From the Wall Street Journal, November 12:
Miners are plundering one of the biggest mother lodes of gold in Latin America, led by gunmen who seized tunnels from a Chinese mining giant
BURITICÁ, Colombia—Some 700 yards deep in Colombia’s richest gold mine, private security guards crouch behind sandbags, trapped in a failing battle with a drug-trafficking gang that has commandeered 30 miles of tunnels worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The air below ground is hot, humid, sometimes toxic, and the work is dangerous—defending claustrophobic passageways against tossed explosives and gunfire from AK-47 assault rifles. Two guards were killed and several others wounded last year. On the other side, braving their own dangers, are an estimated 2,000 illegal miners
The scale of plunder is stunning. Mine owner Zijin Mining Group, a Chinese state-controlled company, estimated that last year it lost more than 3.2 tons of gold, worth around $200 million and equal to 38% of the mine’s total production. The illegal mining, a slow and laborious process that continues largely unpoliced by authorities, is a war “we are losing,” a Zijin security official said.
Rogue miners at Zijin’s mines and elsewhere in Colombia get access, protection and equipment from the Gulf Clan, an armed militia of some 7,000 men that moves cocaine and migrants along routes headed to the U.S. The group seizes Zijin tunnels on behalf of illegal miners in exchange for a cut of the spoils.
Illegal gold mining in South America has expanded in recent years, government officials said, propelled by record-high gold prices, up 30% this year to around $2,600 an ounce. The miners move dredges and excavators into jungles, igniting conflicts with local indigenous groups, and use mercury to separate gold from rock, polluting parts of the Amazon rainforest in several countries.
As history shows, the lure of gold can be irresistible. Some of Colombia’s trespassing miners extract $5,000 or more worth of gold a month, a sum about equal to what business executives earn. Since 2019, about 18 illegal miners have been killed in accidents at the Zijin mine, company officials said.
“The wages are very good, but you risk it all,” said Erik Dubier, a 22-year-old illegal miner. “You can get trapped. There are rock slides. And there’s combat every day.”
Zijin Mining, which operates worldwide, filed a $430 million lawsuit at the World Bank’s International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, alleging Colombia authorities aren’t doing their job. Zijin estimates that illegal miners control more than 60% of its mining tunnels in the mountains around Buriticá, a two-hour drive from Medellín.
The company bought the mine in 2020 from Canada’s Continental Gold for $1 billion, part of Beijing’s global push to secure minerals. Leizhong Li, the company’s chief executive, said violent incursions have since become a daily threat—with little help from the government.
“We tried to talk to the state all last year but didn’t see much will,” Li said. The company estimated that Colombia lost the equivalent of $100 million in taxes and royalties last year.
Daniela Gómez, the vice minister of defense, said Colombia doesn’t have the capacity to flush out the clandestine miners from the “subterranean theater of operations.” The government, she said, wants to avoid violent confrontations that might endanger civilians.
“The demands made by the company are not realistic,” said Gómez. Zijin bought the gold-mine operation “knowing that the illegal extraction of minerals was taking place,” she said.
Over the past four years, illegal miners have built an underground network so vast that Zijin engineers said the mountain has started to resemble Swiss cheese, crisscrossed with makeshift passageways and tunnels leading from an estimated 380 aboveground entryways. The Gulf Clan provides bunks, kitchens, bathrooms and security....
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