They would try to give power and goodies to the informal miners. The ruling of the new law on Small Mining and Artisanal Mining, MAPE Law, which the Energy and Mines Commission has been developing, would seek to grant mining concessions expressly, and for the State, with the money of all Peruvians, to pay them environmental impact studies.
Perú21 had access to the presentation document of the draft of the law that the aforementioned commission has been working on – chaired by the congressman of the Magisterial Bloc, Paul Gutiérrez –, which states that the Ministry of Energy and Mines (Minem) “will prioritize mining easements to in favor of peasant and indigenous communities, in the case of mining concessions located in areas of their superficial property.”
According to sources in the mining sector, what the aforementioned ruling would seek to do “is a clear attack on legal security, property and encourages the invasion of formal concessions; it would be a covert expropriation.”
“It establishes that in the absence of a consensus for the signing of an exploitation contract between the holder of a mining concession and a miner who aspires to formalize, the latter can resort to Minem to impose a mining easement and access through it to the exploitation of minerals,” the sources added.
In another part of the text, it indicates that mining producers (PPM) and small artisanal mining producers (PMA) “may choose to prepare the environmental study or request its preparation from Minem.”
According to the mining sector, this “would transfer to Minem the technical and economic burden to prepare environmental studies and would be unconstitutional, since it would be diverting resources that come from the taxes of all citizens towards particular interests.”
