The CECOMSAP Gold Mine, Peru

At around 4,700 meters in Peru's Andes, where alpaca herding was the traditional way to make a living, ten cooperatives mine gold together as CECOMSAP. Just up the road lies La Rinconada, a notoriously dangerous gold mining town. CECOMSAP shows what the same mountains can yield instead: Fairtrade Gold, audited, processed without mercury and paying a premium into the community.

Key insights

• The CECOMSAP gold mine is the work of ten cooperatives in Ananea, high in Peru's Andes. Founded in 1990, the umbrella organization handles compliance and exports for 348 cooperative members who mine at around 4,700 meters.
• CECOMSAP has been Fairtrade certified since 2017. FLOCERT audits its cooperatives, and every kilogram of gold earns them a Fairtrade Premium of 2,000 US dollars on top of at least 95 % of the London gold price.
• CECOMSAP gold has been processed without mercury since 2023 – and never with cyanide. The switch to vibrating tables, which began in 2022, was driven by the Fairtrade Gold Standard, not by Peruvian law.
• The Fairtrade Premium pays for safer work, cleaner water and support for the community. In 2021 alone, gold sales in Switzerland earned the ten cooperatives 1.3 million Swiss francs in premiums. Documented projects range from a dining hall for miners to computers for schools.
• Fairever buys CECOMSAP gold from Peru directly. It goes into our Fairtrade Gold semi-finished products and bars, with the mine and its FLO ID declared on the label.

Table of contents

• CECOMSAP at a glance
• Gold at 4,700 meters: life in Ananea
  • From alpaca herders to gold miners
  • Where every breath counts
• La Rinconada: the dark side of Andean gold
• Ten cooperatives, one voice
  • Hortencia Quispe: a woman at the top
• How CECOMSAP mines its gold
  • Open-pit mining in glacial moraines
  • From mercury to vibrating tables
• The 2021 dam failure – and what followed
• Why CECOMSAP gold is responsible gold
  • Independently audited against Fairtrade rules
  • Protecting water and health
  • Fair prices and local development
• Where the Fairtrade Premium goes
  • What we saw on our visits
• From Ananea to your workbench
• FAQs: The CECOMSAP gold mine, Peru
• Key takeaways
  • In a nutshell ...
  • Get active, be the change!
  • Further reading
• Sources

CECOMSAP at a glance

Gold at 4,700 meters: life in Ananea

From alpaca herders to gold miners

Tomas Lopez Mamani grew up herding his parents' sheep and alpacas in Ananea, a place "where the air is thin and income is meager," as the journalist Hildegard Willer described it when she met him in 2022.² In 1987, he and other miners founded the cooperative Señor de Ananea, today one of the ten members of CECOMSAP. "My six children all went to university and are now engineers and business administrators," he told her.

His story is Ananea's story. The people here traditionally lived from alpaca breeding and wool, and gold mining became the economic alternative.³ Today, 34 % of the district's population works in mining-related activities, and some 85 % of its territory is covered by 309 mining concessions, according to the UN Development Programme.⁹

Where every breath counts

Ananea lies at around 4,700 meters above sea level,¹⁰ and CECOMSAP's cooperatives mine at 4,600 to 4,900 meters.¹ At that altitude, air pressure is only about 55 % of what it is at sea level. Every breath delivers roughly 45 % less oxygen, for visitors and miners alike.¹¹

The landscape is high and bare, and mining has left its mark on it. When swissinfo.ch visited in 2016, "much of the mountainous landscape has been stripped bare."¹⁰ Whether that price is worth paying depends on what the people here earn from gold, and how.

La Rinconada: the dark side of Andean gold

Just up the road from Ananea lies La Rinconada,¹² at 16,732 feet (around 5,100 meters) "the highest settlement on the planet," according to National Geographic. Some 30,000 to 50,000 people live there, many of them only for a while. The town has "no garbage collection or sewer system" and no hospital.¹³

Most miners there work under a system called cachorreo: around 25 days without pay for the mine owner, then three to five days in which they may keep whatever ore they find. In a 2019 survey by the University of Antwerp, 87.2 % of the workers were "cachorreros," according to a report published by the International Labour Organization. Police recorded 59 homicides between 2018 and 2023, 18 of them in 2021 alone.¹⁴

Some 2,000 young women, some of them minors, work in bars that double as brothels.¹³ We describe the wider pattern in our overview of gold mining's social impact.

Mercury reaches everyone. Vapor from gold processing in La Rinconada contaminates the nearby Sleeping Beauty glacier, and with it "the water that residents use for drinking and cooking."¹³ In the Ananea district, researchers have measured mercury in water, soil and plants, with the highest levels closest to mining and processing sites.¹⁵ More on how mercury spreads: gold mining's environmental impact.

This is not a verdict on the people who work there. It is what gold mining looks like without rules, fair buyers or anyone checking. CECOMSAP mines the same mountains a few hundred meters lower – under very different rules.

Ten cooperatives, one voice

CECOMSAP – the Central de Cooperativas Mineras de San Antonio de Poto de Ananea – has operated since 1990.⁴ Its ten member cooperatives, among them Señor de Ananea, Halcon de Oro and San Francisco, had 348 members in 2022,² about 35 per cooperative on average.¹⁶ A similar name belongs to CECOMIP, a separate group of cooperatives in the same district, which is certified by Fairmined, not Fairtrade.¹⁷

The umbrella organization does what no small cooperative could do alone. It supports its members in formalizing their operations and organizes the exports.³ In 2022, compliance officer Oscar Ccori weighed the month's delivery at the Juliaca headquarters: twelve 3-kilogram bars of CECOMSAP gold, each stamped with the seal of its cooperative. "Every step of gold production, from excavation to smelting, is documented here," Welt-Sichten reported.²

An armored truck then took the gold to Arequipa, and a plane on via Lima to Zurich. Averaged over several years, we estimate CECOMSAP's output at 30 to 50 kilograms of fine gold a month.⁶

Pooling makes certification pay. In our experience, a cooperative with a few dozen members can hardly carry the cost of audits, due diligence and exports alone. Together, ten cooperatives reach volumes that make certification and direct sales abroad viable – a practical answer to the barriers facing artisanal and small-scale gold mining.

Hortencia Quispe: a woman at the top

CECOMSAP's commercial manager is a woman: Hortencia Quispe.⁷ Before she joined CECOMSAP, she ran the Fairtrade exports of a coffee cooperative in Puno's rainforest for ten years. She then convinced the gold cooperatives of the benefits of fair trade.²

That is anything but common. Across all minerals, women make up around a third of the workforce in artisanal and small-scale mining worldwide, yet they often end up in what the World Bank calls "low-paying roles."¹⁸ In Ananea, too, women are increasingly finding jobs "in the former male domain," for example in charge of environmental management, according to a 2022 report on CECOMSAP.¹⁹

How CECOMSAP mines its gold

Open-pit mining in glacial moraines

CECOMSAP mines gold that glaciers ground out of the mountains and left behind in moraines and gravel. The cooperatives work open pits along the Viscachani moraine by the Ananea-Grande river and in nearby placer deposits. They loosen the gravel with high-pressure water, move it with loaders and wash it over sluices, where the heavy gold particles settle.²⁰ The water is collected in sedimentation ponds, where the suspended solids settle in several stages, so that it can be reused.⁸

From mercury to vibrating tables

The cooperatives used to separate the gold with mercury.² Until 2021, CECOMSAP used mercury only under controlled conditions, on small amounts of highly concentrated material, and it has never used cyanide. From 2022, production was switched so that mercury would no longer be needed.⁸ Since 2023, all ten cooperatives have recovered their gold without mercury, on electrically powered gravimetric vibrating tables.¹⁹⁷

The driver was not the law. Peru still has no ban on mercury in small-scale mining; a bill for a five-year phase-out only cleared a congressional committee in March 2026.²¹ What made the difference was the Fairtrade Gold Standard. Its requirement 3.2.1 obliges certified mines not to use mercury "if gold recovery without mercury is commercially and technically possible."²² At CECOMSAP, gravity methods made it possible.

That is how the standard works: it does not shut small-scale miners out, it sets them a clear direction and checks their progress. It matters, because artisanal and small-scale gold mining accounts for 37 % of the roughly 2,200 tonnes of mercury released into air, water and land each year.²³ Once in rivers, mercury turns into methylmercury, which then "bioaccumulates" in fish and shellfish.²⁴ Gold recovered on vibrating tables adds none of it.

The 2021 dam failure – and what followed

On Saturday, November 27, 2021, the dam of a sedimentation pond gave way at San Antonio, one of CECOMSAP's member cooperatives, after unusually long and heavy rain. Mud damaged several homes in Ananea and the road to La Rinconada, already badly hit by rain the day before. No one was hurt, and the pond contained neither mercury nor cyanide, according to Fairtrade Max Havelaar.⁸ "For us, it is a technical failure," said CECOMSAP's technician Carlos Hancco Ramos. "We assume responsibility."²⁵

The cleanup started the same day. The mines cleared the streets, handed out mattresses and medicine and offered psychological support; within a day, a bypass road was open.⁸ CECOMSAP then removed sludge from homes and drains, restored soils, reinforced its remaining ponds and paid for the road repairs.¹² Prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation, with no published findings to date.²⁶ Certification cannot prevent every accident. It does make sure that someone takes responsibility – and that someone checks.

Why CECOMSAP gold is responsible gold

CECOMSAP gold is responsibly mined because its production is independently audited against binding rules, it is processed without mercury and cyanide, and its miners receive a fair price plus a premium they invest themselves.

Independently audited against Fairtrade rules

FLOCERT, the independent certifier of the Fairtrade system, audits CECOMSAP against the Fairtrade Gold Standard; its FLO ID is 38864.⁷ The standard requires, among other things:²²

• No employment of children under 15, or under the higher age set by national mining law – checked in the mine by an independent auditor.
• No work for anyone under 18 that puts their health, safety or schooling at risk, and a signed child protection policy.
• Protective equipment for all workers and miners, paid for by the employer.
• A committee for health and safety at work.

Protecting water and health

CECOMSAP's processing is environmentally responsible in three specific ways: no mercury since 2023, no cyanide ever, and process water that is cleared in sedimentation ponds and reused. The Fairtrade Gold Standard adds rules for alluvial mining, planned waste management and the rehabilitation of mined land, which must take place within two years of the end of mining.²² Open-pit mining changes the landscape, even when cooperatives do it – which is why rehabilitation is part of the rules.²

Fair prices and local development

The miners get a fair price, and a premium on top. The Fairtrade Gold Standard guarantees at least 95 % of the London gold price; Fairever voluntarily pays 96–99 %.⁷ On top comes the Fairtrade Premium of 2,000 US dollars per kilogram, paid in full to the organization.²² In a region where alpaca herding and mining are almost the only sources of income, that money stays in Ananea – which is what we mean by responsible small-scale gold mining.

Where the Fairtrade Premium goes

The miners decide how the premium is spent. An elected premium committee, representative of all groups of miners and workers, identifies needs and draws up a development plan; the general assembly approves every decision and receives a report on the results each year.²² Fairtrade does not publish a year-by-year premium report for gold, but the figures that are known are substantial: in 2021 alone, gold sales in Switzerland paid 1.3 million Swiss francs in Fairtrade Premiums to CECOMSAP's ten cooperatives.²

The documented projects fall into three groups:

• Work and safety: protective clothing, health and safety training, a new dining hall for the miners, better worker housing and more productive processing equipment.³¹²
• Water and environment: gravimetric vibrating tables to replace mercury, water treatment and waste management, a flocculation system that recovers clean water, old sludge ponds closed, and a dam that protects the retention ponds from overflowing.¹⁹¹²
• Community: computers for schools, playgrounds, food and household goods for poorer villagers, 248 blankets, and school supplies, hygiene items and toys for schools in the region.¹⁹¹³

In 2022, the cooperatives were also planning an ambulance or a small local clinic.¹⁹

What we saw on our visits

Desirée Binternagel, Fairever's managing director, has seen the premium at work in Ananea. Besides the projects she mentions below, she saw sleeping quarters, blankets and food for the community, support for the local school and kindergarten, and equipment that makes the work easier.

"At 4,700 meters, every step takes effort. Yet the miners of CECOMSAP proudly showed us what they have built with the Fairtrade Premium: solar panels, showers, warm meals for the workers and vibrating tables that replaced mercury. For me, this is what traceable, fairer gold looks like in practice."

– Desirée Binternagel, Managing Director, Fairever

From Ananea to your workbench

Fairever buys Fairtrade Gold from CECOMSAP in Peru directly and regularly. Our strategic partner, the Betts Group, refines it, and the gold stays separate from non-certified gold. It goes into two product lines:

• Semi-finished products for jewelry makers, such as casting grain, sheet and wire. The contained fine gold is certified to Fairtrade Standards.
• Investment bars of 1 troy ounce and 100 grams in 999.9 fine gold, explained in more detail in our article on our Fairtrade gold bars.

On every label, we declare the mine and its FLO ID. Jewelry makers who want to tell their customers where their gold comes from will find guidance in our article on Fairtrade Gold product claims.

CECOMSAP's gold also contains a little silver. We have it refined and stored separately, and it is one of the sources of Fairever ASM Silver. This silver is a by-product of the certified gold mining, but it is traded outside the Fairtrade system.

FAQs: The CECOMSAP gold mine, Peru

Key takeaways

In a nutshell ...

• The same mountains, two very different kinds of gold. Up the road in La Rinconada, miners work for free most of the month and mercury drifts over the glacier; at CECOMSAP, the gold is audited, processed without mercury and paid for at a fair price plus a premium.
• A good standard sets a direction, not just bans. The Fairtrade Gold Standard requires mines to drop mercury wherever gravity methods can do the job – and without any legal ban in Peru, the cooperatives of the CECOMSAP gold mine completed the switch by 2023.
• Organizing is what makes small miners strong. Ten cooperatives with a few dozen members each share compliance, exports and certification, and a woman leads the commercial side.
• Ask where your gold was mined – and by whom. Gold from CECOMSAP comes with the mine and its FLO ID on the label, so you can tell your customers exactly whose work is in their ring or bar.

Get active, be the change!

Gold from Ananea can be part of your next collection or your next investment. Take a look at our Fairtrade Gold products – from casting grain and sheet to gold bars.

Further reading

• How the certification behind CECOMSAP's gold works: what is Fairtrade Gold?
• The rules in detail, from minimum price to mercury: the Fairtrade Gold Standard.
• More mines we work with, and what they do differently: responsible gold mines.

Sources

1. Fairtrade International, Cooperativa Minera Metalúrgica San Francisco de Ananea, accessed September 2026. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
2. Hildegard Willer, Faires Gold für die „Bärreli“, Welt-Sichten, August 26, 2022. Translated by Fairever; original wording of the quotes: “dort, wo die Luft dünn ist und das Einkommen karg”; “Meine sechs Kinder haben alle die Universität besucht und sind heute Ingenieure und Betriebswirte.”; “Jeder Schritt der Goldproduktion, von der Ausgrabung bis zur Schmelze, ist hier dokumentiert.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
3. Fairtrade International, The gold mining organisation Halcon de Oro, accessed September 2026. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
4. Peruvian tax register (SUNAT), RUC 20190784429, via datosperu.org: Central de Coop Mineras de San Antonio P, accessed September 2026. ↩ ↩
5. Our own calculation from the monthly number of employees of the central organization in the Peruvian tax register, January to November 2025 (footnote 4): 105 to 116 employees; mean 1,210 ÷ 11 = 110; median 109. ↩
6. Fairever estimate of the average monthly output over several years, based on data for 2021 and 2022; our own calculation, rounded. (1) In 2022, one month’s delivery to Zurich consisted of twelve bars of 3 kilograms each, worth 2 million US dollars (footnote 2): 12 × 3 kg = 36 kg of unrefined gold (doré). At the 2022 average gold price of 1,800.03 US dollars per troy ounce (National Mining Association, Historical Gold Prices), one kilogram of fine gold was worth 1,800.03 × 32.1507 ≈ 57,872 US dollars; 2,000,000 ÷ 57,872 ≈ 35 kg of fine gold. (2) In 2021, a Swiss bank sold Fairtrade Gold from CECOMSAP worth 30 million Swiss francs (footnote 2). At the 2021 average gold price of 1,798.61 US dollars per troy ounce and 0.914 Swiss francs per US dollar (IRS, Yearly average currency exchange rates), one kilogram of fine gold cost around 1,798.61 × 32.1507 × 0.914 ≈ 52,853 Swiss francs; 30,000,000 ÷ 52,853 ≈ 568 kg a year, or around 47 kg a month – less in practice, since retail prices exceed the spot price. Both values describe single deliveries or single sales channels, and output varies from month to month. Range: 30 to 50 kg a month; midpoint (30 + 50) ÷ 2 = 40 kg. Deviation: the Fairtrade Premium of 1.3 million Swiss francs paid in 2021 (footnote 2) would correspond to around 711 kg in that year (1,300,000 ÷ [2,000 × 0.914] ≈ 711 kg); we treat this single value as an outlier and have not used it for the estimate. ↩ ↩
7. Fairever, internal information, September 2026. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
8. Fairtrade Max Havelaar, Stellungnahme: Bruch des Damms eines Sedimentationsbeckens der Kooperative San Antonio de Ananea in Peru, statement, December 22, 2021 (unpublished, provided to Fairever). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
9. UNDP Peru, Ananea libre de mercurio: tecnologías para reducir la contaminación en la minería artesanal de oro, September 26, 2022. ↩
10. SWI swissinfo.ch, Digging for ‘better’ gold in Peru, September 9, 2016. ↩ ↩
11. Our own calculation with the barometric formula of the International Standard Atmosphere (ISO 2533): p = 101.325 kPa × (1 − 2.25577 × 10⁻⁵ × 4,700)^5.25588 ≈ 56.2 kPa, or 55.5 % of sea-level pressure. The share of oxygen in the air stays at around 21 %, so the amount of oxygen per breath falls in proportion to air pressure, by around 45 %. Standard atmosphere; actual values vary with the weather. ↩
12. La República, Puno: Cecomsap remedió impactos por colapso de poza de relaves, December 17, 2021. ↩ ↩
13. Barbara Fraser and Hildegard Willer, Gold is a toxic lure in the world’s highest settlement, National Geographic, June 15, 2021. Conversion (our own calculation): 16,732 feet × 0.3048 ≈ 5,100 meters. ↩ ↩ ↩
14. Elmer Mamani, “Cachorreo”, the system used to exploit miners in La Rinconada, International Labour Organization, July 14, 2024. ↩
15. Huisa-Mamani, Arizaca-Avalos and Llanque-Maquera, Mercury pollution in water, soil, and biota induced by artisanal gold mining: A case study from Ananea District, Puno, Peru, Journal of Degraded and Mining Lands Management 12(2), 2025. ↩
16. Our own calculation: 348 members (footnote 2) ÷ 10 cooperatives ≈ 35 members per cooperative. ↩
17. Alliance for Responsible Mining, CECOMIP: first alluvial gold mining cooperative with Fairmined certification, September 16, 2016. ↩
18. World Bank, World Bank Urges Action for Gender Equality in Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining, February 5, 2024. ↩
19. Patrick Steinemann, Fairtrade Gold: Fairness, die allen dient, magazine „ZH“ 3/2022, Zürcher Kantonalbank. Translated by Fairever; original wording: “in der einstigen Männerdomäne”. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
20. Ulises Francisco Giraldo Malca, Minería informal en la cuenca alta del río Ramis, Peruvian Ministry of the Environment (SINIA), 2020. ↩
21. Congress of the Republic of Peru, Aprueban dictamen que establece marco normativo para eliminar progresivamente uso de mercurio en la minería artesanal, March 17, 2026. ↩
22. Fairtrade International, Fairtrade Standard for Gold and Associated Precious Metals for Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining, version 1.2 (in force until June 30, 2027; version 2.0 applies from July 1, 2027), requirements 3.2.1, 3.2.28, 3.2.30, 3.2.31, 3.3.14, 3.3.16, 3.3.18, 3.3.47, 3.3.50, 4.1.1, 4.1.3, 4.1.4, 4.1.5, 4.1.8, 4.5.1, 4.5.3 and 4.5.5. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
23. UNEP Global Mercury Partnership, Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM), accessed September 2026. ↩
24. World Health Organization, Mercury and health, fact sheet, October 24, 2024. ↩
25. El Popular, Puno: desembalse de relaves mineros genera desastre ambiental en Ananea, December 6, 2021. Translated by Fairever; original wording: “Para nosotros es una falla técnica.” and “asumimos la responsabilidad.” Peruvian media call the pond a tailings pond (“poza de relaves”); we follow the operators and Fairtrade Max Havelaar, who describe it as a sedimentation pond. ↩
26. La República, Puno: Fiscalía investiga daños ocasionados por desborde de relaves mineros en Ananea, December 4, 2021. ↩