Michelle Pascua had barely settled in her office on a Thursday morning when the police arrived. At the small gold mine where she works in the Philippines, official visits aren’t unusual, but this immediately felt different. More than 50 officers arrived together in a convoy, some in full riot gear, others in uniform and still more in plain clothes. They were there to search for illegal explosives.
“There was no warrant,” Pascua remembers, “no protocol.” We’re talking in the relative calm of the mine’s communal farm, beside rows of vegetables and a fishpond shaded by coconut trees. It couldn’t feel further removed from the chaos of a police bust and still Pascua’s husband, 27-year old miner Cyron Cabanez, clenches his jaw. He was not afraid, he insists, just angry.
On the morning of the raid, in June 2022, police moved through the mine’s office seizing phones and cash before making their way to the main shaft. According to the local mining association, the Association of Miners in Barangay Casalugan (SMBC), over 60 tons of gold ore were taken by officers. It’s hard to put a price on how much gold the bags may have contained but easy for miners to feel their loss: Each bag was filled by hand, more than 250 feet underground, over grueling, 12-hour shifts.
Pascua’s mine, in the central Philippine province of Paracale, is permitted and operates in a “minahang bayan,” one of the country’s few designated areas for small-scale mining. None of the seized ore or belongings were ever returned. Neither the Philippine National Police, nor its regional office that covers Paracale nor its explosives department responded to a request for comment about the incident. As Pascua and her husband finish describing the raid, another member of Pascua’s mining association sums it up for me, in English: “Basically it was shady.”
A law passed in 1991 made it illegal for small-scale mines to tunnel using explosives or heavy machinery. Without either, “artisanal” miners were supposed to dig down entirely with hand tools. But miners say it’s no longer possible for hand-dug mines to support a community, if it ever was. Legal or not, every working day Cabanez and other miners use small ammonium nitrate explosives to extend their shaft.
Now miners and advocates are asking for updates to a law they say is not only outdated, but provides a pretense for police to shake down mines that otherwise go to great lengths to operate legally.
That’s already an uphill battle: Most mines pop up in the jungle without permits “like mushrooms” and quickly disappear again, says regional government information officer Sarah Marie Pante-Aviado. Officials have tried to incentivize formalization with tax breaks and grants for permitted mines, but that’s undercut by police raids at mostly legal mines like Cabanez’s.
Pante-Aviado says raids like those at Pascua’s mine are common. “It’s a vicious cycle of extortion,” she says. The reality for miners like Cabanez is that explosives are fair game for industrial mines, and it’s near impossible to tunnel effectively without them, even at a relatively small community mine.
“There is a conflict between the law and what is [taking place] underground,” says Pante-Aviado. That conflict, she and other advocates argue, is not just unfair to small miners but also stands in the way of meaningful attempts to formalize the gold mining industry and begin to make it safer for the communities involved.
Soon, and for the first time since it was passed over three decades ago, the People’s Small-Scale Mining Act of 1991 — which banned explosives and set most other regulations for community gold mining — could be updated. House Bill 6408 would not only bring explosives back (under the supervision of a designated, trained blaster at each mine), but also streamline the process for creating and permitting new mining areas.
But trusting small mines with explosives rankles some who still associate the sector with lawlessness and terrorism. In 2013, illegal explosives were blamed for the collapse of an underwater mine shaft, killing at least three miners. Just three years ago, national police called for all small gold mines across the province to be closed after claiming to trace explosive devices used by the New People’s Army (an armed guerilla wing of the illegal Communist Party of the Philippines) back to mines a dozen miles southwest of Paracale.
Nonetheless, the changes have gradually been gathering momentum. The bill was first introduced in 2022 and passed through committee this August, garnering political support on the way. At the local level, Paracale’s vice mayor, Bernadette Asutilla, is so convinced by the changes she says she couldn’t imagine what the opposition to them could be. In October, Senator Robin Padilla promised miners gathered in the municipality just west of Paracale for the national Gold Summit that he’d sponsor an equivalent bill for the Senate to vote through.
For advocates and officials like Pante-Aviado, the reform is a product of almost a decade’s work rehabilitating the image of mining communities. If successful, they argue, it’ll clear one of the last hurdles to persuade informal miners that registering with authorities is in their interest, and give the government a once-in-a-generation opportunity to regulate the industry.
All that goodwill has an expiry date in just over half a year, however, when Filipinos go to the polls for a general election that promises to reset the legislative agenda. “We are rushing,” says Pante-Aviado, “because if the amendment isn’t passed in both houses then we will be back to square one after the election.”
The Philippines is just one of more than 80 countries with active small gold mines — an industry thought to produce up to a fifth of the world’s supply of the precious metal. From Colombia to Cote d’Ivoire, small-scale gold mining is associated with unsafe working conditions, child labor and mercury pollution. Pollution, in particular, has drawn the attention of the international community: Small-scale gold mining releases more mercury into the environment than the next two polluting industries combined, with devastating consequences for mining communities and the natural world around them.
For some, these are compelling enough reasons to call for an end to gold mining altogether. It’s a little more difficult to imagine that from Paracale, where more than three-quarters of locals make a living from gold. As a Spanish colony, Paracale sent intricate gold gifts back to Philip IV’s daughters. Under U.S. rule, the town began dredging for the precious metal. The name Paracale itself literally means “canal digger.” Today, the more intricate gold relics populate a small museum in the town hall; far more can be found in pawn shops lining Paracale’s streets.
Pante-Aviado herself grew up next door to miners in a nearby town and remembers rolling mercury from hand to hand as a child, for fun. To stop mining altogether, she says, would take the ground out from underneath places like Paracale. It is more likely that industrial mines would continue to exploit deposits for companies based on the other side of the world while the few legally operating small mines went underground — joining the many illegal mines that already pop up throughout the jungle around Paracale.
Pante-Aviado and other officials say the only way to make the industry safe and environmentally sound is to formalize it: to issue permits and mining designations to small mines so they can be followed and regulated. As the provincial government’s liaison for mining communities applying for minahang bayan status, Pante-Aviado has worked hard to make the designation worthwhile. Permitted mines can sell their gold directly to the Philippine National Bank and are more likely to garner capital loans for new equipment, for example.
This is why it is particularly frustrating that legal mines are raided for their explosives. “There must be some balance between carrot and stick,” says Pante-Aviado. “We are encouraging them to be legal but then they can be regulated, and penalized.”
At the same time, Pante-Aviado has worked to rehabilitate the public perception of mining communities. In many ways, she offers the perfect face for a responsible, formalized community mine. She smiles easily, shares her nervously excited laughter hosting a local radio show about gold mining and likes big, disk-shaped earrings: moonish shells when we first meet in Manila and dangly, embroidered sunflowers for a panel discussion about mining reform near Paracale. When she’s offered a thank-you gift for taking part in the event, she blushes. “Yay, gold bars,” she jokes, not quite loud enough for the whole audience to hear. (It’s actually a small tea set.)
“For such a long time, there has been a stigma that small-scale mining is irresponsible or environmentally degrading, so nobody really wants to support it,” she says afterward. “But since we are now organized and they know that we are gaining numbers, the politicians need the votes of the people, so it’s different.”
After Pante-Aviado finishes speaking, I meet Yancey Seve Guinto, an engineer with the regional office of the Mining and Geosciences Bureau. He’s a young, burly man wearing black boots and navy blue — and a vociferous advocate for formalization. “I’ve yet to see a mining site outside a minahang bayan,” he says by way of example, “that has been rehabilitated once miners left the area.”
He’s also quick with examples of successful, creative ways for regulating mines. As recently as 2015, it was common for miners to snort methamphetamines to power them through 24-hour shifts, often without much food. Drug tests with financial penalties were hard to administer and didn’t move the needle. So Guinto’s team began collecting contact information for miners’ partners and sending results directly to wives, girlfriends and mothers. The meth disappeared within 18 months, he says.
Stories like these are precisely why small-scale mining has an image problem. But they also give Pante-Aviado hope for how the sector can change. “I’m very optimistic now,” she says. “Because I have seen how small-scale gold mining was marginalized before. Nobody listened to the sector; nobody wanted to get involved.” At a recent meeting of the advocacy group, the National Coalition of Small-Scale Miners of the Philippines, over 200 miners from five different local associations gathered to promote the reform bill. “Now we are gaining favor from NGOs, International Labor Organization, from government officials, government agencies.”
Peering down the main shaft of Cabanez’s and Pascua’s mine, I’m impressed not only by my own sense of vertigo, but also the nonchalance with which miners do something so dangerous. One, Roland Salcedo, talks to a miner more than 250 feet underground through a long plastic tube. “Don’t be shy,” Salcedo coaxes him up, then turns to those of us above ground and smiles. “He’s just retouching his makeup.”
Advocates like Pante-Aviado aren’t claiming that the reform bill will make mining safe overnight, but they do say it will make it more attractive for mines to get permits, and that permitted mines are safer than illegal ones. And that means, in part, trusting miners enough to give them their explosives back. It’s been an uphill battle which Pante-Aviado can soon see the end of. “Ten years ago this was just a dream,” she says. “Now I think it’s possible.”
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