Drost - The Devil Underground

The Devil Underground

TABLE OF CONTENTS

One

Often, when faced with the specter of imminent death, Victor Meneses, a Colombian journalist, would call me and tell me to publish what he feared he would not live to write himself.

He would speak in exuberant bursts, as rapid-fire as the bullets that he sometimes found himself dodging. Escriba! write!he would bark, his voice distorting down the phone line. If they kill me tonight, write! During other, quieter calls, I could hear the sadness weighing down his voice as he described watching his town slip away in what he called a slow massacre.

The town was Segovia, a dusty gold-mining center that is 141 miles northeast of Medelln as the crow flies and about six hours by road, in the departmentColombias equivalent of a stateof Antioquia. Victor was the editor of El Nordesteo, a biweekly local newspaper. The short article that was the beginning of Victors troubles, published on December 20, 2011 in the papers online edition, concerned the killing of four owners of La Roca, a particularly prosperous local mine. The article was simple. It described who was killed, where it had happened, and who Victor believed to be responsible.

That night, three armed men pounded on his door. Were going to kill you! one of them shouted. Victor survived by promising to immediately scrub the article of any mention of the suspected culprits. But he knew that he had crossed a perilous line. Even as the articles he published in El Nordesteo grew more circumspect, he began piecing together a bigger story, one he knew he could never write, and one that stood a good chance of claiming his life.

It was a story about goldabout the gold rush that was rolling through Segovia, less like a wave of opportunity and more like a plague. It was sweeping through Segovias narrow streets, barging into homes, and descending mine shafts. It would eventually contort Segovia into a twisted version of the tale of Midas. Here, Victor told me one night, anyone who touches gold converts to dead.

When people in Segovia talked about what was happening to the town, they often brought up the massacre that Victor had written about as the detonator that had triggered the explosion of violence in their midst. Behind the killings, they pointed to a prominent local figure. He was rarely spoken of in anything much louder than a whisper, and when he was, people often referred to him by his initials alone. They called him JH.

Two

I moved to Colombia in 2009, when the country appeared to be undergoing a profound transformation. In the late 1980s and 90s, Colombia was arguably the most forbidding place in the Western Hemisphere, the heartland of the global cocaine trade. Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medelln cartel, was the most famous drug kingpin in the world and the prime target of the United States counternarcotics efforts abroad. Colombia was also home to one of the worlds longest-running civil wars, dating back to the 1960s, when the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC by its Spanish initials) declared war on the state.

Colombia and its allies eventually responded to both threats with overwhelming force. U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency operatives worked closely with Colombian forces to break the Medelln and Cali cartelsan effort that reached its climax in 1993, when Escobar was gunned down in a shootout with police commandos in Medelln. In 2000, the Clinton administration began stepping up military aid to the country, which it now considered to be the most important front in the War on Drugs. The support eventually surpassed $8 billion.

The Colombian military, meanwhile, was colluding with a right-wing paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), to fight the FARCwhich, by the late 1990s, controlled about a third of rural Colombiaon its own terms. The AUC swiftly grew into a monster, moving into the cocaine business that had been vacated by the splintering cartels and unleashing death squads that proved more terrifying to many civilians than the FARC had ever been. Many feared Colombia was becoming a failed state.

But by the late 2000s, the country seemed to be putting its worst days behind it. The FARC had been greatly weakened, and beginning in 2003, the government demobilized the AUC, offering amnesty to its soldiers and drastically reduced sentences to some top commanders while extraditing others to the United States. Years of a U.S.backed campaign of coca eradication had cut crops by more than half, and much of the cocaine industry had migrated north to Mexico. Foreign investors and tourists started flocking to regions of Colombia that had been no-go zones just a few years before.

What looked from a distance like an impressive turnaround, however, was less convincing up close. Many of the deep-seated problems that were at the root of Colombias half-century-old civil warthe countrys profound economic inequality and the central governments limited reachhadnt gone away. Armed conflict still simmered in many parts of the country, causing hundreds of thousands of Colombians to flee their homes each year. The cocaine cartels were gone, but new criminal organizations made up of former paramilitary fighters had taken control of whole swaths of the country and infiltrated politics at every level. And then came the gold rush.

Since precolonial times, gold has been deeply embedded in Colombian culture. When the Spanish conquistadores first arrived in South America, they heard legends of the Muisca, an indigenous people living in the highlands near present-day Bogot, who were so rich in the treasured mineral that tribal leaders would paint themselves in gold dust. From these stories grew the legend of El Dorado and the centuries of European exploration and plunder that followed.

Although the mythical city never materialized, Colombias gold reserves were still a formidable prize for the Spanish colonists, who eventually imported African slaves to work the colonys rich gold veins. The slaves descendants, along with indigenous peoples and rural mestizos, have continued to work ancestral mining claims ever since. This kind of subsistence-level mining defined the Colombian gold industry through the 20th century. Although Colombia was rich in reserves, guerrillas controlled vast areas of the countryside and jungle, keeping them off-limits to prospectors. By the turn of the 21st century, there were still only a handful of large mining companies at work in the country.

That all changed in the 2000s. The global price of gold began rising steadily in the early years of the new millennium, part of a broader commodity boom driven by growing demand from emerging markets like Brazil, China, and India. Then the global financial crisis hit. As the stock market plummeted, some anxious souls turned to gold as a safe haven for their money. A perfect storm of worriesover rising inflation, U.S. debt, and a weakening dollarfurther increased demand. Between 2000 and 2007, the average price of gold more than doubled, from $279 to $695 an ounce. By 2011, it had more than doubled again, to $1,572 an ounce.

By 2012, Colombias gold production had more than quadrupled over the previous five years, to 72 tons annually, and 77 percent of the countrys exports were bound for refineries in the United States. The vast majority of this goldas much as 86 percent, by some estimatescame from operations that were technically illegal.

A decade ago, the Colombian government tried to open up the countrys mining industry to outside investment, granting foreign companies thousands of mining concessions. Many of these concessions were in areas where traditional minersas Colombias small-time independent prospectors are calledhad long staked a claim. But most of the large-scale projects are still in the exploration stage; only a few major firms are actually hauling any ore out of the ground. Much of the countrys production is still the work of traditional minersoften prospecting without official permission on the margins of big companies legal claims. The rest mostly comes from the larger wildcatting outfits that started popping up across the country as the market exploded, dynamiting hillsides, dredging up entire riverbeds, and tearing through pristine landscapes with backhoes, leaving moonscapes in their wake.