Andrew Willis
By Andrew Willis
After Francia Marquez complained that illegal gold mining was polluting her water, masked men with guns decided to pay her a visit. They failed to find her. A day later, she and her two sons fled the village where they had lived all their lives, joining the ranks of Colombia’s six million internally displaced people.
“I’m living in a state of total uncertainty,” Marquez, 33, who is now in hiding, said in a telephone interview.
Long known for the cocaine trade and kidnappings, Colombian rebel groups and criminal gangs have turned from drug sales to illegal gold mines to fund their activities. Those mines are increasingly responsible for driving people out of their homes. Colombia has the second-largest number of displaced persons worldwide, just behind Syria, according to the United Nations.
The rebels and gangs, who operate in large swatches of the country, are pushing villagers out of areas with promising mineral profiles, taking over small-scale local mines or warring over who will control areas with the most promise for gold. Residents are caught in the crossfire. About 200,000 Colombians were driven from their homes in 2013, the latest year for which data is available, Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos & el Desplazamiento, a Colombia-based human-rights group, said last month.
Police say the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and groups of disbanded former paramilitaries who migrated into pure organized crime are heavily involved in illegal gold mining, along with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, a Marxist group that emerged in the 1960s.
In June, Colonel Hector Paez, then serving as acting director of the country’s rural police division, said in an interview that gold was increasingly become the go-to source of funding for armed groups in the country.
“As soon as it’s excavated and away from the mine it’s legal,” said Paez. The rural police had shut 336 illegal mines to that point last year. While the Farc has been engaged in peace talks with the Colombian government since late 2012, activists including CODHES, as the human-rights group is known, say they’re disappointed the talks don’t include discussions about the illegal mining. Marco Romero, CODHES’s director, said the government doesn’t want to expand its negotiating agenda, which includes agricultural reforms, dismantling the drug trade and political participation.
The drive for gold is so extensive that mines operating without full certification account for more than 85 percent of the metal produced in Colombia.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Andrew Willis
After Francia Marquez complained that illegal gold mining was polluting her water, masked men with guns decided to pay her a visit. They failed to find her. A day later, she and her two sons fled the village where they had lived all their lives, joining the ranks of Colombia’s six million internally displaced people.
“I’m living in a state of total uncertainty,” Marquez, 33, who is now in hiding, said in a telephone interview.
Long known for the cocaine trade and kidnappings, Colombian rebel groups and criminal gangs have turned from drug sales to illegal gold mines to fund their activities. Those mines are increasingly responsible for driving people out of their homes. Colombia has the second-largest number of displaced persons worldwide, just behind Syria, according to the United Nations.
The rebels and gangs, who operate in large swatches of the country, are pushing villagers out of areas with promising mineral profiles, taking over small-scale local mines or warring over who will control areas with the most promise for gold. Residents are caught in the crossfire. About 200,000 Colombians were driven from their homes in 2013, the latest year for which data is available, Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos & el Desplazamiento, a Colombia-based human-rights group, said last month.
Police say the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and groups of disbanded former paramilitaries who migrated into pure organized crime are heavily involved in illegal gold mining, along with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, a Marxist group that emerged in the 1960s.
In June, Colonel Hector Paez, then serving as acting director of the country’s rural police division, said in an interview that gold was increasingly become the go-to source of funding for armed groups in the country.
“As soon as it’s excavated and away from the mine it’s legal,” said Paez. The rural police had shut 336 illegal mines to that point last year. While the Farc has been engaged in peace talks with the Colombian government since late 2012, activists including CODHES, as the human-rights group is known, say they’re disappointed the talks don’t include discussions about the illegal mining. Marco Romero, CODHES’s director, said the government doesn’t want to expand its negotiating agenda, which includes agricultural reforms, dismantling the drug trade and political participation.
The drive for gold is so extensive that mines operating without full certification account for more than 85 percent of the metal produced in Colombia.
WP-BLOOMBERG
