we'll have a good yield. where we can provide for our families as well as for many people here in our neighborhood. but we know in which places there are gold lanes. we go there and it worked i'm going to on title land which isn't enough to not have belongs to the multinationals. illegal mines 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 grand colombia gold recently bought from tino gold mines which went bankrupt. all the large mines of the area and the processing facilities were sold by the

government to the canadian multinational for just two hundred million dollars. so frontino gold mines here and sit go via has proven gold reserves of over nine hundred thousand ounces of 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 this is truly scandalous. your work 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 and. get to the state is selling something it doesn't own in colombia we call this villainy and over thirty. 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. a government supports foreign investment of. 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 miller g. 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. guerrillas are active. so are ago. group of former paramilitaries that astro horse. finally the envy ghetto office is also in operation here it is a drug cartel founded after the death of popular 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 their restaurants were killed today in the battle with foreign insulter province up there thirty to set the battle was to claim areas in the mountains known of the aren't you a municipality when i meant that you're also i really see feel that he'd. goal is not evidence substance that it's legal. is that attracts illegal groups a loss which he got his. leg out of the new one during money through gold is easy. he is going to risk less for the illegals by gold or minus a door to euro and then they take it to the municipality and get it legalized as

a number as legal merchandise but it brings profits to the local authorities which will be divided among the politicians 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 in suburbia 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 know and i don't know. you know see. those munitions we give two million a month to fark he says then there is also the envy gado office. rojas going to send organized crime i restore the restaurant to the end we got

office sealion going up or pay protection with a percentage of the gold you know to get on board 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 later in but something this is how we've come to operate over a hundred people because otherwise it would be impossible to work. because either that will make you leave people in a city not all muddy you or your family what can you whoever they want. silliness the poor 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 if 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 profit and as well as their organizations national nazis because

in this area enormous amounts of money are exchanged intentionally going to deploy economic power leads to answer. system has 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 the country. that this activity doesn't fuel the conflict i mean. you know you look at what is going very well in order to prevent its what again 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 going up if it's not then 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. 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. so 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.

rabanne takes the over 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 nancy 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. is gold right now it's still

going down. i'm excited because this is what we search for to live. a mission free cretaceous a free transport judges free. range humans free. free studio time free. download free broadcast video for your media projects and free media r.t. dot com. please speak your language. programs and documentaries in arabic it's all here on. reporting from the world's hotspots of the i p interviews intriguing story for you.

to. visit. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.

thanks.

go via miners use mercury to make the process faster and easier. in every mill we throw in this amount of mercury look i'm not going to some of this will gather the gold we only put this much in each mill come and see how i will do

this i. think i've had my. mercury is especially toxic to the environment and to humans. damages the brain and central nervous system. gathers of 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 owner when the mercury captures the gold the one of the only thing left for his eco to do

now is to gather it up into a cloth and strain it was wonder how much is this gold worth i know man i live by going to 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 was.

this is the result. all he needs to do now is to drive. two hundred grams. how much does it take to produce this amount. about it but i estimate about. fifty tons. the only thing left to do is to get to the gold shop i've done your 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. to go via 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 you know accurate 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. meaning. you know

a little bit in the middle 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 the 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 poison waters nor in the dangers of.

yet i mean if the mine works we make money with it and build a plant that. after this work has always taken place here. a lot of people live off this one to retain extracting gold i could i would wind up either. and is there gold there. naturally if there wasn't we wouldn't work if i didn't i never look at their work 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 from. this pollution. since cyanide falls into the ravine it's bullish. but it's profit to profitable. december's my we know it damaging the environment but this is how we end our bread that.

i. am i. despite the reactions of the citizens of mar matto 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 of 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 bit yes we must talk to the women and tell them that in your new house you have a washer and dryer 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. in the ward it off and the work at home could do the work is crucial we will create many jobs there will never do that. but not everyone will have ork nobody will give work to many people. and 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. you know that someone once said to us in a knowing way that we had sinned but having such

a rich land lakes and this in the past and i think it was the colonizers who wanted to take our fertile land i live. now but what they even a little land we still have legend element and as it is a target of the multinational this book or spies or this tiny piece of land we have . and what this with of in the way of prepared to defend without a lot some of them and on this way a very clear. morning

as today volunteers once again flared up. again these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada as. a child corporations are offered a. world

. science technology innovation all the least a mellow minutes from around rush hour we've got this huge earthquake covered. if. someone from.

six gold and gold. gold because we're going to look into the experience before theories with the color guard. model for service. so. be forced to ship. nations the foreign policy. they are all here to make. a chimp and the client on our show. choose your language. we

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