Not Just Out of Africa: South America’s “Blood Diamonds” Network

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Girish Gupta for TIME
An 11-year-old boy works at a makeshift mine in Icabarú, near Venezuela's border with Brazil on July 6, 2012. The child works on a team with five other children, only slightly older than him, and his father who said simply, "He has to work." In an office in Santa Elena, deep in the Venezuelan jungle bordering Brazil and Guyana, a diamond trader inspects a rough gem under his magnifying glass. Surrounded by precious minerals, stuffed tarantulas and a sprawling anaconda skin pinned to the wall, he takes calls from men who work in the rowdy clandestine mines nearby and bring him the precious stones. From there, a broker will traffic the diamonds into Guyana, where they’ll receive falsified certificates that they were legally mined and marketed. Many will end up in commercial hubs like New York, Tel Aviv and Antwerp.
And the entire journey will flout the Kimberley Process, a decade-old, U.N.-mandated international agreement to curtail rampant global diamond smuggling. Venezuela, a major diamond producer, is a KP member but voluntarily removed itself as an active participant in 2008 after being widely accused of ignoring the pact’s mission to regulate diamond production and commercialization. “There is no control at all,” says the Santa Elena trader, who asked not to be identified. The KP, as a result, is considering expelling Venezuela: the U.S., which chairs the KP for 2012, this summer delivered an ultimatum to Venezuelan authorities to demonstrate compliance or lose membership altogether.



The Venezuelan crisis is just the latest but perhaps gravest reminder that the KP’s effectiveness is in serious doubt. Last year Global Witness, an international NGO and a KP architect, cut its ties to the KP largely in protest over the failure to stem illicit trade in “conflict” or “blood” diamonds from African countries like Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire, where a civil war is being financed in part by gem smuggling. (That problem was a key impetus for the KP’s creation.) But for Global Witness and other erstwhile KP boosters, Venezuela is one of the most egregious examples of how “the KP has turned itself into a toothless League of Nations,” says Ian Smillie, who in 2009 resigned a top post at the NGO Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), another KP founder, citing a litany of countries where he said the KP had failed. “One way or the other, the KP has actively let Venezuela off the hook.” And if Venezuela can spurn the KP rules, he adds, “why should anyone else bother?”

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Still, Venezuela is the bigger problem in South America. After PAC visited the region in 2006 and issued a damning report on Venezuela’s negligence, Global Witness called for its expulsion for “flagrant [KP] non-compliance.” The government of socialist President Hugo Chávez denied any wrongdoing. But Rob Dunn, who as chairman of the KP Working Group on Statistics visited the country in 2008 as part of a KP review mission, says the country “essentially said they have no ability to control the illegal flow of diamonds and therefore they washed their hands of it.” Requests for Venezuelan diamond output data and interviews with key ministers were refused, he says. The country has since resumed submitting reports, but they’re usually late and “a joke,” according to one PAC official.

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But they will be sold, as long as the rough-and-tumble illegal diamond mines in southern Venezuela continue to operate. There are thought to be hundreds of them inside the Gran Sabana, and many, given the increasingly mafioso nature of the country’s diamond trade, are violent. “You think I live a cool life, an adventure,” one smuggler tells TIME during his visit to Ciudad Bolívar, north of the Gran Sabana. “But I don’t know how I’ll die, with a gun to the head perhaps, or hung from a tree and my body thrown in the river.” Which is just the sort of ugliness the Kimberley Process was meant to do away with.


Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/08/20/not-just-out-of-africa-south-americas-blood-diamonds-network/#ixzz24Hs47RgB

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1. Global Witness on Venezuela pioneer blood diamond watch dog

In recent years the vast majority of Venezuela's diamond production has been smuggled out of the country rather than being exported through legitimate KP channels.


After much pressure from civil society and continued evidence of serious non-compliance (for example, the Venezuelan authorities ceased issuing KP certificates, and internal controls in the diamond mining areas remain inadequate), Venezuela voluntarily "separated" from the KP in 2008.

The government stated that it would neither export nor import rough diamonds until it had established credible internal controls.

To date Venezuela reports zero exports despite overwhelming evidence that diamond mining continues, with diamond licences still being issued by authorities, and the entire national production smuggled across the border into neighbouring KP participant countries.

http://www.globalwitness.org/campaigns/conflict/conflict-diamonds/venezuela


Global Witness has since left the Kimberly Process as an observer stating that implementation has been ineffective

“Nearly nine years after the Kimberley Process was launched, the sad truth is that most consumers still cannot be sure where their diamonds come from, nor whether they are financing armed violence or abusive regimes” said Charmian Gooch, a Founding Director of Global Witness. “The scheme has failed three tests: it failed to deal with the trade in conflict diamonds from Côte d’Ivoire, was unwilling to take serious action in the face of blatant breaches of the rules over a number of years by Venezuela and has proved unwilling to stop diamonds fuelling corruption and violence in Zimbabwe. It has become an accomplice to diamond laundering – whereby dirty diamonds are mixed in with clean gems.”

http://www.globalwitness.org/library/global-witness-leaves-kimberley-process-calls-diamond-trade-be-held-accountable