ENAMI (Chile)

Empresa Nacional de Minería (National Mining Enterprise) better known by its acronym ENAMI is a Chilean state-owned mining company based in Santiago. Its business involve purchasing ore, primarily from small and medium-scale mining, processing it is and selling the processed product, usually copper, in the international market. ENAMI has also its role in providing technical and financial assistance for mining in its target segment. Its board president is the Chilean minister of mining, who since August 2023 is Aurora Williams. ENAMI was created in 1960 by the merger of Caja de Crédito y Fomento Minero (CACREMI) and Empresa Nacional de Fundiciones. The company is aimed to help small-scale miners by among other things buying ore in quantities that are otherwise too small to be traded in the international market. The company also helps stabilizing prices for the products of medium and small-scale miners. It has most of its offices and smelters and other industries in the northern half och Chile, from Rancagua to the Arica in the far north. South of Rancagua the only office of ENAMI lies in Concepción.

Artisan miners known as pirquineros usually sell their output directly to ENAMI. The number of small-scale miners in charge of a mining operation (each typically having a workforce of five to six miners), including pirquineros, registered at ENAMI has been in the span 2300 to 750 in the 2011–2021 period. Thus, by one estimate in the 2000s to the 2020s in years of high mining activity up to 14,000 miners would have been employed in small-scale mining in Chile. As of 2019 the number of small-scale miners working on copper mining was about twenty times larger than those working on other metals like gold or silver.

ENAMI is considered a key component to fight illegal mining in Chile as it deprives organized crime from taking the role of being the main buyers of the products of small-scale miners as it happens in other Latin American countries.