With Blasts And Grit, Colombia Fights Gold Mines Run By Crime Gangs

Parque Nacional Farallones de Cali, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 6th Dec, 2024) A thin detonating cord snakes its way into an illegal gold mine drilled high up on a mountain near the Colombian city of Cali, exploding with a roar and destroying a lucrative source of money for armed groups that include leftist rebels.

The blast brings down the walls of a tunnel leading into the pit in Farallones National Park, which features a stretch of the Andes that runs just outside Colombia's third largest city.

The entrance is now blocked by tons of rubble, putting that mine out of commission.

It took the engineers, police and city officials assigned to knock it out 10 hours to hike up to the mine, which was dug at an altitude of 3,400 meters (11,000 feet).

Wildcat miners operating under the control of local crime gangs and leftist rebels have been running mines like this for decades in these mist-covered mountains.

To isolate the gold, they use mercury, a toxic liquid metal that is polluting the water used in Cali, home to 2.2 million people.

"All that mercury goes into the ground" and ends up in rivers that supply its drinking water, said the chief engineer of the blasting operation, who for safety reasons did not want to give his name.

AFP accompanied the blasting team on a three-day climb in the mountains, with mules carrying the equipment.

The government estimates that 85 percent of the gold that Colombia exports comes from unlicensed mines.

The above-board mines yielded at least 248 tons of gold from 2017 to 2022, according to the United Nations.

In the Cali region, the grueling, freezing work of climbing a mountain to dig into it for gold is done by local people employed by local crime gangs.

These in turn pay a tax to rebels who have formed renegade, offshoot groups from the once powerful guerrilla army known as the FARC, which laid down its weapons under a historic 2016 peace accord after decades of fighting.

These FARC dissidents thus run a large network of illegal mines that extends beyond the Cali region.