the gold miner works hard for fifteen days to one month. and then he goes out and in one week spends it all on drink on women and passions everything he made in a month. it's good when 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. where 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 plains. we go there and it worked i'm going to on title and 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 ground 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. 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. 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. to the state is selling something it doesn't own in colombia we call this villainy

and overt. get big 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 which it 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 a kilo of gold and another metre where the same to her.

fellow. gorillas are active. so oregon. group of former paramilitaries that astro horse. finally the envy got to office is also in operation here it is a drug cartel funded 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 the restaurant this were killed today in the battle with foreign insulter province it is said the battle was to claim areas in the mountains owner of the aren't you a municipality when i meant that you're also going to see that he.

goal is not of a bit in substance that it's legal. is that attracts illegal groups a loss which he got is. that it goes here in order to level out of the new hole under a money through gold is easy would be it. has got you riskless. the illegals buy gold or minus a door to you if you want to and then they take it to the municipality and get it legalized the number of concealing as legal merchandise it brings profits to the local authorities which will be divided among the politicians who are doing this 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 fear is that correct. they will meant that you know at the moment i don't know anything about that no one has come to me and i don't know. no to. those munitions we give two million a month to fark he says then there is also the envy got office. rojas forgiveness and organized crime i restored the restaurant the end they got office silly and violent poor pay protection with a percentage of the gold you know to get on board one part of the or as if they were also partners in the mine has anything left over i will clear something is left him not much erin but something this is how we've come to operate on a hunch because otherwise it would be impossible to work. because either that will make you leave it where in

a city not almighty you or your family one kid will whoever they want. steal a misstep 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 thing is a kind of can they visit you all the time did you know and get involved in your business if you. don't need a for their own profit business and 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. 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 of energy as you know sweep the country. so that this activity doesn't fuel the conflict i mean. you know we're going to you know in order to prevent it's going to go on 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 just the police and security forces did their

job we wouldn't be obliged to pay for protection. so most. here they do the opposite but they fight as they search for us. and throw us off our own land so they can surrender it all to the in multi-nationals. they. were ben takes three or which comes out of the mine. into the mills to get it 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 lawyer 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. the yellow is gold right now it's still going down covered in dirt i'm excited because this is what we search for to live. wealthy british style.

markets why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max cons are no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report. little. plug. plug. plug plug.

plug. plug. thanks. lynn . lynn. toler. please.

i answered go via all the gold miners use mercury to make the process faster and easier. then every mill we throw in this amount of mercury look i'm all right only some of us will gather the gold that we only put this much in each mill come and see how i will do this i almost. died on the lawn i think

a book about a mile away thanks i thank mercury is especially toxic to the environment and to humans i demonstrated the brain and central nervous system i feel gathers up what's left of the process in a small container i mercury has the property of dissolving an amalgam mating with gold i stopped by one of the mercury captures the gold and the monoplane the only thing left for his eco to do is now to gather it up into a cloth and strain it i

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

you. this is the result. all he needs to do now is to drive. the two hundred grams. how much earth does it take to produce this amount. no thought about it but i estimate fifty tons. of 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. i mercury is released into the atmosphere when burned and when it rains it falls on to homes fields rivers and lakes. so 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 but that you know 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 into. them everything else is much more difficult. yet i don't know if there's another method you won't find it here here mercury is used by the ton on the low.

there's already an ecological catastrophe. which was triggered by small scale metallurgy yeah york also. we have the greatest concentrations of your accurate look you know what is not at all logical it's get out there and that is the alternative proposed by this government if they go vietnam. 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 the idea that the in your columbia 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. 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 as. they will be. the effluent from the ground colombia 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 poisoned waters nor in the dangers of all.

that i mean if the mind works we make money with your handle. this work has always taken place here. a lot of people live off this one to detain extracting gold i could i was going to buy them. and is there gold there. naturally if there wasn't we wouldn't work. and never look at their work again and again and there's always gold left but even what we throw away contains go. so what happens in the cyanide ravine isn't pollution from. this pollution. since cyanide falls into her veins you know it's bullish. but it's profit to profitable the pollution imo 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 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. the door has stated that it will help fund the building programme. then look a little better 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 wood. and the work going on could do the work is crucial we will create many jobs they're going to have. 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. again of this year 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 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 less than the number of them as it is a target of the multinational this local is by this or this tiny piece of land we. what if with irvin that we have prepared to defend without a lot some of them and on this we are very clear.

choose your language. because we know if they're going to have a feel for the moment or. choose that the concerns get like a. chance to get kenyans that invigorated. choose the stories get in high life choose the access to your office. luck.

was. i've. lived live. live . he is under siege for.

destruction without mercy. what could have been just ruins. saved by a great sacrifice. and restored by human just such. a remarkable reminder of courage and selflessness. putin is of more people. of the russian side. sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry.