Sand trafficking in Latin America

It seems to me that business springs up wherever there is arbitrage and this is especially true for "free" natural resources (timber, water, etc).

Organised crime can make it profitable because they already have manpower and equipment, but it isn't necessary.

The smuggling operations between Guatemala and Mexico go both ways, depending on market prices in both countries for some very unglamorous products like eggs and gasoline.

your answer was like "tell me you don't live in a third-world country without telling me..." I am from Argentina so I know: You go to buy sand and are offered the legit one at a price hard to afford, or the "black" one with some discount. This way you learn there is a black market. Maybe for one bag you will get the same price anyway, but when you need an important amount of it, there will be 2 prices. If you are in a beach town, you hear the rumors about why there is less sand.

I've forgotten the name, but I once watched a documentary on illegal gold mining in Brazil. One of the most successful of them was a German (illegal immigrant? not enforced in brazil anyway) , who was attracted by the wild west aspect.

There definitely does seem to be a breed of people like this, and Latin America or Africa can present some interesting opportunities (see alo cowboy capitalists by vice).

I personally think getting into organised crime kind of mirrors the process where corps pick up fresh grads. Someone who fits the profile of being suitable for organised crime is someone without legal opportunities due to a lack of education, illegal immigration status, prior convictions, etc. In similar ways they are "headhunted" in a process that is more about convenience than key skills in a resume. If you're one of these people you'll end up floating around spaces where the "headhunting" happens.

I remember when I was young and unemployed being plucked from the street when I was looking at job cards in the window of a job centre by members of an MLM. They tried to rope me into their ugly embrace selling door to door on commission only deals that were dubious in nature.

What's kind of spooky to me is how thin those lines can be, it only takes one mistake, lapse in judgement in youth or rolling your birth into an unstable family to end up on the wrong side of that line. This is why I personally find it quite distasteful when people who travelled the happy path turn up their nose at people who fell off onto the darker one. In some cases some kids excel in their black market roles and would have applied the same gusto to a white market profession if they'd had that opportunity.

I lost a best friend that few years prior to his jail conviction got his phd in economics. I always knew about his business and he told me many stories about why he was doing it. I even advised him. But I always stayed out of it. One thing got clear to me. The people in that world are similar to our 'normal' world. You have the same hierarchy as in normal society with smart and dumb, nice and not so nice people. His story took place in Europe. He started after meeting some people in his fighting gym. Got a first assignment and things rolled fasr from there. High reward and thrill was an important motivation for him. He occasionally had hundreds of thousands of euros in cash. which we mainly spend on parties, escorts and drugs. Sometimes huge chunks of the money got lost because a person in the chain got caught or stole the money. But on avarage he was making like 200k a month. He got caught on the highway few years ago with several kilos of heroine and cocaine and has to sit for 22 years.

This is the way it is with everyone. Rarely does someone choose their industry and job. I was into computers as a child because I had access to them through my grandparents' bookeeping business and being taught by my grandfather.

I really wanted to build houses but could never find a confluence of opportunity. I was sucked in by the available opportunities. My family were all artists and skilled industrial laborers. A lot of whom picked up their trade in the military. My opportunity was tech and I consider myself very lucky.

My father was a failed artist turned retailer bootstrapped by his father's GE stock he was granted as a precision welder, and I worked as a retail clerk and manager in the retail business for a time when I wasn't working in tech.

Farmers kid becomes a farmer. Maybe another opportunity comes up and they take it.

I'm never impressed by anyone's professional title until I hear their story. 99% of the time it's a result of the circumstances they were born into. Usually the only people with an interesting story were born into very modest or limited opportunity and had to grind it out until a better opportunity presented itself.

Sand trafficking is a perfect example. It is the best opportunity they have.

Sand is heavy af. A ton is only like 20 cubic feet. Still… that’s not very much money.

how can anyone possibly make money off of that with transport costs and labor?

There's a chart about half way through the article - around 40% in Brazil

Any sources for the shoot-to-kill policies?

SandGPT

Innovation may be needed for recycling of the old concrete from demolished buildings. Including extraction of sand from it.

If anyone invents a cheap process, it may have revolutionary consequences, probably.

I think that's a joke but honestly I think there's a disruption opportunity here.

The easy thing about sand is that it takes whatever shape you want it to. The hard thing about sand is that it has to be firm (strong internal chemical bonds) and in small granules (somehow, lots of energy had to go into breaking those bonds, in the beach case this is wave energy).

But if you had a large enough library of rocks with known shapes or which will break along predictable lines, and a precise enough idea of the ultimate desired shape for your project, you could skip the energy intensive middle part and just use large rocks that mostly fit instead of tiny rocks in the form of sand-based concrete. Then you'd glue those rocks together with concrete--which would still require sand, but now much less of it.

I'm not sure how the monetary economics would shake out, but from an energy budget perspective it seems like a win to not require things to be broken up so tiny just to have them glued back together into something so large. "cheaper" to just mostly solve the puzzle out of already large pieces.