I saw your Facebook post, I write. What’s the deal? He replies immediately.
Hola
Where are you writing from
I realized that I’d slipped up. My attempt to see if I could broker an illegal mining deal in the Madre de Dios region of Peru was at risk of derailing just two texts in. I was sitting on a balcony watching the Madre de Dios River carve its way through the Amazon rainforest. But I’d written from an American phone number. This required a more elaborate cover story, I decided—one with a topical twist. I had been in the United States, I told him, but they deported me, and now I was on my way to Madre de Dios looking for work.
His next reply was just as short and curt, but it cut straight to the heart of the matter.
And how do you plan to work
Do you have equipment.
I had got hold of his phone number via a post on the Facebook groups for La Pampa, a lawless gold boom town built by wildcat miners. “Mining partners welcome. Land with REINFO in Madre de Dios,” it said.
The REINFO, or Integral Registry for Mining Formalization, is supposed to be a pathway for informal miners to enter the formal, legal economy. But, experts say, it is often used to provide legal cover for illegal mining operations with no intention of formalizing, as well as a laundering tool for black market gold. If my new friend had secured REINFO permissions for his lands, in theory that would be because he was running an informal mining operation that he wanted to make legal. But it sounded like he had no such thing.
I’d heard of such deals. Someone with some land gets the permits, then allows miners to come in and work them in exchange for a percentage of the profits. It is exactly the same way illegal mining works—landowners are either paid off or threatened to allow miners onto their properties, then the miners come in with hydraulic pumps and hoses, blasting away the vegetation, then churning through the mud and extracting its gold deposits with mercury, leaving behind a toxic desert. But in these cases, they are allowed to do it because they have the REINFO.
I had a choice to make. Normally, while doing investigations, we are always direct and open about who we are and why we have questions. But verifying what I’d heard about how the REINFO was being abused required an honest answer from someone involved in those manipulations. So I decided in this case, it justified some virtual undercover work.
I told him I had some friends with equipment already working in La Pampa. But, I asked, will he provide anything at all or will we have to come in with everything ourselves? He replied with two words.
With everything
In other words, I was to do all the work extracting the gold, and his role was limited to providing legal cover for my otherwise illegal activities.
Today, six months later, such schemes are more important than ever. Over the last few months, La Pampa, where no REINFO permits have been issued as it borders a nature reserve, has been targeted by relentless military operations, soldiers swooping down in helicopters, blowing up whatever machinery they find, and arresting whoever they get their hands on.
The Facebook groups are lit up with debate. Some feel it is the beginning of the end of La Pampa. Others say that it is nothing but a big political show that they have to ride out. But scrolling through the message boards to gauge the mood, it was an advert that caught my eye; I felt it spoke even louder than the social media din. It was a gaudy flyer offering a way out, showing the La Pampa miners how they could carry on working without the risk of losing everything. As with the one I replied to, it invited miners to come work a concession in a region to the northwest of La Pampa. “Active REINFO,” it said.
In the end, my contact called my bluff. When I pushed him on the financial arrangements, he rang me directly. My Spanish is fluent, but it is very clearly not the Spanish of a young Peruvian miner. So I didn’t take the call. And I never found out what his cut would have been.
