Peru’s government will impose a curfew and suspend gold mining in the northern district of Pataz for 30 days after police found the bodies of 13 security guards in a mine tunnel, President Dina Boluarte said on Monday. The announcement followed a kidnapping inside a gold mine and turned a criminal massacre into a broader crackdown on illegal mining and armed gangs.
The dead men worked for a subcontractor of Poderosa, one of Peru’s biggest gold producers. According to the evidence packet, they had been held captive for more than a week before their bodies were found on Sunday. The killing deepens a security crisis in Pataz, a gold-rich region where criminal groups believed to be tied to illegal mining have repeatedly attacked workers and contractors.
Boluarte said the armed forces would take control of the area where Poderosa operates and that the government planned to set up a military base in Pataz, about 560 miles from Lima. She also said she would ask Congress for legislation to combat what she called urban terrorism. Those statements show how the state is trying to recast the killings as part of a wider fight against organized violence rather than a single mining incident.
The suspension itself appears to be limited, at least in the way the company described it. Poderosa told Reuters that the 30-day halt applied only to informal miners. Mining and energy minister Jorge Montoro said the pause could be extended, suggesting the government wants room to tighten or prolong the measure depending on conditions on the ground.
The scale of the violence is severe. Poderosa said 39 of its workers, including contractors and artisanal miners, have been killed recently in the Pataz region by criminal gangs believed to be linked to illegal mining. The area has already been under a state of emergency for more than two years, which means the latest killings did not happen in a vacuum. They happened inside a continuing breakdown of security and state control.
Boluarte’s blunt comment that illegal mining generates more money than drug trafficking captures the government’s view of the threat. In Pataz, illegal extraction is not just an economic problem; it is a violence problem, a governance problem and, increasingly, a military one. The curfew and suspension are the state’s attempt to reclaim some of that ground.
The curfew and mining suspension are meant to show that the state can still impose order in a zone where criminal groups have repeatedly tested it. But the scale of the killings suggests the problem is deeper than one incident. Pataz has been under emergency rule for more than two years, which means the latest move is less a fresh policy than an escalation of an already failing security model. If the halt is extended, it will show the government sees mining violence as a systemic threat, not a temporary flare-up.
For families in Pataz, the immediate question is whether the new measures actually change daily security. Curfews and deployments can slow attacks, but they do not by themselves dismantle the criminal economies that make violence profitable. That is the burden now placed on the Peruvian state.
