Chilean authorities uncovered organized criminal networks that investigators say stole, processed, and shipped copper on a vast scale to Peru and China, exposing a trade worth an estimated 817 billion pesos, or about $917 million, between 2020 and 2025, according to a Bloomberg report. 

Chilean police on Wednesday dismantled one network that moved the metal by truck to the northern port of Iquique before shipping it to China. Two weeks earlier, officers seized cables, chips, and cathodes at a storage site in Arica that authorities said were bound for Peru and then China, the news agency said.

The cases underscore the scale and sophistication of copper theft in Chile, the world’s largest producer of the metal, as criminal groups seek to profit from elevated prices. Energy Minister Ximena Rincón told Bloomberg that organized crime had taken over the activity and that the government was reviewing whether the existing legal framework was sufficient. 

According to the report, thieves increasingly use heavy trucks to knock down power poles, strip cables and funnel the copper into cross-border networks. Prosecutor Rodrigo González, who works on organized crime cases in the northern border city of Arica, told Bloomberg the method can leave communities without power and cause losses of as much as 60 million pesos in a single incident. 

In the latest probe, known as “Operation High Voltage,” police raided 49 properties across seven regions and arrested 25 people, including alleged leaders and key operatives, the news agency reported. Authorities also seized 187 tons of copper, worth about $2.2 million at current prices. 

The seven-month investigation found that the organization used intermediaries to buy copper from storage or aggregation sites, charge a commission, and then sell it to exporters, Bloomberg reported, citing Santiago Bravo of Chile’s Investigative Police. Each transfer helped obscure the metal’s origin and weaken traceability, he said. 

The thefts have hit both public infrastructure and mining operations. Stolen copper is often stripped or burned at informal processing sites, and some is mixed with higher-grade mining metal or melted into plates and ingots to remove identifying marks such as serial numbers, according to the report. 

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