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 Editorials | Issues | July 2007 
Latin American Scrap Metal Thieves Profit at Their Poor Countries' Expense
 PR Inside
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| | People in Santo Domingo describe seeing neighbors walking down the street with reams of stolen wire wrapped around their shoulders. |
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic - Copper exports from the Dominican Republic are surging, but the metal's not coming from underground.
Thieves have been cutting down power and telephone wires to sell the valuable metal inside as scrap, accounting for much of the 288 tons (261 metric tons) exported this year - an impressive total for a Caribbean nation with no active copper mines.
Soaring metal prices driven partly by demand from China have motivated like-minded bandits across Latin America to plunder communication lines, traffic lights and other wiring to feed their families. In the process, they are cutting electricity to entire neighborhoods and damaging struggling economies.
Much of the Dominican Republic's scrap copper makes its way to China, which imported 460,000 tons (417,000 metric tons) in the first two months of 2007 to feed its booming economy.
"Globalization has created a climate in which these types of activities are going to flourish," said Cuauhtemoc Calderon Villareal, an economist with the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico.
The rise in world copper prices, which reached a record US$4.16 a pound in May 2005 and have mostly stayed above US$3, has meant a bonanza for owners of copper mines in Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Mexico. It is also driving copper exploration in areas including the central mountains of the Dominican Republic.
But enterprising thieves find valuable metal in plenty of more convenient places, and are encouraged by the ease with which it can be resold as scrap.
In Brazil, vandals sawed off the arms of a bronze statue of soccer legend Pele last month, touching off a police search of scrap metal yards. Jamaican thieves ripped up tracks and cables from an old Kingston railway station. Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest country, runs television ads imploring people to "stop cutting down wires."
In May, the South American nation of Guyana banned exports of scrap metal altogether to close the market for thieves who have taken the wiring out of traffic lights in the capital and towns along the Atlantic coast.
Latin America and the Caribbean are not the only regions to be plagued by a spike in copper thefts.
The United States has recently seen thieves snatching cooling coils from air conditioner units and pulling off daring thefts from farms and construction sites. Last month in Fort Wayne, Indiana, thousands of dollars worth of copper gutters were stripped from a church in the middle of the night.
But if metal thefts are costly in the developed world, they can be disastrous to the already-vulnerable economies of poor countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The vandalism has devastated the crippled electrical sector in the Dominican Republic, where hospitals depend on shaky generators and schools refuse donated computers because there is often not enough electricity to run them. The country already loses about half the power it generates to infrastructure damage and customers who do not pay.
When thieves in Santo Domingo cut 1,000 feet (300 meters) of wire in May, it knocked out power to a huge swath of the capital for two hours - including a hospital, naval base and downtown hotel.
"The wire thieves are increasing the number of blackouts," said Pedro Pena Rubio, commercial director of the Dominican state-run electric company. "They need to abandon this practice immediately."
The government has responded by setting up an investigative task force and requiring exporters to prove they obtained their copper scrap legally. Copper exports have fallen by almost 20 percent since that requirement took effect in April, according to customs officials.
But a probe of the 11 companies that have exported more than US$1.8 million worth of copper scrap from the country since January 2006 has yet to produce any indictments.
Meanwhile people in Santo Domingo describe seeing neighbors walking down the street with reams of stolen wire wrapped around their shoulders. Some barter the scavenged wires for food or drugs, while others sell them to scrap companies.
"They do it right during the day," said 18-year-old Noemi Ramirez, who works in an ice cream shop that depends on a diesel generator to get through daily blackouts. "They don't care." |
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