The Deadly Battle over Colombia’s Precious Metals
The Deadly Battle over Colombia’s Precious Metals
February 23, 2015
By Nadja Drost
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Miners crush rock containing gold ore at the La Roca mine in Antioquia, Colombia. Photos by Stephen Ferry
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When people in Segovia, Colombia, a dusty gold-mining center 125 miles northeast of Medellín as the crow flies and six hours away by road, talked about what was happening there, they said the explosion of violence in the town had started with the massacre. Four members and associates of a family had been ambushed at a meeting to decide the fate of a successful local mine, called La Roca. Behind the killings, they said, was a prominent local figure. He was rarely spoken of in anything much louder than a whisper. He was known simply as Jairo Hugo.
To understand Jairo Hugo Escobar Cataño—his rarely used full name—you have to understand the gold. Colombia's gold reserves were a formidable prize for Spanish colonists, who eventually imported African slaves to work the colony's rich veins. It has always been a profitable industry, but perhaps never so much as when global gold prices began to rise steadily in the last decade. Between 2000 and 2007, the average price of gold more than doubled, from $279 to $695 an ounce. By 2011, it had more than doubled again, to $1,572 an ounce. A gold rush swept through swaths of Colombia, and narco-trafficking groups—both guerrillas and paramilitary organizations—turned to the precious metal to make up for lost profits in the drug trade. In many parts of the country, gold became the new cocaine.
Much of the country's production is still the work of traditional miners—often prospecting without official permission on the margins of big companies' legal claims. The rest comes mostly from the larger wildcatting outfits that popped up across the country as the market exploded, dynamiting hillsides, dredging up entire riverbeds, and tearing through pristine landscapes with backhoes, leaving moonscapes in their wake. These operations are often intertwined—voluntarily or otherwise—with Colombia's criminal underworld. Many mines pay an extortion tax to whichever armed group is in charge of the region. Sometimes outlaws act as shareholders in a mine. The result: A portion of gold sales goes directly into the coffers of militias.
In few parts of the country was this as obvious as the region where Hugo had risen to unofficial power. Hugo had worked for a time as a miner, then served for five years as an auxiliary policeman in a settlement near Segovia. In the 1990s, he made his first foray into the business of gold trading—buying gold directly from mines, then refining and melting it down into bars to sell to big exporters in Medellín.
More:
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/gold-warriors-0000545-v22n1