Chinese buyers were the end destination of a five-year smuggling pipeline that drained an estimated US$917 million worth of stolen copper from Chile, authorities said on Wednesday after police dismantled the network in one of the largest organised crime operations ever uncovered in the country.
The group trucked stolen metal to Iquique, a port city in Chile’s far north, and shipped it to China in containers disguised as scrap cargo. Over the same period, it collected more than US$55 million in fraudulent export VAT refunds, inserting stolen copper into Chile’s legitimate trade infrastructure for years without detection.
Coordinated across seven regions, the so-called Operation High Voltage ended with 25 arrests, raids on 49 properties and the seizure of 187 tonnes of copper, 40 vehicles and 11 firearms.
Authorities estimated the recovered metal was worth roughly US$2.2 million at current prices, a fraction of what the network moved over the five years it operated.
Head of the criminal analysis unit at the Arica prosecutor’s office and the investigator leading the northern border cases, Rodrigo Gonzalez, told Bloomberg earlier on Wednesday that the network ran with a clear division of labour: crews stole cables, intermediaries processed and stored the metal and transporters moved it across borders.
“It’s a very profitable business. A few dozen metres can mean millions of pesos,” he said.
The method was simple: trucks ploughed into rows of power poles, bringing down entire sections of cable within minutes, before crews stripped and loaded the copper and moved it out before authorities could respond.
Losses from a single incident have reached 60 million Chilean pesos (around US$63,000), and the attacks have left entire communities without power, González said.
The stolen metal was then processed at informal sites where thieves burned or stripped the plastic coating from cables, leaving bare copper with no identifying marks. Authorities found melted plates and ingots they believe were reprocessed to erase serial numbers, then blended with legitimately sourced metal before export.
The police have not revealed who the buyers in China were, and the Chinese embassy in Santiago has not commented on the case. However, signs of the network’s reach had emerged two weeks earlier.
On March 25, police in Arica, on Chile’s border with Peru, seized more than 10 tonnes of copper at a local storage site, finding cables, chips, cathodes and anodes bound for Peru and then China. A Bolivian and a Peruvian national were arrested at the scene.
China, which consumes roughly 58 per cent of the world’s copper, had already emerged as a recurring destination in previous port seizures across the South American country. Chile produced 5.3 million tonnes of copper in 2025, roughly a quarter of global output, making it the world’s largest producer and a recurring target for organised theft at scale.
In January 2020, police seized about 80 tonnes of contraband copper from a junkyard in Lampa, northwest of Santiago. The metal had been stolen from electric and telecommunications companies and was bound for China.
Months earlier, investigators had recovered more than 10 tonnes in Antofagasta, a northern mining hub where attacks on copper trains had risen from six in 2014 to 48 in 2018.
In January 2023, 10 armed men entered the San Antonio port, beat and restrained five workers and walked out with 13 containers loaded with Codelco copper destined for China.
Chilean President Jose Antonio Kast, who took office in March on a law-and-order platform, has made organised crime a central focus of his government’s first months.
Authorities have centralised investigations and deployed drones, heat maps and pattern-tracking tools to identify hotspots and storage sites. González, however, was direct about the limits of that approach.
“You dismantle one group, and another one appears,” he said. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
