How a Chinese mining conglomerate found itself entangled in a subterranean war in Colombia
How a Chinese mining conglomerate found itself entangled in a subterranean war in Colombia
Criminal armed groups, security forces and pirate miners clash below a sleepy mountain town
This week we bring you an original and exclusive long-form piece. It’s a little different than our usual format, but the story struck as being well worth the extra ink. Please enjoy.
The Zijin gold mine, in Buriticá, Colombia, sits on the largest known gold deposit in South America— an estimated reserve of over 300 metric tons. The town is idyllic, nestled amongst the clouds in the Andean mountains of Antioquia. Its picturesque town square, near a colonial style Cathedral, bustles with residents who chat while sipping coffee at half a dozen bakeries and cafes as men in white straw hats chat calmly in the mountain sun.
It is prototypically paisa, the Colombian slang term for the residents and the culture of the lush hilly regions of Andean Antioquia. There is only one road into the town, which winds past breathtaking vistas and lush green mountain passes before depositing the visitor in a small and tranquil mountain hamlet.
On the surface, the town seems better suited for an old-timey postcard than a sordid story about organized crime, conflict, international mining conglomerates, and murder.
But below ground, in sharp contrast to the almost postcard quality of rural Antioquia small-town life, a war for blood gold is underway, and everyone in Buriticá knows someone whose life it has claimed.
A subterranean battleground
The Zijin mine consists of nearly a hundred underground tunnels crisscrossing and plunging into the depths of the mountain on which it is located. Those tunnels are being constantly invaded by informal miners associated with Colombia’s largest criminal, the Gaitanista Army of Colombia (EGC), (called the “Clan del Golfo” by the government) who are digging their own honeycomb of tunnels into the same massive gold deposits.
Thousands of informal miners, most working at the behest of the Gaitanistas and digging in horrific and unsafe conditions, tunnel into the mining shafts created by Zijin miners to steal what they can.
These subterranean invasions have often escalated into pitched gun battles, explosions, ambushes, and offensives and counter-offensives as informal miners and security guards employed by Zijin play a bloody game of cat and mouse over gold and platinum.
Twenty-four hours a day, heavily armored guards with shotguns and steel security shields stand at the entrance to every sub-tunnel within the sprawling mine. They build sandbag barricades to repel incursions, and often intentionally collapse old tunnels with explosives to prevent them from being taken over by pirate miners.
Juan Guillermo Pineda is a firefighter who has lived his whole life in the town. He is soft-spoken, with a babyface that somehow makes him seem almost childlike despite being in his late 40s.
“The illegal miners dump the bodies of those who die in the Zijin tunnels,” he said, sipping a coffee. His manner is matter-of-fact as if he were talking about house chores rather than the grisly job of removing bodies. “They know they’ll be found there. So we come to pick them up, identify them, and then notify the families. If there are any families.”
Buriticá wasn’t always so accustomed to conflict. The mining industry, and the organized crime that followed it, are all rather new.
“We used to all be farmers here,” said Pineda. “But the kids here aren’t interested in that. Why would they want to poke around in the dirt when they earn twenty times as much looking for gold?”
How an idyllic mountain town became the site of an underground war
The Buriticá mine was built over three years of surveying by Toronto-based Continental Gold. In 2019 the Zijin Mining Group, a multinational Chinese conglomerate, acquired a controlling share of Continental Gold and took over the Canadian corporation's mine operations in the country.
The EGC (The Gaitanista Army of Colombia, formerly called AGC), a criminal armed group ideologically descended from paramilitary forces that fought on the side of the government during Colombia’s 53-year civil war, has near total control over the region of Antioquia where Buriticá is located.
Previously, EGC did not maintain much of a presence in the municipality, despite having effective control over the region, but after Continental Gold’s discovery that quickly began to change.
“A lot of people started arriving here from other mining regions in the country,” said Marta Jaramillo, an activist and social leader who also operates Buriticá’s only radio station. People started to come here from “dangerous places, like Segovia,” a mining town in northern Antioquia where EGC also maintains a strong presence, and which has one of the highest per-capita murder rates in Latin America.
“And now everyone has to pay EGC,” she said. “But the extortion isn’t the worst of it. Informal mining has exploded, and deaths have come with that.”
In addition to the expense of becoming the majority Continental Gold shareholder, Zijin also Invested heavily in infrastructure and mining titles in the region. However, after operations became increasingly dangerous, the conglomerate filed a lawsuit against the Colombian government seeking $500 million in damages under Colombian-Canadian trade agreements, claiming the Andean country has failed to guarantee basic security for their investment.
Continental Gold, in a public statement in June, stated they have lost control of more than 60% of their mining operation, either due to tunnels being taken over, or being collapsed to prevent them from being used, and dozens of employees have been injured or killed.
Meanwhile, the poorly constructed tunnels built by the informal miners are in danger of collapsing the mountain entirely. Researchers and environmentalists in Colombia have called the situation a “ticking ecological time bomb.”
Perhaps just as worrisome, the dynamics under which Continental Gold operates in the region call up shades of the height of Colombia's civil war in the 90's. As leftist President Gustavo Petro seeks to negotiate with the Clan del Golfo as part of his "Total Peace" plan, political progress with EGC leadership has failed to translate into peacebuilding progress on the ground.
“The Canadians dressed up the mine, claimed it was safe, and walked away with a nice paycheck,” said Luis, a mid-level manager for Zijin’s operations in Buriticá. He asked that his last name be withheld because he doesn’t have authorization to speak on behalf of the company. “It isn’t the Chinese company's fault the problems started right afterward.”
But the Zijin lawsuit against Colombia is unlikely to succeed. The fact that Buriticá rests in a region firmly controlled by EGC is public knowledge. Government lawyers are likely to argue that it was a lack of due diligence on the part of the international conglomerate that is to blame, not Colombian security forces and that no one is forcing the Zijin mining group to conduct operations here.
Other multinational companies have argued in Colombian courts that they were entangled in the Colombian conflict against their will, most recently Chiquita Brands. It is rarely a successful legal strategy.
The pirate miners are just as much victims of the conflict as everyone else
The informal miners, or “artisanal miners” as they prefer to be called, are principally young, and come to Buriticá from all over the country in search of what they have been misled to believe is a surefire way to make money.
But the conditions they work in are horrific. They work “shifts” of 20 to 30 days, locked underground in the tunnels where the work, regardless of what happens below, and though they can order food, and drugs, from those who have organized the illegal mining operation, they must pay for those goods out of their earnings.
“These kids are locked underground for weeks. They have no cellphone service, no entertainment,” said Jaramillo. “So a lot of them turn to cocaine or other drugs to aid with the tedium of the work.”
“Some of them, if they’re unlucky, actually emerge in debt,” she said.
But more often, even after giving the majority of the ore they extract to the ‘investors’ who organize the illegal mines, they can earn 5 to 6 times the monthly minimum wage in Colombia— which is currently roughly USD 360.
“Sometimes, if they strike a rich vein, they can make more though,” said Pineda, the firefighter.
He told PWS a story about the son of the couple who own the bakery near the town square. He had grown tired of working long hours at the family business and thought working as an informal miner could be his chance to achieve something better.
After his first 20-day shift, he had earned enough money to put a down payment on a small house near town. “But he wanted more. He wanted to pay for the house outright, and maybe start his own business,” said Pineda. So he went back for more work.
“But the tunnel he was working illegally in, which was attached to the Zijin mine, became his grave,” continued the firefighter. Workers in the Zijin mine happened to be using explosives to expand production on the day that, unbeknownst the them, the baker’s son was working in an adjacent tunnel.
When the explosives were activated, they burned off all the oxygen near the explosion site, as well as in the tunnel where he was working. “He died of asphyxiation,” said Pineda.
Above, a video of informal miners fleeing as rainwater floods their tunnels. After emerging, one says “there are four more trapped down below”. In subsequent videos passed to PWS, the miners try to return to rescue them. But their efforts failed, and the young men drowned.
For Luis, the Zijin mine manager, the solution is “a purge. Security forces need to clear out all of these strangers to the town who come here and commit crimes. If Zijin leaves, the mine will just become even more of a magnet for armed groups.”
But Jaramillo, the social leader, doesn’t think the solution is so simple. “You can’t put these kids in jail for accepting an opportunity to improve their economic situation that they view as legitimate,” she said. “They are victims of the armed conflict as much as anyone else. And Zijin, despite their claims otherwise, knew the situation they were getting into.”
“They just thought the profit would exceed the risk,” she said.
As we’re already well over our customary word count, we’ll be skipping our usual headline round-up and the Spanish Word of the Week. But fear not, piratas, next week we’re back to our usual format!
Hasta pronto!
nice piece, and fwiw some of us like long-format journalism, don't limit yourselves arbitrarily to a short word count!
Amazing work Mr. Collins! I don’t hear about any of this whenever I have time to take a cursory look at Colombian news…