On gold – The Economist:

‘The miners’ chants filled the main square of Trujillo, a city on Peru’s northern coast. Many of them had travelled from Pataz, a province deep in the Andean hinterlands where a gang recently murdered 13 guards working in a gold mine. “There’s a lot of crime in the mountains,” said a man with a white hard hat. In response to the killings, Peru’s government imposed a month-long ban on mining in Pataz. But the protesters wanted to return to work. “The miners of Pataz are not criminals. We demand the right to work,” read a woman’s t-shirt.
As the largest producer of gold in Latin America, Peru has been particularly hard hit by a wave of violence linked to illegal mining in the region. Poderosa, a mining company, says 39 workers have been killed in Pataz in the past three years. Two mass graves have been discovered there since October. In January the prosecutor’s office in Trujillo was bombed.’

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‘Meanwhile, coca-bush cultivation in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru has doubled since 2010. Many gangsters are worried that cocaine may become less profitable, so they are piling into the illegal gold market. The two criminal activities complement each other. In the Amazon, coca farms and illegal gold mines often share the same infrastructure, such as landing strips for aircraft. Gangs invest their earnings from drug-trafficking in mining projects, whose output can be laundered and sold as though it had been dug up legally.
In Colombia and Peru gangs are now thought to make more money from gold than from the sale of narcotics. The Peruvian Institute of Economics, a research outfit in Lima, the capital, reckons the country exported $4.8bn of illegal gold last year (see chart). That would represent 44% of Peru’s total gold exports, up from 20% a decade ago. In Brazil the government estimates that gangs earned more than 18bn reais (around $3bn) from the sale of gold in 2022, compared with 15bn reais from cocaine.’

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‘Luis Miguel Castilla, a Peruvian former finance minister, worries about his country’s future: “I see a lot of similarities with the 1980s, when armed groups controlled large parts of the country.” Across the region, dealing with illegal mining will require a rethink. Redirecting national budgets would help. Peru’s government allocated $73m to combat drug-traffickers in this year’s budget, compared with a puny $17.5m to stop illegal mining. But crackdowns alone will not be enough. Without proper regulation of the sector, it will remain easy for gangs to move from one mineral-rich province to another. As the world gobbles up gold, Latin America bleeds.’

Read the article here.

Gold, the new cocaine?

And the problems in Peru have never been solved. The new violence is unlike the guerilla warfare in the 80s without idealism, no Marxism, no Maoism, just gangs fighting each other and the government.

Gold replaced Marx and Mao.