Illegal Mining

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the illegal extraction of metals and minerals from the perspectives of organized crime theory, green criminology, anti-corruption studies, and victimology. It includes contributions that focus on organized crime-related offences, such as drug trafficking and trafficking in persons, extortion, corruption and money laundering and sheds light on the serious environmental harms caused by illegal mining. Based on a wide range of case studies from the Amazon rainforest through the Ukrainian flatlands to the desert-like savanna of Central African Republic and Australia’s elevated plateaus, this book offers a unique insight into the illegal mining business and the complex relationship between organized crime, corruption, and ecocide. This is the first book-length publication on illegal extraction, trafficking in mined commodities, and ecocide associated with mining. It will appeal to scholars working on organized crime and green crime, including criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars. Practitioners and the general public may welcome this comprehensive and timely publication to contemplate on resource-scarcity, security, and crime in a rapidly changing world.

The explosive story of the illegal gold trade from South America, and the three Miami businessmen who got rich on it—until it all came crashing down. In March of 2017, a team of federal agents arrested Juan Pablo Granda, Samer Barrage, and Renato Rodriguez, or as they came to be known, "the three amigos." The trio—first identified publicly by the authors of this book—had built a $3.6 billion dollar business in metals trading, mostly illegal Peruvian gold mined in the rain forest. Their arrest and subsequent prosecution laid bare more than a scheme between a few corrupt traders. Dirty Gold lifts the veil on a massive and very illegal international business that is more lucrative than trafficking cocaine, and often just as dangerous. As this award-winning team of current and former Miami Herald reporters shows, illegal gold mines have become a haven for Latin American drug money. The gold is sold to metals traders, and ultimately to scores of unwitting Americans in their jewelry and phones. By following the trail of these three traders, Dirty Gold leads us into a sprawling criminal underworld that has never before been in full view.

In recent decades, gold mining has moved into increasingly remote corners of the globe. Aside from the expansion of industrial gold mining, many countries have simultaneously witnessed an expansion of labor-intensive and predominantly informal artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Both trends are usually studied in isolation, which contributes to a dominant image of a dual gold mining economy. Counteracting this dominant view, this volume adopts a global perspective, and demonstrates that both industrial gold mining and artisanal and small-scale gold mining are functionally integrated into a global gold production system. It couples an analysis of structural trends in global gold production (expansion, informalization, and technological innovation) to twelve country case studies that detail how global gold production becomes embedded in institutional and ecological structures.

Based on studies from countries in Africa, South America and Asia, looks at small-scale mining activities which often are both illegal and environmentally damaging, and dangerous for workers and their communities. Gives an overview on the issues and challenges involved, concluding about how sustainable development can be achieved.

y global social, agrarian and political changes, whilst underlining the roles that local social political-historical contexts play in shaping mineral extractive processes and practices. It shows that the people who are engaged in these mining practices are often the poorest and most exploited labourers-erstwhile peasants caught in the vortex of global change, who perform the most insecure and dangerous tasks. Although these people are located at the margins of mainstream economic life, they collectively produce enormous amounts of diverse material commodities and find a livelihood (and often a pathway out of oppressive poverty). The contributions to this book bring these people to the forefront of debates on resource politics. The contributors are international scholars and practitioners who explore the complexities in the histories, in labour and production practices, the forces driving such mining, the creative agency and capacities of these miners, as well as the human and environmental costs of ASM. They show how these informal, artisanal and small scale miners are inextricably engaged with, or bound to, global commodity values, are intimately involved in the production of new extractive territories and rural economies, and how their labour reshapes agrarian communities and landscapes of resource access and control. This book drives home the understanding that, collectively, this social and economic milieu redefines our conceptualisation of resource politics, mineral dependent livelihoods, extractive geographies of resources and commodities, and their multiple meanings.

The purpose of this book is to examine both the positive and negative socioeconomic impacts of artisanal and small-scale mining in developing countries. In recent years, a number of governments have attempted to formalize this rudimentary sector of industry, recognizing its socioeconomic importance. However, the industry continues to be plagued by

Join the deadly journey of cocaine, from farmer to kingpin. Meet Maria. Maria doesn't see herself as a criminal. She's just a farmhand picking the crops that never lose money- coca. This is Cachote. He prays to the Virgin of the Assassins that his bullets find their target. If he misses, he'll have to answer to the cartel who pay him to take out their enemies. Pedro works the coca labs. But this laboratory is hidden deep in the jungle, and he turns coca leaves in to coca paste, a step just short of cocaine. And finally, here is Alex. Alex is a drug-lord and decides where the drug goes next- into Europe or the US. And he wields the power of life and death over everyone around him. In Kilo, Toby Muse takes us deeper into the drug trade than ever before, following a kilo of cocaine as it travels from its origins to the street. On the ground in the drug war for over a decade, earning the trust of those involved on all sides, Toby Muse takes us with him through the endless blood-soaked horror and economic logic at every level of the journey of the world's most alluring and dangerous drug. We come to meet and ultimately understand the tainted personal psychology and motivations of each player in this dark El Dorado. But there are no winners here. Anyone who tries to hold the power of the 'white goddess' cocaine is ultimately undone, violently stripped of their humanity, their souls and their lives in this endless, pointless dance of death.