The Underworld Podcast - Shafted: How Cartels are Killing for Rare-Earths

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Bolivia's Cerro Rico has been spewing out tons of silver for centuries. It was the economic bellows of the Spanish Revolution, whose lust for the precious metal came at the price of some eight million slaves. Some of the empire's earliest gangs formed around the Cerro. They were called ‘Jukus,’ and one man stood above (or below) them all. Today's there's another, modern silver rush at Cerro Rico — and it's being led by the green energy revolution. EVs, wind turbines and data centers are all hungry for silver. Its price has almost quadrupled. That has brought a new wave of organized crime to Bolivia. This time they're smart, and armed. And the only people holding them back are a band of women packing nothing but dogs and sticks of dynamite. But Bolivia isn't alone. The race for rare-earth minerals has drawn cartels to mines across Latin America, killing miners and taking over entire operations from Quito to Cali. This documentary-style episode digs into organized crime's newest trend — and shows how dirty clean energy really is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast.

I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Haven't you heard? The Green Revolution is here. Fully electric car sales in December overtook petrol for the first time in the European Union. That was despite policymakers proposing to loosen emissions regulations. The EU unveiled in December a plan to abandon an effective 2035 ban on combustion engine cars,

bowing to calls from struggling carmakers. analysts expect EVs to gain in popularity despite the policy relaxation. Electric vehicle sales are surging with demand fueled by record high petrol prices, inflation and interest rates. Motorists are scrambling to cut costs, sending new and second-hand EV sales skyrocketing. Solar energy is the cheapest it's ever been, nearly 90% cheaper than it was just in 2009. In a lot of places, it is now cheaper to generate electricity. with solar than with coal, natural gas, or nuclear power.

This is an unqualified success story. And if we can take the right lessons from it, this story can help us create and deploy all the other technology we will need to keep our planet livable. Rare earth minerals are used in almost every technology you can think of. They're present in cell phones, medical devices, wind turbines, weapons, and much more. Recent negotiations between the United States and Ukraine, Ukraine regarding military assistance have brought rare earth elements into the spotlight.

We're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now. With us, you start having things. Escalating trade tensions between the U.S. and China have further underscored their strategic geopolitical significance. Trump was just in China, and most of the headlines focused on trade, on Taiwan, diplomacy, and of course the war with Iran. But honestly, the bigger story is energy. Because while the current administration continues fighting against renewables,

China has spent the last few decades building the industries that are shaping global energy. Green energy is getting better and cheaper faster than we had ever dared hope. This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago. The energy think tank ember found in April that all, all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild. Before you know it, we'll all be flying around in driverless electric cars, fueling our homes with wind turbines and solar panels, and optimizing the whole lot with cutting-edge AI. Our sons and daughters will be living like the Jetsons, enjoying a safe and shiny utopia without

all those dirty fossil fuels clogging the skies and turning our planet hotter than a penguin in a Pakistani pig pen. If only we can get all this stuff out of the ground. You see, when it comes to clean energy, a ground don't come for free. batteries, data centres, display units, they all need a very specific array of minerals to function. And sure, there are your rare earths, your serium, your dysprosium, your presidimit, that one. But the technologies we're told will save us all need metals that we've been digging up since spades were considered high tech. Copper, nickel, zinc, gold and silver.

There's a hell of a lot of this stuff in Latin America, around $100 billion worth of it by most estimates. And where there's that kind of cash swilling around, you can bet it'll attract the region's most ruthless and enterprising business leads. Yes, crooks are getting in on the global green revolution. You knew that because you pressed play on this episode. What you probably don't know is just how deadly the situation already is.

Ecuador is in the grip of a deadly gold rush. On paper, the country's a mid-tier gold exporter, but its illegal trade is among the biggest in Latin America, and it's controlled by the country's most powerful drug gangs. The government has deployed thousands of soldiers to shut down these illegal mines, but the criminal groups who run them are fighting back. Starting sadly with a bombing at a nightclub in Peru, which has left 33 people injured, including several miners. Authorities say the explosion happened at the Dolly Nightclub in Trujillo along the country's

northern coasts. Some of the victims suffered sharpnel wounds and amputations and at least five people are in serious condition. The region has seen a surge in violence and extortion tied to organized crime. On the border of Colombia and Venezuela, tensions are escalating over access to minerals of high geostrategic value. We have much of care of. Rare earth elements, essential to electric vehicles, AI, renewable energy, and a defense industry. It can be titanium, it's the base for this new revolution that's presenting in the world. As competition of a resource deposits and intensifies, so does the violence that increasingly turns the Amazon into a geopolitical chessboard.

Even Trump's latest intervention in Venezuela is about more than just oil. This new resource frenzy exposes a paradox. Minerals for a green future and defense capacities, fuel violence and environmental destruction and indigenous lands in world's largest tropical rainforest. Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, there isn't a Latin American nation without its share of massive illegal mining. That's not new. What is, is that the gangs, the bandits, the narcos and the cartels, they're getting in

on the Act 2. Hold your hard hats and check your harnesses, guys. This week we're heading, quite literally. April 2026. I'm in a beat-up bus, weaving through morning traffic and cinder block market stalls in the Bolivian city of Potter C. At almost 16,000 feet above sea level, this remote and browbeaten town is one of the highest on earth.

The sky is grey and frozen, the ground a filthy patchwork of mud and snow. I can barely catch my breath, but I'm heading uphill. Around 20 minutes from here, the foot of a mountain that has loomed over little pottersea, both literally and figuratively, for almost half a millennium. Cerroico, or rich mountain in English, is not a pretty place. Its shallow, boggy flank is quilted in criss-crossing dirt tracks and tin roof shacks. At its summit, a giant, jagged caldera that looks like the mouth of a sandworm from June. Below it, and all around the mountain, a tiny black holes like pockmarks on a teenager's skin.

These are the mineshaas that have turned Cerro Rico into one of the most over-exploited places on the planet, a hulking slab of Swiss cheese in the high Andes. There are around 600 mines in total, each one burrowing deep into the mountains bowels, overlapping each other five or ten times, creating what some people believe might be more than 20,000 tunnels. It's barely any wonder then that experts have been predicting the collapse of Cerroico for decades. But there's money in them that are hills, lots of it. Cerrorico is pregnant with tin, zinc, lead, but chiefly silver.

For years, the price of silver remained relatively stable. Then came renewable energy. The Green Revolution is hungry for silver. Its conductivity helps transmit electricity in the cells of solar panels. It's the perfect component for an electric vehicle battery. It's a catalyst in the production of hydrogen cells, 5G networks, water purification. Four years ago, silver traded at under $20 an ounce. Now, almost 70 bucks.

This has helped spark a silver. the rush, the likes of which Pottersy hasn't seen for centuries. 30,000 miners now work up in the mountains, up from 20,000 a year ago. And with China in the US competing to become the world's green energy giants, Cerro diacol has suddenly reclaimed its status as a high-stakes geopolitical prize. Silver brokers hang out in Potency bars in the Bolivian capital, La Paz, and on the country's borders. Cargo ships lie in dock in Peru, Chile, and Ecuador, fat with black market silver. And as the metals price keeps soaring and the industry to get it

out of potter see grows, crime at Cerro Rico has gone from low-rent banditry to something altogether more organized and deadly. There are no effective controls, either institutional nor police. You go to a certain place, you take out everything you have to take out, and you know where you have to go. That's Alfredo Zacconeta, an investigator at the Center for Labor and Agrarian Development Studies in He knows more than just about anybody about Bolivia's mining sector. Up to 80%, 8.0 of the market is illegal or informal, making criminals some $4 billion a year. That's around 7% of GDP in Bolivia, where most people make around 500 bucks in month. It's also a hell of a lot of money for a poor country to lose. There are tons of illegal operations that take out this load and bring

it to places where clandestine engineers have been installed. They don't have authorization. They don't have environmental licenses. The criminals take the loads to these points, process them, and then after that, they transfer them to the city, where the clandestine engineers get away with their work through political corruption. That doesn't sound great unless you're in a legal minor.

But I don't just want to speak to experts while I'm in Bolivia, I want to visit Cerro Rico to be at the coal face, the silver face? To meet the folks battling mining's new crime wave head on. And at Cerro Rico, that means hanging out with the women. Yes, women fighting back. These women don't have guns. They don't even carry knives. But they are wier than Bugs Bunny and tougher than a marathon on a hangover.

In other words, they are 100% copper-bottomed badasses. Very good days. I'm a lot of Lucia, my son. This is Lucia Armijo. She's 52 years old, over 30 of which she's lived at Cerro Rico. Lucia is one of 180 or so, so-called Guarda Bocaminas, literally the guards of the mouths of the mines. She's worked outside the one where stood at, not far up the side of the mountain,

for over three years and lives in a tiny shack next door. There are around 180 women here. We all work with our kids. We want our kids to be professionals, but it's in vain. They can't work down there in the city, and some of them can't afford a house there. Each month, one of the dozens of mining cooperatives that operates at Cerro Rico pays Lucia between 500 and 1,000 Bolivianos,

between $42 and 84 U.S. dollars. On a good month, that's still less than half the national minimum wage. There's no holiday pay and Christmas bonuses are a basket of sugar, bread and Coca-Cola. The living conditions here are very bad. For the guards, there is no light, no water. We barely manage to live in Cerro Rico. Like the miners whose tunnels they protect, the Guards drink rainwater to survive,

water that is full of harmful metals and chemical compounds. The mountain often trembles, building means crack. A near daily reminder that Cerro Rico could collapse at any moment, killing everybody in and on it. For years, these were the biggest dangers stalking Lucia and her ferro Guardsas. Not anymore. And she knows it. Peliga, we live in the serra. Jukos caminan. Chou. A word in the indigenous Quechua language, Lucia's mother tongue. It means owl, clandestine mineral thieves, nocturnal scavengers who travel deep into the mountain,

to steal sacks of precious metals. Years ago, these were just small-time bandits. Groups of maybe two, three or four guys who'd squirrel up the side of Cerro Rico, not crucially inside it. It comes from a long time ago. 20 or 30 years, more or less, much earlier before,

they would simply go to the mouth of the mind. There, there are little houses where the miners keep their work tools, keep explosive material, the machines, all that. Before, the hookus went and made a hole in the side of the building and stole it. But now, the hookus say, I don't care about that anymore. So they dedicate themselves to going inside the mines to steal minerals. that's that's what you have. I don't me interest in the silla,

then, simply, that's Basilio Vargas, a 36-year-old miner who's my guide at Cerro Rico. He's been working at the mountains since he was a small boy. In fact, in 2005,

Basilio and his little brother Bernardino were featured in the award-winning documentary The Devil's Mine about Cerro Rico. Since a 23 accident during which Basilio plunged 170 feet down a shaft, cracking his skull-knee and Colobone, he's been trying to get into other work. But the price of silver is just too

damn high to give up his subterranean life. In my job, journalism, you meet a lot of people. You have to keep your distance. But I like Basileo. We talk about football, our kids. He's honest, what my old man would call a grafter. He glommed onto me quicker than glue when I arrived in pottersee. Sometimes I hate that. This time, I appreciated it. Whatever it takes to get through, right? Huckus have always scared Basilio, but they were chances before. Today, he says,

they are way more organized. Because of the price of the mineral. Now the price of the mineral is good. Obviously, the huckus know and know the mine very well. They know where to go. If you want to record videos or you want to call the police,

they are fearless, completely fearless. They can shoot you. You ever heard the phrase don't bring a knife to a gunfight? Lucia and the Guadro de Bocaminas, they don't even have knives. They walk here to the mouth of the mine.

Then they work, taking the minerals in sacks. They rob them. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they come. 30, 40, everywhere. They come like soul. There are violations.

Everything happens in the city. The police are also here, but they don't come. It's dangerous to work in the city, more dangerous than before. Before, we worked in peace, but now it's more dangerous, with weapons. With guns? With guns. How do you defend against guns? Nothing comes from the bosses.

See is only line of defense against this onsla? Well, one, a pack of eight shaggy dogs, who are hardly eating steak each night, and sticks of dynamite, which Lucia tosses at the hookus to scare them away. So far, it's mostly worked. But the hookahs numbers just keep on growing, and each time a new wave comes, it's cannier and better equipped. There was a confrontation between the hookus and the cooperatives, and a hooku killed somebody.

They scare us. Organized crime at Cerro Rico? Mineral cartels? These are new phenomena, fueled by clean energy thirst for precious metals. But crime, that has been a part of Cerro L' landscape going all the way back to the birth of its mining industry. In fact, you could make a pretty good case that Cerro Hico

has been a gangster's paradise from the very beginning. Dale, cue the Spanish guitar. It's 1545, and an indigenous prospector named Diego Hualpa has just discovered colossal deposits of silver in a mediocre peak of the Bolivian Andes. Within a year, Spanish conquistadors have founded the town of Via Imperial, later Potosi, to serve an unprecedented silver rush. And by the 1570s, what is now called Cerro Rico is the epicenter of a new global economy. Over 160,000 people will flock there over the coming decades, making Potosi the biggest city in the Hispanic world, far bigger than Madrid, Mexico City or Seville, and shoveled their quarry onto the backs of beasts of burden.

The silver is then carried a couple of miles into the centre of the city to the majestic Casa de la Moneda or Imperial Mint. Then the metal is blasted, squished into ribbons and cut into millions of small round coin. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.

Your summer travels deserve an upgrade. With select Chevrolete, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac vehicles connected by OnStar, you can stream, game, and more on the go. Whether you're headed to a music festival or a cottage getaway, you can access hundreds of apps on Google Play right from your center display. Explore OnStar Tech today at OnStar.ca and discover how to take your summer to the next level. OnStar. Better never stops. Want to talk ETS with the people behind them? Join me, Etienne Jean-Jacqueshaw on the Upside Ticker Talk. We dive into what's moving markets with timely analysis, trends, and answers to

ETF questions you've actually been thinking about. Hit play on the upside ticker talk and elevate your ETF investing IQ. These are the Real de Aoucho, or to use their English name, Pieces of Eight. Yeah, those pieces of eight. Once they're minted, pieces of eight are loading onto llamas and dispatched on a two-month journey across the Andes to Lima and other Pacific ports where they're sent into circulation. It's an efficient process. And given the Spanish Empire stretches all the way from Acapulco to Manila, it's no surprise that by the 18th century, around half of all the money on earth is in pieces of eight. They are the global monetary system, capitalism.

Everyone from Philippine casiques to Chinese tea traders uses them. In fact, you know the squiggly S with the two lines we now know as the dollar sign? That comes from the back of a piece of eight. It's the twin pillars of Hercules wrapped in ribbons. And it's where we get the current word Pesso, which is still the name of currency in eight modern nations, including the one where I live. All of this made a select few Spanish colonists filthy rich. Potosi's first coat of arms, for example, carried the phrase,

I am rich potter see. I am the treasure of the world. I am the king of the mountains, the envy of kings. But if monarch's eyes turned green at the sight of all that silver sprouting out of Serro Rico, poor people saw something altogether darker. The Spaniards might have made their billions in the mountains depths, but they never went there. That was the job, or rather the order, of millions of black African and indigenous Andean slaves. You might think that mining by torchlight with little more than explosives and rudimentary picks was a perilous task. You'd be right. Work in the mines was dangerous, desperate and miserable.

By some estimates, 8 million people have died inside Cerro Rico, which is why those who survived knew it by a different name, the mountain that eats men. And that's not all. Cerro rico's unparalleled wealth attracted criminal attention too. The crime is one of the most important experience in the potosi of the past. Because during the 16th century, potosi ground around the rich silver mountain. And all the people with law or with crime develop their wealthy.

Daniel Oropesa Alba is Director General of the Casa de la Monera in downtown Possossolsi. We're meeting Daniel's office, a grand library-esque tangle of desks and lever-bound books that sits to the side of the complex's main in a courtyard. Daniel is the fifth generation of his family to work at the Mint, and he has spent most of his adult life digging into its deep and deeply dark past. And when it comes to crime, one historical figure stands above them all, despite his stature. Here's Daniel again, this time in his native Spanish.

El Duende, the little elf. El Duende, the little elf. In Potosi, we have an old story about El Duende, who was a very dangerous criminal during the 17th century. He was a slave of African origin, very famous for his skill with the sword, the knife, and the dagger. Besides that, he was a strong man,

and he faced many trials for theft, rape, and murder. He was a very dangerous man. They called him El Duende because he was very small and would surprise people in the black of night. Being a slave, a person of African origin, and being enslaved, he practically instilled terror in the population. When they heard about El Duende, in those times, everyone was horrified. Many judges tried to execute him because his crimes carried the death penalty.

But he always managed to escape, thanks to his knife skills. And he was also a man who, for money, you could say a hitman, could easily dispatch your enemies. The story of El Dweende is a rather dangerous one. Many old people, grandparents in Potosi, still remember El Duende as a terrible thief, who gripped all of Potosi in suspense. The crime at Saro Rico didn't end without Duende, even if nobody. He rose to such legendary heights after his death. Hookles were part of the landscape all the way up until now, Daniel tells me.

Looking out of his office window and across the courtyard, we can both see the so-called Mascaron, a joking, almost sinister character whose face hangs above the entrance to the halls that once contained giant smelting and pressing machinery. Some say he depicts Diego Huilpa, the man who kicked this whole thing off in the 1500s. Others believe that, because of his grape-like hair, he is the Greek, God Bacchus, which makes sense, really, because not only was Bacchus the god of fruit, fertility and wine, but also insanity and ritual madness. And as Cerroico, those things come in spades, literally, and they've traditionally invited Hokkaos. Here's Daniel again. The work in Potosie is very

peculiar. In Potosie, we have a lot of festivals and Paris, and the alcohol is the best friend of the miners. When the miners celebrate one important party, the huckus start their job. Because it's very simple

the work of the juku. The hooku keep or give or took the the smallest rocks of silver inside the mining's and immediately go out to the potosi area and we'll send the silver merchant merchant it's simple there the hookwork no more So they go in when everyone gets drunk.

Yes. They steal the silver behind everybody's back. Yes. And then they sell it to a merchant outside of that. Is it potosi? Impotency. Women were never historically allowed to enter the mines. Legend has it, the presence of females could cause the mountain's riches to escape.

But those who stayed and had to earn a crust there would be stationed as Guadda Pocaminas, keeping packs of fierce dogs to dissuade criminal fingers from pressure. sacks of silver. The guards have a leading role at the mine entrance, controlling the miners' tools. Also, the dynamite, because you've probably seen that dynamite is essential at Cerro Rico, whether to destroy the mountain and be able to mine it or intimidate the thieves we call hookus. That's why the women are usually accompanied by several children, their own children, and

many dogs. Because here we have dogs just like sheep dogs in England. We have mining dogs. The dogs that guard the mines. They all start barking and scare people away. It's a security mechanism. Besides, the dogs are very fierce. You probably notice that there are many dogs

in the cities of Bolivia. I have actually, and they're pretty terrifying in past. They'll chase you. The same thing happens in Peru. In Colombia, too. They approach and start biting people. they don't know. It's a basic

canine instinct. In Potosi, it serves a purpose to prevent the huckus from attacking the mines and the weak's production. Because the miners work all week extracting the minerals, which have a high concentration of silver, tin, zinc. They even have radium,

radium, and other rare and very valuable elements. And they leave all this production at the mine entrance. And on weekends, there's a lot of alcohol. It's a party, a holiday. A holiday. and that's when the thieves strike. Back in the day, Daniel tells me,

the hookahs work ended at the foot of the mountain. There they'd hand their loot over to a local broker who'd get his silver and trade it to a fence, somebody who steals in stolen goods. Today, though, that has changed. The hookers might still be poor, local miners. Some of them, perhaps miners, have been laid off by cooperatives for bad behavior.

They might head down the shafts themselves or corrupt fellow miners to do it for them. At Cerro Rico, despite the numbers, most people know each other. But now, with the price of silver and other metals sky high and the global scramble to command the world's next generation of vehicles, devices and power sources well and truly on, hookus now form the vanguard of a complex and globalised organised criminal network. The hookers would pass their swag onto broker's impossacy or other towns, the broker's ferry material to engineers in clandestine labs. The engineers process the silver and pass it onto runners. The runners get the silver across the Andes

and out across the Pacific from Lima or any one of a number of Latin seaports. The route itself has barely changed in 500 years. Here we already have developed organized crime, right? And much of this organized crime within the mining company in some way is linked to the activity of mining cooperatives, right? because there are mining cooperatives that first proceed with the illegality in the sense that they have the title of a mining area, but what they do is not export it, but deliver it to a partner, generally abroad, right?

Chilean, Peruvian, Chinese, Colombians, and so on, which is the one who puts the money and makes the exportation. The most profitable mines in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America are often in remote, hard-to-police areas, with states that are already strapped for cash. If communities discover that organised criminals are active in their area, there is very little they can do. If confronted, the criminals lie, say there's nothing going on. Increasingly nowadays, though, they don't mind getting blood on their hands. It's another form of the platter or plomo, literally silver or lead, technique that drug cartels have used to cow local people for decades. And that's no coincidence.

Van der Felbad Brown is a security and intelligence, excellent. expert at DC think tank the Brookings Institution. Regular listeners would have heard her speak on everything from Southeast Asian scam centers to Haitian street gangs. When it comes to global organized crime, few people know more than Vanda. And recently, she's been investigating the links between drug cartels and other illegal interests in the Amazon and Andean regions of Latin America. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer.

That's why every step and dollar raised matter. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. Have you ever wondered why we call French fries French fries? Or why something is the greatest thing since sliced bread? There are answers to those questions.

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children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. One of the big developments with organized crime over the past 10, 8 years, is diversification of large criminal groups that were primarily associated with drugs into many other commodities. And one of these commodities and one of the dramatic expansion is into minerals,

red earths, precious metals, such as gold, silver, but sometimes more specialized commodities such as Colton. And this is not wholly new. What I think is new is the wide presence of very large criminal groups. So we think of groups like the Primero Commando de Capital in Brazil, or Mexican cartels, Sinanova and Cartel de Chálezcanola Generacion, or groups in Colombia, be it of ex-FARC mafia groups or a white plethora of other actors, ELN, groups in Colombia, they have entered that illegal mining space. In variety of ways, sometimes this might be even as large as direct ownership.

of mines. Often this is provision of services for the illegal miners, perhaps fuel, perhaps transportation, could be provision of other supplies. Certainly China and China's presence in Latin America and its Mauritius appetite for a wide variety of commodities in Latin America has been a very important factor. And this is true, not just about minerals, although it's very importantly true there, but it's also true about timber, about wildlife. And to some extent, this precedes the geopolitical competition dimensions. It's simply the enormity of the appetite and willingness to accept commodities without proper certified supply chains, without at least the nominal demands that Western companies have to comply with whether by laws, such as the Lacey Act in the

United States or because boards and shareholders in the West demand that. So China has far, Chinese companies operate under far less scrutiny with corruption practices being far more established and willingness to overlook the source of the commodity. Now, there's no doubt that geopolitics are very significantly shaping organized crime. in wide variety of domain, including far greater willingness to, by states, to use criminal groups to serve state purposes. And this is certainly true about China, not that China sets out its companies to corrupt and engage in criminality, but companies that do engage in criminality abroad and at the same

time stay within the bounds of China. You know, Mexican cartels learn to behave in a certain way, perhaps from Chinese criminal groups. They discover that wildlife and timber are valuable. They start doing this. Brazilian criminal groups are watching them. They learn from them. And in the case of the Mexican groups, we have seen them supplying or helping the establishment of illegal mining and smuggling networks in places like Colombia, in places like Bolivia or Ecuador, related to mineral smuggling and rare earth smuggling.

We have certainly seen across Latin America, the southern cone, the hardening of local criminal groups as they come in contact with large Latin American criminal groups and their methods of violence. Like Vanda mentioned, Brazil's Primero Comando de Capital, or PCC, has made a very much made huge inroads into mining and logging in its domestic Amazon Basin and beyond. Recent flare-ups of violence in Peru and Ecuador have at least partially been blamed on gangs getting into local metal markets, especially gold. Bombs are going off. In nightclubs, it's crazy. But pretty much every large narco cartel is now eyeing up rare earths and even smaller splinter

groups are doing the same. Here is Mexican investigative reporter Luis Chaparro for more. I mean, drug traffic, they're going to be wrong, still a very important source of income for cartels. But as the war keeps growing and everyone tries to capitalize what's happening with the Zinolo cartel, with the federal financial, smaller criminal groups like Santa Rosa de Lima, which is mostly a local regional cartel home to Santa Rosa de Lima operating mostly in Guantanajuato. they're capitalizing on other sources of income like natural resources, mining, water, also government contracts. Contractors, they are trying to get more and more government contracts to build highways, schools, hospitals, etc. So they can keep earning that money.

But they also are outsourcing their security forces, the domestic carriers, to foreign mining companies landing and landing. Mexico. So let's say there is a Canadian mining company trying to get silver from Guanajato or from Sakatecas. And these guys are outsourcing their power to protect that mine, to establish a security zone, and they're, they're cashing in big. So I think natural resources, land, government contracts, human smuggling are for new source of income that are probably even higher right now than drug trailing. Bolivia is no stranger to this wedding of drugs and minerals. The Chaparay, a vast rural region in the middle of the country, has for centuries been a prime grower of coca leaves. In the 20th century, drug kingpins like Roberto Suarez Gomez, the so-called Rei de la Cocainea

turn the Chapar and neighboring provinces into the bellows of a brand new cocaine industry, setting in cocapes to Colombian narcos like Pablo Escobar and helping to fuel one of the most violent criminal tides in history. Bolivia has since been relatively successful in preventing cocaine production on the scale of Colombia or Peru with a system of crop substitution and other welfare for coca farmers. But now, with metals like silver making more cash, the real money is down Bolivia's mines. We have really not seen any country in Latin America and for that matter even in Africa, really successfully clamping down on illegal mining.

It's a similar problem like drug cultivation. It involves a lot of people being involved, often a lot of poor people. So there are issues of political capital, brutality toward them, might backfire in terms of street protest and demonstrations. Law enforcement is critical, but it really needs to tackle not just the miners, but also the cruxious. criminal groups behind them and often the politicians behind them. Because just like with timber mining, just like with timber extraction, rather, there is often

a lot of financing for heavy equipment that comes from established businesses, established politicians. It's not just a criminal powerful syndicate, but also the crime, politics, collusion that needs to be tackled. and that often receives still limited attention. What does all of this craziness mean? Well, for one, that electric car you've been ironed up, chances are its supply chain is riddled with Latin American narco-terrorists. Just like the 16th century,

some people, some small group of people in pottersey, are getting incredibly rich off this new environmental windfall. Despite the city's obvious poverty, walk around town enough and you'll see plenty of Mercedes, BMWs, and Tesla, among the clapped out Toyota's and Missands. And despite the obvious upsides of clean energy, a tiny one being evading the heat death of our species, those at the sharpest end at the Green Revolution

are only going to suffer more. And crime and mining abound ever closer together. I mean, as mineral extraction ever truly worked differently? Thank you for your time. Yes, I want to go to be in two months, maybe. Falk is wrapping itself around the side of Cerro Rico. It's been a couple of hours since we headed out on that bus, and neither I nor Basilio could speak well.

It's that cold. Lucia shows us round her heart. It's tiny, and she doesn't like it. But it's the only chance she has to give her kids a better life. 30 years ago, Lucia and Cerroico's 180 other Guadabokaminas, once just faced down desperate kids trying to make a buck from a pill, for power tool or two. Now they are fending off dozens of trained men with the backing, at least tangentially, of billion-dollar cartels and nation states. Thanks to a cost of living crisis,

most of us would recognize their already paltry wages go way less far this year than they did even six months ago. Well, yeah, at any minute the entire mountain can plunge into the Andean Cordillera, taking them, the miners and the Hokus with it. And you think your job is tough. Twice of late she's got into physical confrontations with Hokus. The most recent time, they pulled pistols on her. I screamed. I thought they were going to kill me. So, 30 or 40 of them come. What are you going to do, boss? If there's just two or three of you, you can't do anything, right? That's how it is. Sometimes the police come, but often they don't.

Better? No, shut up. You're going to die? That's how our lives are here in El Serro. It's dangerous. What are we going to do? Well, what are we going to do? Thanks for listening.

We'll be back with another slightly more conventional show next week. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of the fear of of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca.