Good post! I wonder how these five principles would change if we dropped the assumption that most illegal mining occurs in "abandoned shafts of improperly closed mines." This not the case in most of the American countries. In Ecuador, Peru or Brazil, most of the illegal mining occurs in remote areas of the rainforest. Illegal operators target the river banks in search of gold, and they are highly mobile. These characteristics make it hard for governments to form task-forces due to the resources needed to oversee vast territories where states often lack permanent presence or control.

Me think one of the effective reasonable ways of enabling the war against illegal mining in the mineral rich undeveloped countries to succeed is the making  of local communities the main sovereign owners of the mineral and other natural resources of their ancestral lands, and requiring their local governments in collaboration with their Regional and central governments  to take the direct responsibility of ensuring that any development and/or exploitation of the mineral and other  natural resources of their lands is legal and safe to the local environments.