the district by criminal gangs. The threat is of national importance. As one of Latin America's biggest gold producers, mining is a key economic avenue in Peru. However, with the financial success of the market, illegal mining has taken off. The practice involves more money than drug trafficking, amounting to $3bn-4bn per year, according to the government. That has helped bring an unprecedented wave of gang violence, with several areas of the country under a state of emergency.
Times
16-05-2025
- Times
Inside Peru's ruthless gold rush as drug gangs turn to illegal mining
In the depths where some find fortunes, Peruvian security contractors had been blindfolded and stripped naked, their hands bound. One uttered a barely audible cry for help. There would be none. The 13 men who had been held hostage at the Poderosa gold mine in Pataz, a province in northern Peru, were filmed as they were shot dead one by one. Their executioners were careful to make sure they could still be identified when the footage was sent to their families. 'Aim for the neck,' one said earlier this month. 'Not the head.' Though the precise motive for the attack remains unclear — the security contractors were guarding the mine from criminal gangs — the warning was stark: despite a 15-month state of emergency, and
Al Jazeera
16-05-2025
- Al Jazeera
Peru arrests suspect in gold rush massacre
Police have arrested the main suspect in the kidnapping and murder in early May of 13 gold miners in Peru. Miguel Antonio Rodriguez Diaz, also known by the alias 'Cuchillo' (Knife), was detained in the Colombian city of Medellin on Thursday, the Ministry of the Interior in Lima said. The murders in early May put the spotlight on increasing violence provoked by a gold rush in Peru's northern Pataz district. The burned bodies of 13 missing gold miners were recovered after being reported as kidnapped by illegal miners allied with criminal armed groups. Diaz was detained in a joint operation by the Peruvian National Police, Interpol and the Colombian National Police, the Peruvian ministry stated. He is accused of 'organised crime, aggravated kidnapping, and aggravated homicide' and due to be extradited back to Peru. Colombia's police chief, Carlos Triana, wrote on X that the capture of Diaz was with the support of the United States Homeland Security Investigations agency, which is responsible for investigating transnational criminal gangs. The suspect's lawyer, Kevin Diaz, told local radio station RPP that his client had been in Venezuela for 'a few days' before returning to Colombia, where he was arrested. The wave of violence sparked by the gold rush in Pataz has led the government to establish a military facility in the area. Mining company La Poderosa, which owns the mine where the murders took place, claimed earlier this month that nearly 40 people, including contractors and miners, have been recently killed in the district by criminal gangs. The threat is of national importance. As one of Latin America's biggest gold producers, mining is a key economic avenue in Peru. However, with the financial success of the market, illegal mining has taken off. The practice involves more money than drug trafficking, amounting to $3bn-4bn per year, according to the government. That has helped bring an unprecedented wave of gang violence, with several areas of the country under a state of emergency.
