The Open Veins of Mina Vieja: A 21st Century Gold Rush
CSN-MADISON, MAY 24, 2002
This account was rendered by Jeff Carlson, a delegate on the International
Caravan for Life in the Sur de Bolivar. The Caravan was compromised
of 70
caravanistas from 11 countries representing 180 organizations. Carlson
also visited the Putumayo on a Colombia Support Network delegation,
and has
volunteered with CSN for several years as a member of the Minneapolis
chapter.
The title of Eduardo Galleano's classic history text, The Open Veins of Latin America, is truthful and keen in its observation. The fruits of the earth's womb, since the years of the conquest, have been open to outsiders, first in the form of conquistadores. In the early colonial years the indigenous, through the blood of their own hands, enriched kings and queens a thousand leagues from home. Clear parallels can be drawn between Pizarro's gang of slave drivers and today's more humane but no less contemptuous international conglomerates, which stop at nothing to satiate rich country's demand for underground resources in the third world.
Deep in the San Lucas Mountains of central Colombia yet another chapter in Galleano's story is written. San Lucas may be one of the last resource-rich places on earth where campesino miners still dig for gold on small independent land holdings. More than one giant mining company is drooling over San Lucas but hasn't been able to colonize it. The reason, I suspect, is the ELN, or Army of National Liberation, which claims San Lucas as its traditional homeland, and despises foreign mining companies. In recent times, paramilitaries have come to claim the gold for the outsiders, sowing death and terror in their path. While fear still stirs within the populace, we are offered a relatively peaceful portrait of life in a small mining community, 4,000 meters closer to the heavens.
We have arrived here over tremendous odds: by bus from Bogota to the regional hub of Barrancabermeja, by ferry boat down the Magdalena river, and ten hours by jeep over a rugged path until we are forced to get out and hop onto mules for a precarious nocturnal trot over mountain switchbacks and into Mina Vieja. The campesinos tell us that the ³the mules know the way², and of course, they are right. We are greeted in Mina Vieja by a grand fiesta complete with blaring vallenato music out of a generator-run stereo. We are shown the mines that are dug by pick and shovel and homes made of tree boughs and plastic. Everything in this town has to be brought up by mule.
There are two ways to mine for gold in San Lucas. The first is a vertical
socavon, where the miner is lowered in a basket by a hand-held pulley
system. One of our
guides climbs in and descends into the blackness where he will chip
away at the rock and send up piles of earth in a bucket. Due to the
lack of machinery, he can only dig down until he hits ground water,
or venomous gas. Every day miners die by water, crumbling earth, or
poisoning. He takes his lift into his own callused hands. The second
method is a horizontal tunnel, which can stretch for over a mile into
the earth's belly. On a trek inside one of these, I feel, if briefly,
the harrowing claustrophobia of mining for gold by hand.
Fifteen years ago, the area was sparsely settled. In the blink of an eye, virgin cloudforest has become home to 10,000 fortune seekers from all over Colombia, living in a lawless yet invigorating time and place, much like California in the 1850's. The difference here is that the moment San Lucas is opened up to foreign mining, the dreams of land ownership dry up and once again, the Latin American peasant will be at the mercy of global forces beyond his own power. To the question"what are we fightin for?" , the answer is gold.
Even while U.S. officials blame drugs for the bloodshed in Colombia, Mina Vieja teaches us to the contrary. Colombia is engulfed in a turf war pitting state-sponsored paramilitaries against the insurgency in a never-ending battle for resources. In Mina Vieja, the civilian population is as much intertwined in the conflict as the armed actors. The paramilitaries wish to remove them by force. The guerrillas manipulate them and endanger them by association. Reprisals against the civilian population often come after the guerrillas have been present. All the while, the gold that is their livelihood intensifies the rivalries between the two bands of outlawed and endangers them further.
Politicians do not come here. Neither do soldiers or bureaucrats. For the residents of mining country, the caravan¹s visit is the only show of outside solidarity they will see this year. The leaders of the different "mines" take advantage of our presence, offering articulate treaties defending their rights to self-education and health care. Each year intrepid colonos push farther up into the virgin cloudforest, burning stretches of land for food crops and mine evacuation.
One morning my photographer friend John and I wander up the hills
outside of town. Three times we are offered arepas, fresh off of a wood
burning stove and
accompanied by a delicious tinto, or small cup of coffee. Two guerrillas
talk idly over bowls of changua, a soup made out of eggs and potatoes.
From the top of the
hill we see the crude wooden dwellings where women work the stains out
of clothes over a stone washboard, and men walk mules loaded with picks
and shovels up a mountain to the mines. By our side a bubbling spring
empties into rubber hoses which bring water, using gravity, into the
dwellings of Mina Vieja.
This is life outside the reach of traditional Colombian authority: precarious, unpredictable, and tragic. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote that Colombians lack conventional means to render their lives believable. "This comes clear to me at two in the morning when I take a moment to peer out over the vast dark night which envelopes us. In front of me, the silhouette of la teta rises like a mother's breast over the horizon. Behind me the hypnotizing accordion underscores a nasal vallenato voice while people dance, drink and tell campesino stories. Under me lies the gold which brought them here and is their blessing and curse." In the near future, the delicate bubble of peace we have observed may burst into more bloodshed. The next time the paramilitaries come, the open veins might be their own.