Lima, May 5 (EFE) .- Some 80,000 people work at 1,200 gold mining undercut, many of them informal and illegal, which exist in the Peruvian province of Pataz, where 13 workers of the powerful gold mine were kidnapped and killed, the Interior minister, Julio Díaz Zulueta, were reported.
“There are 80,000 people there,” the minister said during a presentation before the Defense Commission of the Congress, to which he was summoned after the kidnapping and murder of mining workers for alleged criminal gangs linked to illegal mining.
The minister confirmed, in that sense, that the government will dictate the curfew in the province of Pataz at 6:00 p.m. at 6:00 in the morning during the next 30 days and that “the Armed Forces will take control of the province of Pataz.”
As he said, the military “will determine with a database who workers are in 1,200 undercuts.”
“We are going to make an informal as illegal database,” he said before indicating that the authorities have “plans and strategies” and is “in the process of fighting these armed criminal organizations.
The minister also said that “the police cannot fight alone” against these organizations and that “the message is clear”, since “organized crime does not face it only with bullets.”
“We have to work as a single team, without excuses and without prominence,” he said.
Díaz said that “Pataz has one of the most latent problems in Peru of organized crime” and that in recent months 400 police and 100 military have been sent to the area, which last April intervened in 20 illegal undercuts.
He said that some of these are 3,000 meters long and that those of the powerful mining company, which explodes gold formally in the area, “can be walking very well, but those who give by concession, have a meter wide and in some places they are inaccessible.”
“These criminal organizations threaten the security (members), hurt them and cause them to withdraw and they enter, they can work there for five days, ten days, that gold leaves indiscriminately,” he explained.
The president of Peru, Dina Boluarte, announced on Monday the touch touch in Pataz, after the kidnapping and murder of mining workers, in addition to ordering that the armed forces take control of the area and suspend the mining activity for 30 days.
“We will request legislative powers from Congress to legislate in urban terrorism because it is now when we must act,” he added in reference to being created a legal framework to act in the face of this problem.
For his part, the prime minister, Gustavo Adrianzén, said that the government “at no time” has committed an “carelessness” of its duties and its functions and assured that the National Police acted immediately in the area, “in reference to criticism about the inaction of the authorities.
This Sunday, 13 workers of the powerful gold mine who had been kidnapped a week ago in Pataz were killed, an emergency province in February 2024 for the increase in crime committed by bands associated with illegal mining. EFE
Related news :