DARKNESS IN COLOMBIA
Canadian gold mine faces bandits, murder and ‘the vaccination,’
SEGOVIA, COLOMBIA— It is nine in the evening and there is a knock on the door of Andres Bedoya’s house. He opens the door to find a skinny teenager. The youth raises a revolver to Bedoya’s head and fires.
Bedoya had no enemies, no debts and no links to the armed groups that plague this part of northern Colombia. His only crime was to work in the mines of Canadian mining giant Gran Colombia Gold.
Bedoya was the first to die in a terror campaign waged in Segovia late last year by Colombia’s most powerful criminal group, a paramilitary mafia known as the Urabenos. Their target was the riches produced in Gran Colombia’s mines. But it was ordinary miners who paid the price in blood.
One year on and the teenage assassin who carried out the attacks is beginning a 23-year prison sentence, after confessing his crimes in a recent trial. But the workers in Gran Colombia’s mines continue to pay — now in the form of money extorted from their meagre earnings.
The Toronto-registered company is Colombia’s largest underground gold and silver producer. But in Segovia, Gran Colombia does little actual mining. After arriving in the region in 2010, the company cut costs by laying off most of its directly employed workforce then rehiring them through subcontracting companies. Today, about 65 per cent of production in Segovia is through Damasa, a business group of five mining companies all owned and run by one man, Julio Erazo. Damasa miners who spoke to the Star on condition of anonymity complained of low pay, a lack of proper safety equipment and unstable short-term contracts that are terminated if they complain.
In September last year, the workers’ already precarious situation took a deadly turn when the Urabenos dispatched an18-year-old hit man known as “Venom” with orders to target Damasa. The Urabenos wanted their cut of Gran Colombia’s gold and Erazo had stopped paying it, according to witness testimonies in the case.
In the space of a month, Venom shot up a living room where a miner sat with his family, murdered Bedoya in front of his pregnant wife, hurled a grenade at one of the company processing mills and shot dead a mine manager in the street outside his home.
The attacks were accompanied by Urabenos threats distributed around town by unseen hands and circulated around social media networks. Their message was stark: every one of the 1,500-plus Gran Colombia contractors working for Erazo was a “military objective.”
“There was a lot of fear,” Carlos Durango, a miner who at the time worked for Masora, one of Erazo’s companies, said in an interview. “There were days we couldn’t work or we had to go to work without uniforms on because if they saw us with the red Masora shirts they would kill us.”
Before the arrival of the Urabenos in the region, Erazo had paid extortion — known in Colombia as “the vaccination” — every month. He knew the armed group he was paying well; they had been part of the same paramilitary death squad.
Erazo entered into mining after demobilizing from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the now-disbanded counter-insurgency. While Erazo moved into the legal world, many of his former comrades held on to their arms and dedicated themselves to controlling the criminal interests left behind by the AUC in the region — including extorting mining.
“I had to ask their permission to work,” Erazo said in an interview in November 2015. “They said ‘You can stay, but you know the system — you pay the vaccination.’ ”
Extortion was not the paramilitaries’ only interest in Gran Colombia’s mines. There were also their gangs of machuqueros — mine robbers. Machuqueros dig narrow mud tunnels into the company mines, then spend weeks at a time underground, stealing gold ore and processing it in their own rudimentary portable mills. Erazo stopped the extortion payments then cleared his mines of machuqueros when the Urabenos drove his former AUC comrades out of the region and took over their business.
His refusal to co-operate with the new rulers of the region’s underworld was not tolerated for long. But Erazo was shielded by heavily armed bodyguards, so the Urabenos targeted his unprotected workforce.
In October 2015, after the Urabenos murdered a second Damasa miner, Erazo called together his workers and announced he was going to terminate their contracts and withdraw from the region.
“I said, ‘If I am the problem, then I don’t want to be here anymore,’ ” Erazo said. “It is not worth the life of a single miner.”
Within two days, though, Erazo was vowing to continue, because, he said, of the efforts of the security forces and the solidarity of the workers. The workers, however, tell a different story.
“The government sent the army and police to guard the access routes to the mines, but not the routes to our houses, and this is what we said (to Erazo): ‘You are taking care of the mine, but not our homes,’ ” said another former Damasa miner who did not want to be identified for security reasons.
The miners felt abandoned by both Gran Colombia and Erazo, so, fearing both for their lives and for their futures, they took matters into their own hands.
“We looked for ways to contact the people who were intimidating us, to do what Julio Erazo wasn’t doing — pay the vaccination,” Durango said.
The miners cut a deal with the Urabenos for every work crew to make their own extortion payments. Numerous sources confirmed these payments continue today and that the amount demanded continues to rise. Gran Colombia CEO Lombardo Paredes says the company is not aware of extortion in its supply chain, either in the past or currently. However, he did not dispute worker claims that they are forced to pay their own “vaccination” to be allowed to work in Gran Colombia’s mines.
“There are things that escape from our control,” he said in a November interview at Gran Colombia’s Medellin offices.
“This kind of extortion we cannot deal with, the underworld and organized crime we cannot deal with. It’s not our problem, it is a government problem.”
For the miners, though, extortion is their problem. Many of the crews work for a cut of the ore they mine and the extortion can mean that on a bad month, they now struggle to provide for their families.
“It is not profitable to work with Erazo anymore,” said Durango, who quit. “If the mine isn’t producing well, then there might be enough to buy food but not enough to pay the vaccination as well.”
“This kind of extortion we cannot deal with, the underworld and organized crime we cannot deal with. It’s not our problem, it is a government problem.” LOMBARDO PAREDES GRAN COLOMBIA CEO