If they are lucky, the jade pickers, as they are known, can unearth a chunk of jadeite that can make their fortune. If they are unlucky, they are buried alive.

Myanmar’s jade mines, which are the sole source of the most prized form of the stone, are extraordinarily lucrative. A 2015 report by Global Witness, an international natural resource watchdog, estimated that the jadeite business made up nearly half of Myanmar’s G.D.P. the year before.

The bulk of the money, however, never trickles into the hands of freelance jade miners. Instead, Myanmar’s military, which controls some of the country’s largest conglomerates, monopolizes the profits. Other companies owned by military cronies take a portion of the revenues. So do firms run by warlords from ethnic minority groups that populate northern Myanmar and that have long fought for autonomy.

“The trade is controlled by the military elites, U.S.-sanctioned drug lords and crony companies that the country’s rebranded government says it is consigning to the past,” the Global Witness report said. “These networks cream off vast profits while local people suffer terrible abuses and see their natural inheritance ripped out from beneath their feet.”

The site where Saturday’s accident occurred is owned by a company associated with U Ohn Myint, a retired general and former cabinet minister, according to local officials.

The National League for Democracy, which now shares power with the military that governed Myanmar for nearly half a century, vowed to regulate the jade industry when it assumed some government posts in 2016. But even though licenses for some major mines have expired, the business of tearing into Hpakant’s earth — and the resulting deaths — has continued.

“The place is very big, and rule of law doesn’t work here,” said U Tin Soe, a National League for Democracy parliamentarian representing Hpakant.