as. most of the mines in segovia have passed into the hands of citizens who established small companies of export of them for many years now. at the mine one hundred thirty workers bring the or to the surface like ants carrying it on their backs from a depth of three hundred metres. we

take the or out by the side. trying not to make it too heavy so you can walk. it depends there are times you make two and a half to three million that's twelve hundred euros and if the mine is rich you can even make four or five million. of good middle of the gold miner works hard for fifteen days to one man the minute . and then he goes and in one week spends it all on drink on women on passions everything he made in a month. is to

look good with you ok. that is why in a place so rich there is such great poverty. often the mines are a stone's throw away from homes the residents dig wherever they think they can get lucky. up to the depths of this one hundred ten meters about forty five degrees. for the time being we haven't reached the vein we're getting closer to us by then

production will be twenty grams a load. they were rich it will have a good yield. right of the and we can provide for our families even as well as for many people here in our neighborhood. but we know in which places there are gold veins. we go there and it worked i'm going to on title in a land which isn't out of the national not of belongs to the multinationals. illegal mind sprout up everywhere each week. the citizens who have succumbed to gold rush fever quickly try to exploit the high prices. here no one has titles to the land. the entire region belongs to ground colombia

gold that recently bought art from tino gold mines which went bankrupt. all the large mines of the area and the processing facilities. or sold by the government to the canadian multinational for just two hundred million dollars. frontino gold mines here and sit as proven gold reserves of over nine hundred thousand ounces. supply nine hundred thousand ounces by today's price of gold at the let's say at one thousand five hundred dollars that would be an astronomical amount you know because i can't get this multiplication out of my mind. and then along comes the government of alviro you or e bay velez who donates the mines at the humiliating price of two hundred million dollars because this is truly scandalous. look i will explain it to you sometimes my wife buys shoes which she thinks are cheap and i think are expensive.

so you must give numbers and explain what is cheap in comparison to other mines globally. how much they were bought for with how many reserves etc one. thing you know they don't produce anything only opinions not facts nor. the union says that the sale was illegal it claims that all the property of frontino was conceded in writing to the thousands of workers of the company by the former bosses who in this way paid salaries pensions and insurance in kind in the. to the state is selling something it doesn't own in colombia we call his villainy and overt. but if they can say that elvis presley lives that charlemagne was a jew whatever they like but i have a title and that's the difference. good move with.

the government supports foreign investment of both so much so that the canadian multinational made a former colombian minister of foreign affairs the company's president. is this something bad is there some gap in the colombian legal system which doesn't allow a member of government to work. she might have inside information. that's not certain that the president of the company was minister of foreign affairs she doesn't have any knowledge of mental energy of course she is learning a lot quickly because she is smart when she left the aruban government. and another meter where the same to her. fellow. gorillas are active.

so org. group of former paramilitaries was. finally the envy ghetto office is also in operation here it is a drug cartel founded after the death of powerful escobar by his men it is a war of all against all for territorial control the more territory controlled the more mines exploited this is seventeen gang members of the restaurant hearst's were killed today in the battle with foreign insulter province there it is said the battle was to claim areas in the mountains owner of the aren't you a municipality when i want you also i want to feel that he. goal is not evidence substance that it's legal. is that attracts illegal groups a lot of which he got his. leg out of the new one during

money through gold is easy we. got you riskless. the illegals buy gold or minus two euro and and then they take it to the municipality and get it legalized as a number of as legal merchandise but it brings profits to the local authorities which will be divided among the politicians for your needs and thus there will be support from the municipality. all the ordinary gold miners must pay protection to the armed groups active here in order to work. fear keeps everyone silent insignia they have a saying flies don't enter into closed mouth. i've heard that regular miners must pay protection to all the armed groups active here is that correct. they were meant to you know at the moment i don't know anything about that no one has come to me and i don't know. nor to. those

munitions we give two million a month to fark he says then there is also the envy god office. rojas going to use and organized crime i restore the restaurant business to the i'm a got office celia going up or pay protection with a percentage of the gold you know to. forty one penalty or as if they were also partners in the mine has anything left over i don't care something is left you know not much for your input something this is how we've come to operate our housekeeper because otherwise it would be impossible to work. because either that will make you leave people in a city not all moody you or your family. what can you whoever they want. still i mean a step if the mind is poor they don't care that much as you think you're going to study custom but if the man is rich with good production this time which you can

look when they visit you all the time did you know and get involved in your business if you bought only a few of their own prosecutions as well as their organizations national not because in this area enormous amounts of money are exchanged intentionally going to deploy economic power leads to answers. since they're going to come to establish themselves permanently in the area. the government accuses the small town miners are fueling the bloody civil war. president santos this is another serious reason to eliminate them over the. every day the secret services of the state that you have along with the ministry of mines and energy as you know sweep the country by. so that this activity doesn't fuel the conflict i mean. if we're going to you know in order to prevent its want

to go in as we have done up to now. a special police unit is in charge of hunting down the illegal gold miners. poor peasants watch helicopters landing in the middle of nowhere. noise it's not that we the small miners fund the illegal groups as the government says he will in order to protect our lives our families and to work in peace. but we are forced to pay protection to illegal groups. because the state doesn't protect us if the police and security forces did their job we wouldn't be obliged to pay for protection. and those. here they do the opposite they fight as they search for us humiliate us and throw

us off our own land so they can surrender it all to the in multi-nationals. they. were ben takes the or which comes out of the mine. into the mills to get a pulverized. the cylinders contain metal spheres. cyanide is added to the earth as this helps extract the gold. cyanide is especially toxic and in large concentrations lethal. it was used in the nazi gas chambers. and gerbils and eva brown all committed suicide with the substance during the cold war period both the us and the u.s.s.r.

stockpiled it in their chemical arsenals. the solution ends up on this mechanical table which with its slope and movement separates the gold from the earth. right now it's still going down covered in dirt i'm excited because this is what we search for to live.

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and so go via all the gold miners use mercury to make the process faster and easier . in every mill we throw in this amount of mercury look around not only some of this will gather the gold that we only put this much in each mill come and see how i will do this. but i meant that i thought. that i'm going all over the bucket add up all my life.

mercury is especially toxic to the environment and to humans. damages the brain and central nervous system. thank. god there's a what's left of the process in a small container i mercury has the property of dissolving and amalgamating with gold i was stopped by the mercury captures the gold the monoplane the only thing left for his eco to do is now to gather it up into a cloth and strain it was

the how much is this gold worth i don't mind i look why don't i mean this is worth twelve million or four thousand seven hundred fifty euros i was. every friday rabanne gathers the sediment from the whole week and cleans a carefully for hours. i.

this is the result. all it needs to do now is to drive. two hundred grams. how much earth does it take to produce this amount. in the. no thought about it but i estimate fifty tons. the only thing left to do is to get to the gold shop of donya myra down in town. today the two hundred grams were sold for ten million pesos or about three thousand

nine hundred euros nowadays ruben and his thirty eight partners are earning more than ever. in order to sell the gold z. kill needs to first get rid of the mercury which is stuck to the precious metal. they must burn it off and there are dozens of little shops in the center of town which do that i mercury is released into the atmosphere when burned and when it rains it falls on to homes fields rivers and lakes i said is the town most polluted by mercury in the world according to the world health organization with measurements

up to one thousand times above acceptable levels. but it's a very dangerous job. that men everyone who works with mercury must get treatment for that because you have mercury in your system and my brother has it and must keep on getting treatment. as the easiest process for getting the gold out of that and. then the everything else is much more difficult. yet the med if there's another method you won't find it here here mercury is used by the ton of other women. there's already an ecological catastrophe. which was triggered by small

scale metallurgy. also. we have the greatest concentrations of your curing nor what is not at all logical. is the alternative proposed by this government. and generally by the governments of latin america to have large organized responsible mining companies which are on the stock market that there is no such thing to be already has large scale metallurgy and our analyses all show that an enormous like a responsibility. columbia pollute the environment. no gran colombia pollutes the environment twenty to thirty times less than the average illegal miner. give me. you know a little bit in them we have some pollution like all companies you know which however is within the parameters of colombian laws and international ones. there

are today they will be. the effluent from the grand columbia gold factory along with the waste of a small binders falls into a small ravine which is so toxic that it is acquired name everyone calls its cyanide ravine. on its banks gold diggers process to waste one more time trying to find gold in the poisoned waters nor in the dangers of all. that i mean if the mine works we make money with your handle. this work

has always taken place here. a lot of people live off this one to protect extracting gold i could have went up on. and is there gold there. naturally if there wasn't we wouldn't work having a wonderful trip and they work it again and again and there's always gold left but even what we throw away contains gold. so what happens in the cyanide ravine isn't pollution. this pollution. since cyanide falls into her veins it's bullish. but its profits are profitable. december's my we know it damaging the environment but this is how we are now bred that. i.

am i. despite the reactions of the citizens of my motto the government is planning to relocate them in order to open the way form a doro new open pit mine. the justification for this used by the government is a landslide which took place in two thousand and six it claims of the population is in a high danger zone which means they must be moved to a safer area. despite the fact that state services confirmed that the situation is reversible if interventions are made to the mountain in nearby al johnno the government is

already building a hospital modern school compound and houses for the new residents. madore has stated that it will help fund the building program. didn't look a little better if we must talk to the women and tell them that in your new else you have a washer and dryer in love and you don't need to go to the ravine to wash the clothes so they can have roads a good hospital get a place to study. it up and the work you don't want could do the work is crucial we will create many jobs they're going to. but not everyone will have ork nobody will give work to many people of. great.

when spanish conquistadores arrived in colombia in the sixteenth century they felt they had found the mythical el dorado. in amazement they bore witness to a ritual at play quite heavy to near modern day bogota in which the leader of the movie sky was naked and covered with gold dust through enormous amounts of gold into the water as an offering to the gods. the hunt for the new eldorado is in full swing. are you know that someone once said to us in a knowing way that we had sinned but having such a rich land weeks and days in the past or the earth it was the colonizers who wanted to take out fertile land i live. now but what they even

a little land we still have less than the number of them as it is a target of the multinational his local is by this or this tiny piece of land we have. i want the first seven that we have permitted to defend with our lives on the other the men and on this we have very clear.

thank you. so. much.