The Latin American Report # 496

A region on fire

In Peru, the murder of 13 miners who had been kidnapped a week ago has just been confirmed. The President of the Council of Ministers has been left in a morally irreparable position as he first questioned the kidnapping. The brutal event occurred in the northern region of La Libertad, Pataz province, which for a year has been declared in a state of emergency due to the bloody nightmare of illegal mining. The power of the armed wing of this activity remains intact, despite the military deployment implied by the state of emergency. The problem of insecurity in Peru, expressed fundamentally in the extortion of merchants and service providers, is a serious affront to citizens' peace that does not seem to have been curbed. The national police sent an elite brigade with the objective of capturing those responsible for the massacre in Pataz, and specialized divisions of two other units linked to the investigation of kidnappings and homicides, respectively, will also be mobilized. “Our elite agents are fully empowered to use their firearms if the circumstances warrant it,” the Ministry of the Interior informed in a statement.

Poderosa, the mining company responsible for the attacked deposit, denounces that there are already around 40 fatal victims of the gangs that support the advance of illegal mining in Pataz, “a lawless territory where violence reigns with impunity” even though the exact geolocation of the illegal mines where the criminals have their bunkers is well known. Poderosa held the General Directorate of Mining Formalization of the Peruvian Ministry of Energy and Mines directly responsible, as, it denounces, the dependence has ignored its demand to evict the illegal miners operating in its concessions. It also threw darts at Congress, but, in the meantime, the town of Tayabamba is the nucleus of pain and the cry of a society threatened and plundered by the ineptitude of its authorities. The bodies of the 13 victims, who provided services to an artisanal miner contracted by Poderosa, were found handcuffed and shot in the head and neck.

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El Salvador

The government of Nayib Bukele remains mute in the face of the compromising allegations published by the renowned media outlet El Faro, which suggest that, for better or worse, what has happened in the country in recent years regarding the gang phenomenon is due to agreements and disagreements between the gangs and the controversial leader. El Faro interviewed two gang leaders who, it is alleged, had pacts with the government and escaped from jail and the country with its complacency. This is not a new accusation. From El Faro they denounce that there was credible information that the Public Prosecutor's Office was planning to order the capture of about seven of its journalists.

The allegations suggest that Bukele's rise to power was conditioned by the pressure of certain gangs that made pacts with him. At the same time, the bloody hours that gave rise to his hard-line frontal policy, which is maintained today in the form of a disputed state of exception, would have originated in the rupture of a previous pact. “It is clear that a country at peace, without deaths, without extortion, without blood, without corpses every day, without mothers crying for their children, is not profitable for human rights NGOs, nor for the globalist media, nor the elites, nor [George] Soros”, said Bukele. Homicides have indeed been consistently reduced in El Salvador, although for many, the human rights cost has been too high.