The mechanized miners use mercury (“asogue”) and cyanide to aggregate the gold, creating more environmental and public health dangers. Traditional miners did not use these chemicals.

Silt, rocks, and contaminated water run from the pits into the many rivers that are central to this environment, poisoning the water and fish, reducing fish populations, and increasing sedimentation in the rivers.

In some areas, land that was useful for planting has been destroyed, leaving only inappropriate or useless surface areas for the people.

The new pits provide employment for some local people. While this is well-paid in some cases, the jobs created are very few.

People are invited to pan for gold or use other traditional methods (“barequear”) in the pits opened by the “retros.” They make more money than they ever have before. But they have to buy many things--especially food--that they used to produce themselves.

Rain forest areas are being turned into wastelands. While they pits are productive of gold, they threatened the forest that is the home, the protector and the traditional provider for the Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities of the area

And panning in the pits can be dangerous. Collapses of the walls of the pits have killed a number of people in the area.

This couple had to run for shelter as a backhoe discharged a load of gravel over the spot they were mining.

As the pits fill up with traditional miners, competition, jealousy and envy enter, and in some places have begun to weaken the social fabric of the villages.

In the pits, like in traditional places, the miners work individually or in small groups of two or three.

Small sluices ("matracas") are an alternative to panning, though many people use both in the same spot.

Some people continue to mine in the traditional ways AND the traditional places, avoiding the pits opened by the machines

Artisanal mining implies hours in the water and bent over the pan ("batea").

Heavy pan-load of dirt dug out of the walls of the pits are carried to the water to be washed.

Some people continue to mine in the traditional ways AND the traditional places, avoiding the pits opened by the machines

number 17

number 18

While some people are happy to be able to pan for gold in the pits, others complain that the passage of the machines has destroyed streams where previously they were able to mine more easily and produce more.

The mechanized mining has attracted the attention of the armed groups (guerrillas and paramilitaries) who extort money from the owners of the machines.

So the new mines have created more problems for people in the villages, who are harassed and threatened by guerrillas, paramilitaries and the army.-

Meanwhile the owners of the machines ignore the special rights that ethnic communities in Colombia have in their collective lands, and mine without permission. The government also calls them illegals, but is also undermining the rights of the communities, saying that they only own the surface of the land, not the sub-soil, where the minerals are.

And people worry about a new threat looming over the horizon: the national government is eager to bring transnational mining corporations into the area to start large-scale operations that will wipe out tje current mechanized mines and also limit the rights of traditional miners.

Grassroots communities are trying to organize to defend their rights in the face of all these actors.