The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283

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The Extractive Industries and Society

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Original Article

The history of emerald mining in Colombia: An examination of

Spanish-language sources
Brian Brazeal
Department of Anthropology, California State University, Chico, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: This article presents a review of Spanish-Language sources on the history of emerald mining and trading
Received 16 July 2014 in Colombia from colonial times to the present with a special focus on the late 20th century. Sources are
Received in revised form 28 August 2014 drawn from academic history, anthropology and political science, but also from books produced by
Available online xxx
mining organizations, journalistic exposés and popular history and fiction. They chronicle the history of
violence that characterized the mining area from the 1550s to the 1990s as well as the peace established
Keywords: among miners in 1991. The history of emeralds is intimately tied up with the history of the Colombian
Emeralds
nation, its violent struggles and its hopes for a peaceful and prosperous future.
Mining
Colombia
ß 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
History

1. Introduction: the Czar is dead
On April 4, 2013 Vı́ctor Carranza, the Emerald Czar of Colombia
died. He had presided over a tenuous, 20-year-old peace that had
brought an end to 50 (some would say 500) years of war around
Colombia’s emerald mines. He was accused of forming paramili-
tary groups, masterminding assassinations and even suborning
presidents, but he was always exculpated. It seemed a miracle that
he died of cancer after surviving so many violent attacks on his life.
In the wake of Carranza’s death there was intense speculation in
the Colombian media that the esmeralderos would go to war once
again (El Tiempo, 2013b). There have been skirmishes, assassina-
tions, a few tragic deaths of women and children, and a few
imprisonments of the most bellicose miners, but the peace seems
to be holding (El Tiempo, 2013c). The owners of the largest
mines, together with civil, military and ecclesiastical leaders,
are scrambling to ensure that the equilibrium imposed in
1991 endures.
This seems like an opportune moment to review the long
history of emerald mining in Colombia. Colombian authors have
claimed that conflicts over emeralds encapsulate their country’s
whole violent history (Guerrero, 2002:123). The brutality of the
conquest, the Bolivarian revolution, the political violence of the
first half of the twentieth century, and the violence of the drug
trade in the second half of the twentieth century, have all
reverberated through the emerald mining area.
But this is an optimistic moment in Colombian history. The
world’s longest running civil war seems poised to end. Political
E-mail address: bcbrazeal@csuchico.edu.
power depends on hotly contested elections rather than back room
deals negotiated among elites. Disenfranchised farmers and
disenchanted urban middle classes alike are clamoring for their
rights and their cries are being heard. This optimism reverberates
through the Colombian emerald trade as well. Emerald dealers no
longer gun each other down in the streets of Bogotá. Emerald
miners are no longer tossed into the murderous black waters of the
Rio Minero. Perhaps an examination of the troubled history of
emerald mining in Colombia will help keep those troubles from
repeating themselves.
This article is intended as a review of the Colombian literature
on emerald mining and trading. It depends on published,
secondary sources and not archival research. However, as these
sources are published in Spanish, and as some of them are difficult
to find, even in Colombia, they might not be accessible to this
journal’s readership.
Emeralds, and the travails of the mining area, have fascinated
Colombian academics, journalists, novelists and the general public
to a surprising degree. Perhaps this is because the stones
themselves are finer and have been mined for longer in Colombia
than anywhere else. Perhaps it is because the story of these
gemstones are so tied up with the story of the Colombian nation.
The sources are drawn from academic history and anthropology
but they also include a self-congratulatory proclamation of an
organ of the state. They include a massive tome published by a
massive mine that attempts to silence the recent past by burying it
under a mass of scientific and mythological detail. There is a
journalistic exposé and some ghost-written pseudonymous pulp
fiction. Each illuminates a different facet of the history that still
‘‘weighs like a nightmare on the brains of living’’ (Marx, 1964:1)
Several authors have pointed to the brutal and seemingly

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2014.08.006
2214-790X/ß 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
274 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283
inexorable ways in which this history repeats itself. Today that
cycle may be broken, in spite, or perhaps because of, the fact that
the Czar is dead.
2. Sources and methods
I have conducted both ethnographic and oral historical
research on emeralds in Colombia, but this article is neither an
ethnography nor an oral history. It is a review of published
Spanish-language sources on the social history of Colombian
emerald mining and trading. As such, the people who I spoke to in
the course of my research in Colombia are not implicated in the
production of this text. The information I received from them is
strictly ‘‘on background.’’ The aim of this article is to open up the
literature that might not be available to Anglophone scholars and
to share the contents of sources that are difficult to access outside
of Colombia itself. I have attempted to synthesize these sources
into a coherent narrative, rather than reviewing each of them
individually.
It is hardly fashionable in academic historiography these days
to discuss history as a succession of the doings of great men. By the
same token, it has become trite in the history, sociology and
anthropology of Latin America to fall back on ‘‘patron-client
relations’’ to account for social structures and historical processes.
This article does both. This is in part an artifact of the sources it
draws on. Many of them come from journalism, popular history
and fiction. These sources interweave history and biography and
make it sound as though the processes that unfolded in the
emerald mining area were the results conflicts among the leaders
of the bands of illegal miners.
But there is a grain of truth in this perspective. The Dons or
Patrones of the emerald mines hold great sway over the areas
where they operate. Academic sources, written by political
scientists and anthropologists, describe these men as the heads
of organizations forged by links of kinship and affinity rather than
straightforward capitalist organizations for the exploitation of a
mineral resource. Working in an emerald mine, even for a few
weeks, is considered an ‘‘opportunity.’’ Miners do not generally
receive wages, or if they do these wages are mere pittance. Instead
they get the chance to comb through the dirt that is hauled away
from the productive veins, looking for green stones. If they are
lucky, and sneaky, they might manage to filch an emerald from the
mine face itself (Parra, 2006; Uribe, 1992).1
Miners get these opportunities by virtue of their proximity to
patron. They are given the privilege of working long shifts in
grueling conditions for a few weeks for no pay in hopes that they
might pocket a stone worth as much as a house. In return, the
patrons expect loyalty. In the past this included bearing arms to
protect the person and property of the Don and his followers. These
Dons, in turn fulfill the traditional role of patrons, serving as
godfathers to people’s children, helping them out in times of
1
Parra’s (2006) article gives us a sustained look at questions of sex and gender.
Most writers on Colombian emerald mining focus on men. Women only enter the
stories as prostitutes, virtuous wives or young virgins offered up to the sexual
rapacity of the Dons. But the links of kinship and affinity that tie patrons to their
followers are forged by and through women. Parra’s work highlights their roles.
2
Uribe (1992) gives us the only book-length treatment of the troubled history of
the emerald mining area to have emerged from the Colombian academy so far. Her
‘‘Limpiar La Tierra’’ or ‘‘To Clean The Earth’’ offers an anthropological explanation of
the violence of the mines and shows how killing can become the preeminently
moral activity. Men are defined by their enemies and who will avenge them. Her
title comes from a statement offered by a bodyguard to one of the Patrones, who laid
his Browning pistol on the table during their interview, ‘‘Matar bien es limpiar la
tierra,’’ ‘‘To kill well is to clean the earth’’ (Uribe, 1992:95). Maria Victoria was part
of the Jesuit-Organized CINEP team of researchers on violence in Colombia. She had
extraordinary access to the Dons and their followers, and the book she produced
was considered threatening to the trade when it was first published in 1992.
trouble, throwing huge parties on religious occasions and
distributing largess in sundry other ways (Uribe, 1992).2
The towns in the mining area are small. The people are related
to one another. They live in intimacy, tinged with deference, with
their patrons. They have been willing to fight, and to die for them
(Uribe, 1992). So if I describe the conflicts in the emerald mining
area in the twentieth century as conflicts among individuals, it is
worth remembering that these individuals commanded and still
command large followings. Their followers are people who are
accustomed to working in the most difficult and dangerous
conditions. They consider themselves more adept in the use of
violence, and better equipped for it, than the Colombian police or
military (Uribe, 1992; Steiner, 2005).
It is also worth remembering that many, perhaps most, of the
people in the mining area took no part in these conflicts
whatsoever, except in that they struggled to survive them. It
was impossible to work or even to live in the mining areas without
having some relation to the Dons, but this did not necessarily
extend to bearing arms for them. Most illegal miners were men and
women standing by a sluice echando pala, scooping up the dirt
washed down from the mine, hoping to find an emerald and to sell
it to sustain themselves and their families (Parra, 2006).
This article examines a period that extends over nearly
500 years: from the conquest in the first years of the sixteenth
century to the establishment of the peace in the emerald mining
area in the 1990s. However, its focus is mostly on the events that
transpired in the second half of the twentieth century. The Bank of
the Republic was granted on ostensible monopoly over the
emerald mines in 1947. This event unleashed a wave of illegal
mining activities that precipitated the three so-called emerald
wars.
The aftermath of these conflicts shapes social relations in the
emerald trade as well as public perceptions of miners and traders
to this day. I include information about the pre-Columbian period,
the conquest and the Bolivarian revolution to the extent that this
material sheds light on the more recent conflicts. This article omits
a substantive discussion of archeological and ethnohistorical
sources on the pre-Colombian period (for example Langbaek,
1987). It also omits a discussion of primary sources from the
colonial period (for example Aguado, 1956). I hope that it
compensates for these lacunae with its examination of popular
sources that might otherwise escape the notice of the anglophone
academic community.
The wealth of the popular literature on Colombian emerald
mining points to the importance of emeralds in Colombia’s
national imaginary. Colombian emeralds are generally held to
be the finest in the world.3 However, it is rare to see Colombians
who are not directly involved in the trade wearing emerald
jewelry. The stones have found their ways to the courts of the
Mughal, Persian and Ottoman empires not to mention those of the
Incas and Aztecs. They are included in the crown jewels of several
European countries. They adorn the monstrances and reliquaries of
the Catholic Church. They have graced display cases of the finest
jewelers in the world. They symbolize vast wealth and have
generated considerable fortunes, but not for the Colombian state
and certainly not for the majority of the miners who dig for them.
Those who have managed to succeed in emerald mining and
trading are always viewed with some suspicion in polite
Colombian society. They are derided as ‘‘campesinos con plata’’
or peasants with money, whose consumption habits do not accord
with the staid preferences of Bogotá’s elites (Parra, 2006:18). They
are described, in academic and popular discourse alike, as a Mafia
3
Excellent gems occasionally emerge from other mines around the world, but
Colombia, and especially Muzo remains the benchmark against which other stones
are measured.
 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283 275

(Uribe, 1992, Páramo, 2010). Nearly everyone I met in Colombia ‘‘Fragile and permanent at the same time, the emerald has the
who was not affiliated with the trade urged me to stay away from warmth of the hope that is born in the entrails of America, and
the esmeralderos. The people who were in the trade urged me to use as the messenger of the ideals of the American peoples within
my writings to burnish their tarnished image. the great project of universal peace.’’ (Retana, 1990: unnum-
But Colombians are fascinated by their emeralds and their bered page, my translation)
esmeralderos. They are the subject of songs, soap operas, movies
This talk of universal peace, emanating from the emerald mines
and novels. They are featured in the culmination of the exhibit at
in 1990 seems troublesome. The book omits any mention of the
the Museo del Oro (The Gold Museum) which Michael Taussig
emerald wars of the twentieth century. Hundreds of people must
argues is the symbolic bedrock of the national identity (Taussig,
have been killed in Boyacá as this ponderous volume was being
2004). Every rumbling of violence in the emerald mining area
prepared. The Great Book of Colombian Emeralds is a classic
unleashes a torrent of speculation in the press. The occasional
example of what Rolph Trouillot has described as ‘‘silencing the
reporter who ventures into the mining area, a few scant kilometers
past’’ through the production of history (Trouillot, 1995).
from the capital, describes a journey into the heart of darkness. It is
It seems to be intended to sit like a rock on top of any other
held to be a sphere where traditional social mores are inverted and
historical investigation of the events that have transpired in and
lust and violence given free reign (Pachón, 2008). Anthropologists
around Colombia’s emerald mines. It seeks to rehabilitate
have learned to be suspicious of such exoticizing depictions of the
Colombian emeralds by burying their recent, violent history under
other, especially when the other is so close to home.
a mass of much older historical facts and timeless scientific data.
Colombia’s own anthropologists have turned a critical gaze on
The only hints of the bloody career of emeralds in the twentieth
the mystique and romance of the emerald mining area. Its political
century come in the second glossary where there are entries for
scientists and historians have chronicled the troubled past of the
Isauro Murcia, El Ganso Ariza and Gilberto Molina. There are also
mines and tried to understand the root causes of the violence that
some colorful slang terms for assassins and assassinations, but
has taken place. These academic sources are cited in the footnotes
they are buried very deep.
throughout this article. Popular sources are similarly cited and
Emeralds have also captured the popular imagination in
described briefly. But a few books merit additional discussion.
Colombia. History and fiction written for mass consumption
Two important but problematic sources on Colombian emerald
provide perspectives on the emerald economy that academic
mining and trading came from the organizations responsible for
research might miss. The greatest popular historian of the emerald
the mines themselves. The first is Esmeraldas de Colombia,
mining area is Téllez (1993). Téllez is related to Efraı́n Gonzalez,
published by the Bank of the Republic (Muñoz and Villalba,
the Bandit of Seven Colors. He has devoted much of his life to
1948). This is a celebration of the history of Colombian emeralds,
expounding the exploits of his ancestor and recounting the events
published when the Bank must have been very optimistic about its
that unfolded in the wake of his death. His work does not conform
chances for success in managing the emerald mines. The book is
to the canons of academic history. Much of the detail he presents
illustrated in several colors with woodcuts and is a beautiful
could only be of his own invention. But he has an ethnographic
typographic object. The history it presents is one of progress: from
insight into the emerald wars that cannot be ignored.
Noble Savages to benevolent Conquistadores, to a technocratic and
The work of Iván Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012, is more
scientific administration by the Bank on behalf of all Colombians.
problematic. They present a biography of Vı́ctor Carranza in the
Whatever violence this presentation may perpetrate on the
mode of a journalistic exposé. It was published almost exactly one
historical facts, it is certainly ironic in light of the violence that
year before his death. Their book details both his activity as an
would erupt in the years after the book’s publication.
emerald miner and his alleged formation of paramilitary groups. In
The second source to have emerged from the trade is the El Gran
2013 this book was in the window displays of many of the popular
Libro de la Esmeralda Colombiana, The Great Book of Colombian
bookshops in Bogotá. They clearly captured an audience, but they
Emeralds (Retana, 1990).4 This is another impressive typographical
also clearly have an axe to grind.
object: a mighty tome lavishly illustrated with color photos,
Ivan Cepeda, like his father before him, is a politician affiliated
tipping the scales at over 10 pounds. It was published in 1990, as
with the Union Patriótica (UP) party. The UP is an offshoot of the
the last emerald war was drawing to its bloody conclusion. The
FARC, that espouses the same goals as the guerilla insurgency, but
publication seems to have been sponsored by Tecminas, the
which has renounced violence and works through the political
company operated by Vı́ctor Carranza and his then recently
process. Members of the UP were frequent targets of paramilitary
deceased associate, Gilberto Molina. It was published under the
assassinations. Cepeda’s own father was a senator who was killed
auspices of the newly created Federación Nacional de Esmeraldas de
in Bogotá for his communist political activity (Steiner, 2005). So
Colombia or National Federation of Emeralds of Colombia.
their inquiry into of the life of Vı́ctor Carranza seems to have been
The book provides an incredible wealth of information. It
undertaken with a clear personal and political agenda.
purports to record every mention of emeralds in literature from
Their sources are journalistic accounts as well as the statements
Babylonian times to the present. It examines the religious and
of ex-paramilitary soldiers. Some of these depositions were
magical lore of emeralds, their use in heraldry, philately, medicine,
collected in the course of interrogations conducted by the DAS,
‘‘gemmotherapy,’’ and fiction. It includes articles by the foremost
Colombia’s intelligence agency, which was notorious for torturing
scientific experts on the chemistry and crystalline structure of
suspects in its custody (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012:60). This
emeralds, their optical properties, lapidary techniques, and the
makes the content of these interviews suspect. Carranza was
instruments used to examine and evaluate them. It describes the
absolved of most of the charges leveled by Cepeda because the
synthesis of artificial emeralds, emerald identification by patterns
evidence brought against him was compromised. Cepeda takes this
of inclusions, other green gems that might be mistaken for
very lack of evidence as evidence that he corrupted the judiciary
emeralds and more. There is a glossary of every word that means
(Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012:84). This is as intuitively
green and has been used to refer to emeralds in many different
plausible as it is logically unsound. The things that Cepeda claims
languages. There is even introduction by His Royal Highness, Juan
about Carranza and his association with paramilitaries could very
Carlos I, the King of Spain who says:
well be true, but the issue of reliability is complex.
The issue of reliability is equally complex for those books about
4
This edited volume includes the articles from Arcienagas (1990), Macho and
emerald mining and trading that are ostensibly works of fiction.
Sinkankas (1990) and Keller et al. (1990) cited below.
276 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283
Some of these books appear to be ghost written biographies of
specific miners. In most cases, these books are fictionalized
enough, that it was not possible (at least for this researcher) to
associate most of the characters in the stories with specific
individuals.
This is not the case for Félix Marı́n’s massive, ‘‘Guerra de las
Esmeraldas’’ (Marı́n, 1979). Marı́n’s text is an historical account of
the first emerald war, with a very thin veil of pseudonymity. Isauro
Murcia becomes Don Isa. El Ganso ‘‘The Goose’’ becomes El Cisne
‘‘The Swan.’’ Gilberto Molina becomes Gil Mola and so forth. The
literary style is pulpy and picaresque, but the events it describes
accord well with the academic sources. People in the trade have
described it as accurate. It was written in 1979 and spans more
than seven hundred pages, examining the life, death and exploits of
Don Isa and his associates. I do not know how Marin collected his
information but the wealth of detail is extraordinary and it is a
valuable source for the history of the Colombian emerald trade in
the mid twentieth century. In my own writing I have attempted to
preserve some of the picaresque flavor of this author’s prose.
3. A note on geography, geology and gemology
Colombia’s most famous emerald mines are generally referred
to as Muzo and Coscuez. These are not precisely mines but rather
districts where innumerable small and large, formal and informal
mines are found. The mines themselves are called cortes and they
come and go as the stones appear and then vanish with an
apparent will of their own. Muzo and Coscuez are located in the
western province of the department of Boyacá (el Occidente de
Boyacá). When people refer to ‘‘the emerald mining area’’ they
generally mean western Boyacá.
The trip from Bogotá to Muzo is only 214 km (132 miles), but it
seems like a world apart. One descends from the Andean highlands
into the hot country (tierra caliente) formerly known as the
Território Vazquez.5 The roads are infamously bad though today
they are improving. The terrain is rugged, but very fertile. The local
dialect of Spanish is immediately recognizable by the use of the
second person formal pronoun, sumecé.6
Emeralds as a commodity confound the conventions of
extractive capitalism. This may be why emerald mining and
trading has always had a decidedly informal tinge. It is impossible
to calculate the cost of production because it is cannot be said with
any degree of certainty where emerald will be found. Emeralds
occur in veins and pockets scattered, apparently at random, across
a vast and craggy landscape. It is impossible to calculate the cost of
labor because compensation generally comes in the form of
informal profit sharing and pilferage. Finally, it is impossible to
state the value of the stones themselves. Unlike gold and diamonds
there is no accepted international valuation for emeralds. Indeed
there is not even a generally accepted local valuation for the stones.
Prices are hashed out in face-to-face negotiations and they vary
widely as the stones move from hand-to-hand.
One thing is certain: Colombian emeralds can be very valuable.
Large, fine, faceted stones fetch over $3000 per carat on the
wholesale Colombian export market. They fetch considerably more
in the wholesale gemstone markets of Jaipur, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong
and Manhattan. By the time they reach jewelers’ display cases they
can cost as much as yachts and thoroughbred race horses. Those who
deal in the commodity that is so capricious and so precious often
prefer myth and legend to the dry pronouncements of geologists and
gemologists, and so we turn to the lore of the emerald mines.
5
The emerald mines of Chivor and Gachalá are outside of Western Boyacá and
have not be affected by violence to the same degree.
6
Sumecé is presumably derived from Vuestra Merced, or Your Worth, an old
Spanish term of formal address.
4. The tears of a Divine Cuckoldress
Emeralds were mined in what is now Colombia long before the
ill-fated voyage of the Genovese navigator who gave the country its
name. Archeologists seem to agree that the emerald mining area
was first inhabited by Muisca peoples, the legendary goldsmiths of
Colombia’s Andean Highlands. Musica pottery and funerary
offerings were found in the hot country on the western slopes
of the Eastern Cordillera in what is now the province of Boyacá
(Rojas, 1974:91).
The Musicas were pushed out by the Muzos in a series of battles
that persisted into the colonial period. The Muzos were a Caribe
people who had come to the region up the Magdalena Medio River.
Their system of kinship and residence was matrilineal and
matrilocal, an harmonic regime almost unattested in the anthro-
pological literature (Beltran and Ordoñez, 1995:30, Lévi-Strauss,
1949:216). Their villages were acephalous groups of matrilineal
kin without political titles or hereditary offices. Men were enjoined
to commit suicide if their wives proved unfaithful. Chiefs,
distinguished by military valor, emerged in times of war and
then subsided back into the general population. Muzo settlements
were described by early authors as behetrı´as, after the autonomous
Iberian communities who refused to submit to a king (Páramo,
2010:65).7
The Muzos took over the Musica practice of emerald mining,
but they had little use for the stones themselves. They traded them
to their highland neighbors in exchange for pottery and cloth
(Rojas, 1974:90). The indigenous people of the Andes used
emeralds in their funeral offerings but also sent them into
networks of international trade. Emeralds from Colombia found
their way as far north as Aztec Mexico and as far South as Inca Peru.
From there they entered the treasuries of the rapacious Spaniards
(Macho and Sinkankas, 1990:84).
A Muzo legend is frequently cited by academics and locals alike
to account for the apparently interminable cycles of love, betrayal
and death in the emerald mining area. Colombia’s most famous
mines are in the Western province of the Department of Boyacá in
the basin of the Rio Minero. A few kilometers upriver from the
mines, near the town of San Pablo de Borbur stands the region’s
most impressive landmark: two peaks called Fura and Tena divided
by a black river. These peaks were places of Muzo worship and the
objects of Muzo legend. Like most legends, this one has multiple
versions that account for multiple realities of present-day. I will
tell one them following the work of Javier Guerrero Barón
(2002:127–128).8
Fura, the woman, and Tena the man were created by the god
Arbe. They lived in eternal youth, nourished by the love they
shared. Then along came Zarbi, a blond-haired, blue-eyed
adventurer who seduced Fura and led her to infidelity. Having
betrayed her lover of centuries, Fura was so overcome with grief
that she aged immediately.
7
Páramo (2010) gives us an acute and nuanced reading of the history and social
structure of the mining area in the guise of an ethnomusicological essay. In trying to
understand the popularity of Mexican-style corrido music among the emerald
miners of Colombia he produced an essay that covers several centuries and nearly a
hundred pages.
8
Javier Guerrero Barón is a political scientist who conducted research in the
mining area through the thick of the wars. His (1986) work provides a chronology of
the most significant events, describes the relationships among the various actors
and frames them within the political history of Colombia. One of his articles
(Gutiérrez and Guerrero 2008) contrasts the cocaine and emerald economies as
‘‘subsidiary orders,’’ parallel economies that have proved particularly refractory to
state control. It would be interesting, if perhaps inadvisable from the point of view
of personal safety to pay closer attention to their imbrication. Another article
published by this generally sober and staid author is a much more lyrical
exploration of love and death in the mining area from pre-Columbian times to the
present (2002).
 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283 277

Tena read the signs that he had been betrayed and slew himself
with a wooden sword. Fura held his decomposing body in her arms
for three days as his soul went toward the sun. As he died, he
cursed Zarbi, hoping to turn him into a bare peak that he could lash
daily with the sun’s punishing rays. But before the metamorphosis
could be effected, Zarbi tore out his own entrails. The torrents of his
blood flowed between Fura and Tena, separating them forever and
becoming the river Zarbi, later to be knows as the Rio Minero.
Fura’s anguish knew no bounds. Her cries of despair became
blue morpho butterflies (Morpho cypris) that still flit along the
river’s edge. Her tears became emeralds. Those who mine them are
cursed to relive her tragedy (Guerrero, 2002:127–128).
A Spanish account of the final victory over the Muzos tells the
story of the first time a peace treaty in the emerald area would
ultimately lead to betrayal. It was by no means the last. A tenuous
end to hostilities had been established between the Spaniards and
the Muzos in 1550. But then word came from the Chibcha lover of a
Spanish Captain that the Muzos were planning an attack. The
Captain, Pedro de Ursúa, invited the Muzo Chiefs to a feast where
he distributed gifts and drink. When they were sated, and ready to
make their way home, Spanish soldiers fell upon them, tied them
to trees and killed them all (Guerrero, 2002:128).
6. The Most Holy Trinity of the Muzos

Whether by curse, treachery or the force of arms and dogs, the

5. Poisoned arrows and murder by dog and harquebus
Spanish succeeded in conquering the Muzos. They established the
town of Villa de la Santı́ssima Trinidad de los Muzos in 1560,
The greatest tragedy to afflict the Muzos came from the Spanish
complete with church and pillory, the two indispensable tools of
Conquest. The pillage of the South American Viceroyalty of Nueva
civil and ecclesiastical administration in Nueva Granada (Machuca,
Granada was fueled by the myth of El Dorado. The use of gold in
2008). The town’s indigenous inhabitants were loath to reveal the
indigenous rituals led the conquistadors to believe that there was a
location of the emerald mines that had so piqued the avarice of the
golden city in the jungle and they set out to find it. Soon they were
Spaniards. It was only after four years of exploration and brutal
infected with the fiebre verde as well. This green fever of lust for
interrogation that Juan de Penagos discovered the mines at Muzo.
emeralds has afflicted generations of would be miners (Guerrero,
It was only in 1567 that Spanish mining began in earnest (Rojas,
1986:227).
1974:91).
Emeralds were known in Europe before the conquest. However,
The Spanish reserved the rights of the subsoil to the King, but
these were inferior specimens from Egypt and the Austrian Alps
miners were permitted to exploit it if they paid the Quinto Real, or
with none of the fire and brilliance of Colombia gems (Giuliani
Royal Fifth. This was a 20 percent tax on the production of mines in
et al., 2000). The first European to handle emeralds on the South
the colonies. (Beltran and Ordoñez, 1995:64).9 This law proved
American coast was Pedrarias Dávila (Beltran and Ordoñez,
difficult to enforce in the remote fastness of Muzo. They
1995:61). Soon they became the preferred booty of the quixotic
established a Caja Real, or outpost of the royal treasury, in
conquistador Jiménez de Quesada. He looted them as he razed
1594. The Caja Real was supposed to collect the production of the
villages and slew or ransomed their leaders. He brought them back
mines, evaluate it and insure that the Quinto was paid. But many of
to Spain where he was known for handing them out in taverns to
the emeralds produced never reached its coffers (Macho and
women of questionable repute (Arcienagas, 1990:59–72).
Sinkankas, 1990).
Quesada was a strangely literary conquistador and may well
Laborers in cahoots with illegal miners would steal from
have been a model for Cervantes’ Don Quixote. But rather than
productive veins at night. A lively trade in stolen stones grew up
tilting harmlessly at windmills he was busily despoiling as much of
around the mines. People from Cartagena would come to Muzo,
the continent as he could and consecrating it to his God. One of his
buy stones and embark them on ships headed around the world
more troublesome lieutenants was Luis de Lancheros. In order to
(Lane, 2010). Even the wife of the first administrator of the Caja
get rid of him, Quesada sent him out against one of his most
Real was caught purloining emeralds10 (Guerrero, 2002:129).
intractable opponents, the Muzos (Guerrero, 1986:227). Lancheros
Emeralds have always proved refractory to government regulation.
survived and his expedition succeeded, but it was a near thing.
They are so small, valuable and easy to steal. The pattern would
The Muzos excelled in pitched battles and guerrilla warfare
change little in years to come.
alike. They beat back successive incursions by Lanchero’s forces in
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would see a decline
spite of their Sevillian steel and their harquebuses which they
in Muzo’s fortunes. From time to time the Spanish Crown would
claimed would fell ten or more of the ‘‘savages’’ with each shot
get word of irregularities in the exploitation of the mines and order
(Guerrero, 1986:227). Their arrow poison turned many Spanish
them closed. This would do little to stop the illegal mining. Then
brides into widows. The Muzos were only overcome when the
the Crown would auction the mines to the highest bidder and the
Spaniards brought their perros de presa, famously murderous dogs
cycle would begin again. There was always the hope of great
bred for war in the Canary Islands (Guerrero, 1986:227).
wealth. There were rumors of fortunes made and lost, but very
The final subjugation of the Muzos is the fodder for another
little profit from emerald mining ever accrued to the Spanish
myth of Furatena that shades off into history. Again I follow the
monarchy (Rojas, 1974).
telling of Javier Guerrero Barón (2002:128). The Muzo Cacique
The Most Holy Trinity of Muzo began to decline as a religious
Tisquesusa had been the bulwark of Indigenous resistance against
center as well. The city of Chiquinquirá in the nearby highlands
the Spanish incursions into the Rio Minero basin. One day he saw
was home to a miraculous apparition of Our Lady of the Rosary.
the Princess Furatena walking naked through the valley, with black
Soon it was home to a Basilica and several convents. The convents
hair trailing down to her thighs and an emerald diadem that
of Muzo closed and its church fell into disrepair. Ecclesiastic and
reached to the ground. He sent his messengers to proclaim and
offer his love to her. Just as they arrived they found the Spaniards 9
Beltran and Ordoñez (1995) unpublished masters thesis also provides a wealth
massacring their people, turning the black waters of the Zarbi river of information with a distinctly local perspective. Antonio Ordoñez grew up in
red with their blood. They returned and told their chief that a Otanche, the town that saw some of the heaviest fighting in all of the emerald wars.
immense black bird had come down from the sky and eviscerated He attended some of the peace meetings that brought these wars to an end, and had
his beloved princess. She had died with a fearsome curse. The access to the documents that they produced. He also has a personal knowledge of
the conflict because he came of age in the middle of it.
warrior chief never recovered from the shock and the Spaniards 10
One is reminded of Laurie Heitt, the wife of the Colonel who commanded United
were able to conquer his land and enslave his people (Guerrero, States counter-narcotic operations in Colombia and who was convicted of
2002:128). smuggling cocaine to the US in diplomatic pouches in 1999 (McFadden, 1999).
278 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283

civil divisions changed and Muzo became another backwater rural Colombian government. Finally, lawmakers decided to grant the
parish among hundreds (Guerrero, 1986:229). contract to exploit the mines to a respected and technocratic organ
of the state, El Banco de la República.
7. From Nueva Granada to Gran Colombia and back again
8. The Bank, the violence and the guaqueros
The nineteenth century saw even greater upheavals. The war for
the Independence of Nueva Granada from Spain began on July 20,
The contemporary history of emerald mining and trading in
1810. On April 4, 1811 independence was declared. The battle of
Colombia began when the state signed a contract with the Bank of
Boyacá, fought in the same Department where the emerald mines
the Republic. The contract gave the Bank the exclusive right to
are located, was decisive in the struggle. By 1822 the Spaniards
mine stones in Western Boyacá Province and to sell them abroad.
were defeated. By 1823 the former viceroyalty was incorporated
To understand the tribulations and ultimate failure of this
into the Republic of Gran Colombia, a new nation encompassing
arrangement we must first examine the background of political
Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and parts of Peru, Guyana
violence that convulsed Colombia in the early twentieth century.
and Brazil (Macho and Sinkankas, 1990).
This era is known simply as ‘‘The Violence’’ or La Violencia. When
Bolivar’s government was not long in signing its first contract to
it is divided into periods, these periods are described as The Violence
exploit emeralds. They granted the concession to a Captain in the
of the Thirties, The Violence of the Forties and so on (Steiner, 2005).
Army of the Libertador named José Ignacio Paris (Rojas, 1974:96).
The violence was ostensibly political, with liberal and conservative
Ignacio Paris would control the mines, experiencing only a few
factions fighting to purify the ideology and electoral loyalty of large
vicissitudes of nationalization and failed attempts at regulation,
swaths of the country. Whether there were actual political principles
until his death in 1849.
at stake or this was just an effort by large landowners to displace and
Paris used the open air, tajo abierto system that had been used
despoil the campesinos who lived in their territory, remains open to
by the Spaniards and the indigenous people before them and he
question. Each faction counted on the assistance of bandits
prospered. He sent his brother, Joaquim Paris, to the city of Paris to
(bandoleros) to enforce their will. The Conservative faction had
sell emeralds at great advantage. He used the proceeds of the sale
another powerful ally: the Catholic Church, and especially its
to pay off the debts contracted by Colombia during the War of
Dominican order (Steiner, 2005).11
Independence and to erect a statue of Bolivar in the main square of
Isauro Murcia would become the first Emerald King, but in
Bogotá. The statue remains there to this day (Macho and Sinkankas,
1948 he was just a boy. Bandits chased his family from their small
1990).
farm in Yacopı́, a town in the Department of Santander. Liberals
But Bolivar’s vision of a unified Northwestern South America was
were taking control of the region. His displaced family made the
not to be realized. The area that is now Colombia would become the
trek overland to Quı́pama, a conservative bastion near the Muzo
Republic of Nueva Granada, The Confederacı́on Grenadina, The
mines in Western Boyacá. Along the way, they met another family
Estados Unidos de Colombia and finally la República de Colombia
that had been hounded out of Quı́pama by conservative bandits.
with its current borders and constitutional government. In spite of
The fathers of the two families agreed to exchange the titles to their
this political turmoil, the late nineteenth century was a time of
respective farms, sight unseen (Téllez, 1993:11; Marı́n, 1979).
relative calm in the emerald mining regions. The Coscuez mines a
By the time young Isauro Murcia would arrive in Quı́pama, the
few kilometers from Muzo were rediscovered and reopened. Miners
Bank of the Republic had already been operating the emerald mines
found, to their horror, the skeletons of hundreds of indigenous
for one year. The agreement signed in 1946 gave it the exclusive right
miners and their Spanish overseers who were killed in a collapse
to exploit the mines in the so-called National Reserve. The stones
centuries before. The conquistadores still wore their armor.
extracted were brought directly to Bogotá. In Bogotá the Bank made
The mines at Chivor, in the eastern part of the Boyacá
its own arrangements to sell the emeralds, either rough or polished,
Department, were also rediscovered. Francisco Restrepo, a mining
to foreign buyers. It became a crime for anyone not associated with
engineer, found documents related to the lost mines in a
the Bank (or the independent mines at Chivor) to mine, or even
Dominican convent in Quito, Ecuador. They described a view of
possess uncut emeralds. The Bank’s monopoly should have
distant plains seen between two mountains. Restrepo roamed the
guaranteed them vast profits as well as endless royalties for the
countryside until he found that view, and then he dug until he hit a
Colombian state, but these profits were never realized. The Spanish
vein of emeralds. Restrepo received the rights to work the Chivor
Crown could never control illegal mining and commerce in emeralds
deposits in perpetuity. The mines of Muzo and Coscuez were
and neither could the Bank of the Republic.
transferred more or less peacefully among English, French and
Two men were key in subverting the Bank’s monopoly: Pablo
Colombian companies (Macho and Sinkankas, 1990).
Emiliano Orjuela and Juan Beetar Dow. Orjuela was a campesino
This peaceful expiry of mining contracts ended as the twentieth
who became rich when he struck a vein of emeralds. Unlike most
century began. In 1901 the Colombian government nationalized
informal miners, he was able to retain the profits of his early
the mines and the rights to exploit them were granted to
success and build an illegal but apparently benevolent empire. He
government administrators. But the British and French combine
would recruit young men, provide them with food and tools and
that worked the mines refused to hand them over. The threw in
send them to mine for emeralds in the National Reserve. When
their lot with an anti-government rebel force who took over the
they found the gems, they would bring them to him. This
mine headquarters and looted their accumulated production
traditional role of provisioning illegal mining crews is referred to as
(Macho and Sinkankas, 1990).
being a plantero. As his protégés succeeded, they would recruit
By 1902 control of the Muzo and Coscuez mines was restored to
crews of their own, becoming planteros in their own right but
the state and its administrators. For the first time, the mine’s
remaining subordinate to Pablo Emiliano Orjuela (Téllez, 1993:22).
managers founded a private police force, El Batallón de Zapadores, or
Juan Beetar Dow was the main buyer for the stones wrested
the Sappers’ Battalion, made up of miners (Macho and Sinkankas,
from the earth by Orjuela and his men. He is of ‘‘Syrio-Lebanese’’
1990). This state-sanctioned use of force by miners foreshadowed
descent and lives to this day in the coastal city of Cartagena. He had
the paramilitarism that would sweep the region a few decades later.
The mines opened and closed, were privatized and nationalized 11
Claudia Steiner is a Colombian anthropologist whose 2005 dissertation is an
and the stones were exported to England and France under a series important, English-language source for understanding the emerald mines and the
of arrangements, none of which were quite satisfactory to the legacy of violence in Colombia.
 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283
connections to international buyers from the United States and
Europe and would supply them with stones when they came to
Colombia (Guerrero, 1986:235). In addition to Orjuela, Juan Beetar
had two other important suppliers: a doctor and a priest.
The priest was Padre Damian Barajas of the parish of San Pablo
de Borbur. The illegal miners of his flock trusted the good Father to
give them a fair price for their stones. He is rumored to have gone
out mining himself, under cover of darkness, dressed as a
campesino. He is also rumored to have kept a jeweler’s loupe
and a scale in the tabernacle with the Sacred Host (Marı́n, 1979;
Téllez, 1993:33).
The Doctor, Enrique Nohora, was a physician employed by the
Bank of the Republic to look after the health of the workers and
their families at the mine. He was also of Syrio-Lebanese descent
and got the job by virtue of the machinations of Juan Beetar
(Guerrero, 1986:235). In addition to caring for the miners’ health,
he would encourage them to abscond with stones from the
production sites and sell them to him. The priest and the doctor
would in turn sell their stones to Juan Beetar in Bogotá (Marı́n,
1979). He controlled an illegal economy that prospered alongside,
and even within, the state-sanctioned operations of the Bank of the
Republic.
In order to understand how so many emeralds were diverted
into these illicit channels we must examine the particularities of
emerald mineralization and mining in Colombia. Emeralds require
a very specific confluence of geological and chemical factors in
order to form. In Colombia, one finds the injection of mineral-rich
aqueous solutions into the heavily fractured and folded shales of
one part of the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes. This is an
hydrothermal process where a superheated solution invades a
fissure in a host rock and then cools and solidifies as it gets closer to
the earth’s surface and temperature and pressure decrease (Keller
et al., 1990:108).
This process forms veins of calcite, dolomite, albanite, parisite
and a few other minerals. They are immediately visible in a mine
because they are milky white against the black carbonaceous shale
that hosts them. In a few cases, they will have had the perfect
combination of aluminum, silica and beryl, chrome, titanium,
vanadium and iron at the right temperature and pressure that will
have caused emerald crystals to form (Keller et al., 1990:108).
The veins themselves are perhaps 50–65 m long and around
15 cm wide (Keller et al., 1990:113). They are distributed across an
area that comprises hundreds of square kilometers. To say that this
is like looking for a needle in a haystack would be to overestimate
the size of needles relative to haystacks. And not all of the veins will
contain emeralds, not by any means. The shamans of the Musica
people would ingest an hallucinogenic brew in hopes that the
location of emerald bearing veins would be revealed to them in
their divine transports (Beltran and Ordoñez, 1995:60). More than
a century of scientific, geological study of the emerald deposits in
Colombia has failed to discover a more effective way to locate the
green stones.
So from pre-Columbian times up until the 1990s people
explored for emeralds using the ‘‘tajo abierto’’ or ‘‘open gash’’
system. In its mechanized version, this involved cutting a terrace
across a mountainside with a bulldozer, hoping to unveil one of the
white veins, and then stopping and digging it out with hand tools.
Miners then washed the overburden of unproductive rock down
the mountainside using a tambre, or reservoir fitted with a sluice
gate for that purpose. Informal miners would stand along the
sluice, shoveling through the slurry hoping to hit on emeralds that
the mine owners may have missed (Keller et al., 1990:123).
But that is not all that they did. Because the mining was carried
out in the open air, and because the white productive veins are
immediately apparent against the black shale background, it was
relatively easy for mine employees and illegal miners to raid the
279
productive deposits at night and extract the stones before they
could find their ways into the coffers of the company (Téllez,
1993:17–18).
Another, perhaps even more perilous tactic, was to dig a tunnel
(or socavón) into the crumbly shale, hoping to intersect with the
productive vein underneath the spot where it was being exploited
by the official mine (Keller et al., 1990:123). The mining area is
huge and the companies that ostensibly controlled it never worked
more than a few potentially productive faces (frentes) at a time.
Illegal miners could easily range across the vast territory looking
for emeralds in the alluvial soil. These alluvial emeralds are often
the easiest to extract and of the finest quality (Marı́n, 1979).
Illegal miners in Colombia are called Guaqueros. The word is
derived from guaca or huaca which refers to an indigenous, pre-
Columbian burial site. These burials often include mortuary
offerings crafted from gold (Field, 2012). They sometimes include
emeralds as well. Colombia has a long history of what contempo-
rary archeologists would probably call looting or grave-robbing,
but which miners simply call guaquerı´a (Páramo, 2010).
This notion of illicit digging for buried treasure is metaphori-
cally extended to the illegal hunt for emeralds. Indeed, the two
occupations have a lot in common, with their risks, rituals and
promises of fabulous wealth. And so informal miners of emeralds
and illegal archaeologists of pre-Columbian burials are both
referred to as guaqueros.
Some of the obstacles to the Bank’s control over the supply of
emeralds came from the physical characteristics of the mining area
itself. Others came from the methods used for mining. Even with a
private security force and help of the civil and military authorities,
it was never possible to police the entirety of this large and
mountainous region against a large contingent of determined
guaqueros.
Still other problems came from the functionaries of the Bank
itself. Many of these were liable to be suborned by figures like
Beetar and Orjuela. The Bank did not hire people from the local
communities, probably in an effort to avoid collusion and thievery.
But that made the Bank appear as an exogenous force is forced
imposing its will on a fiercely independent region. In this context,
there was little motivation for impoverished local communities to
respect the Bank’s monopoly (Guerrero, 1986:223, Marı́n, 1979).
9. The armadillo hunter and the Bandit of Seven Colors
Any pretense of a monopoly by the Bank on the production of
emeralds crumbled in 1960. An elderly man named Juvéncio
Morales was hunting for armadillos on the Peñas Blancas hacienda
near San Martı́n, an outlying territory of the town of San Pablo de
Borbur.12 In addition to catching an armadillo, Morales brought
home a fistful of green crystals (Marı́n, 1979; Téllez, 1993:32).
His son, who had dabbled in guaquerı́a, recognized them as
emeralds and brought them to Padre Damian Barajas who bought
them for what seemed to be a fantastic price. The young man was
drinking up the fruits of his father’s good fortune when he
imprudently divulged the source of his newfound wealth to one of
the planteros in Pablo Emiliano Orjuela’s organization (Marı́n,
1979; Téllez, 1993:34).
Orjuela and the Padre mounted simultaneous, competing
expeditions to the new deposits at Peñas Blancas. Before long,
word spread across the region and the country. The area became a
12
In case the readership of The Extractive Industries and Society is not be familiar
with the techniques of South American armadillo hunting I will provide a brief
description: The hunter goes out at night with dogs. The dogs catch the scent the
armadillo and run it to ground. The armadillo begins digging, the hunter digs behind
him with a shovel. It becomes a race. If the hunter is successful he dispatches his
prey with the blow of the shovel’s edge.
280 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283
buzzing and unruly mining camp full of fortune hunters and
fugitives. The vast wealth made possible by alluvial emerald
mining, combined with the difficulty of realizing this wealth by
bringing the stones back to Bogotá, led to an upsurge of
interpersonal violence. Orjuela, in his role as patron of illegal
mining in the region, decided it was necessary to impose control
(Marı́n, 1979; Téllez, 1993:35).
He enlisted the help of Efraı́n Gonzáles, El Bandido de Siete
Colores. Efraı́n was fresh from fighting against the liberal forces of
the bandit Carlos Bernal in nearby Cundinamarca. He harbored a
deep hatred for the National Army after standing off 200 soldiers in
the so-called ‘‘Batalla de las Avispas’’ or The Battle of the Wasps.
Efraı́n had only two fighting men of his own and was accompanied
by his lover, their infant child as well as his aged father, Godfather
and mother-in-law. The old folks had turned themselves in to the
army but were taken hostage. When Efraı́n refused to surrender,
they were shot in front of his eyes. After he escaped he went on a
rampage, killing suspected informers and anyone else associated
with the fatal battle (Steiner, 2005:121, Téllez, 1993:24–27).
He was wounded and taking refuge in the Parish House in
Borbur when he was approached by Orjuela and asked to bring
order to the mining area. Efraı́n González moved into the hills near
Peñas Blancas and began to enforce the law that Orjuela was
creating (Marı́n, 1979; Téllez, 1993:44). He punished robberies and
prevented cycles of revenge killings from taking hold among the
followings of the various planteros. His force was small and
secretive, consisting of a few trusted associates, his own brothers
and a figure who would become important in the history of the
emerald wars. This was Humberto Ariza, known as ‘‘El Ganso,’’ or
The Goose (Marı́n, 1979; Téllez, 1993:29).
With Pablo Orjuela as the civil leader and Efraı́n González as the
military leader of the guaqueros, a semblance of calm returned to
Peñas Blancas. This helped to forestall any unwelcome interven-
tion by the national authorities. Members of the Senate demanded
to know why the Bank was allowing illegal mining to occur. The
Bank replied by letter that while Peñas Blancas was within the
National Reserve, its contract with the state was only for the
exploitation of the mines at Muzo and Coscuez and that Peñas
Blancas was outside of its jurisdiction (Guerrero, 1986:232). The
Bank also created a means by which miners could bring their
stones to Bogotá, have them evaluated and be compensated if and
when the Bank sold them. It is difficult to imagine that many
guaqueros availed themselves of this opportunity (Beltran and
Ordoñez, 1995:87).
The peace in Peñas Blancas was not destined to last. To the
forces of law and order, Efraı́n Gonzalez was an unwelcome
reminder of an era of banditry and political violence. His brothers
and members of his fighting force had been responsible for some
horrific massacres of his political opponents. He had made some
sworn enemies in the military who hunted him with a network of
informers. They caught up with him in Bogotá in 1965 (Téllez,
1993:48).
When Efraı́n Gonzalez was finally cornered alone in an
apartment building, the army mobilized no fewer than 1200 troops
and a full complement of artillery. After their humiliation at the
Battle of the Wasps, they were taking no chances. Still The Bandit of
Seven Colors managed to hold them off, by himself, for several
hours. Finally, his redoubt was destroyed by shells from a bazooka
and he was shot in the back by an anonymous private (Téllez,
1993:48; Marı́n, 1979).
Without the support of Gonzalez, Pablo Emiliano Orjuela was
unable to defend himself or his claims against rival bands of illegal
miners. He was killed outside of his apartment in Bogotá in
1966. Isauro Murcia was named as Orjuela’s successor by his fellow
planteros and would henceforth be known as Don Isa (Téllez,
1993:49; Marı́n, 1979).
Isauro Murcia had been displaced from his childhood home by
political violence in 1948. His family had sought the protection of
Pablo Emiliano Orjuela. Murcia had joined the Army and later the
Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, Colombia’s infamous
and recently disbanded intelligence agency. He was imprisoned
after an operation to interdict a coffee smuggling ring left a long
trail of corpses. However, he escaped from prison and managed to
procure a job with the Bank of the Republic working security at the
emerald mines (Téllez, 1993:11–22; Marı́n, 1979).
Doctor Enrique Nohora, the purveyor of illegally mined
emeralds, convinced him to mount a nocturnal expedition to
extract stones from a productive vein that Murcia had supervised
by day. He was caught and imprisoned once again. Pablo Emiliano
Orjuela paid a substantial fine (or perhaps a bribe) to free him. He
returned to his home in Quı́pama and joined the ranks of Orjuela’s
illegal mining organization. He advanced until he became its leader
on Orjuela’s death (Téllez, 1993:19–20; Marı́n, 1979).
With Orjuela and Efraı́n Gonzalez both dead, there was an
uptick in violence in and around the Peñas Blancas mines. Murcia
had stepped into Orjuela’s role of civil leader, but he lacked a
military leader to enforce his decisions and impose calm on the
illegal business. He and his compatriots chose Humberto Ariza,
known as El Ganso or ‘‘The Goose.’’ In spite of his ridiculous
nickname, The Goose was a force to be reckoned with. He was in
prison in Bogotá having confessed to some his crimes. This did not
prove to be too much of an obstacle (Téllez, 1993; Marı́n, 1979).
Murcia and his followers staged a spectacular escape. The Goose
flew the coop and was spirited back to the mining area. There,
Isauro Murcia offered him the mantle of Efraı́n González and the
support of the dead bandit’s brothers. Together they consolidated
their monopoly over the illegal business (Téllez, 1993:49; Marı́n,
1979).
10. The incompetence of the Bank and the first Green Wars
As this underground commerce was thriving, the legal trade in
emeralds, controlled by the Bank of the Republic, was hemorrhag-
ing money and stones. In 1968 the Bank requested an indemnity of
28 million pesos for losses incurred in emerald mining (Solano
et al., 1996:26).13 Its auctions to foreign buyers were rigged. It sold
vast quantities of top quality emeralds for the price of moralla, low-
grade material worth little more than green gravel (Téllez,
1993:50). Emeralds were stolen by everyone from the lowest
functionaries to the highest echelons of the administration. These
stones entered the informal market (Guerrero, 1986:285; Marı́n,
1979).
The most frequently cited statistic holds that in 1968 the United
States, France and West Germany imported $2,795,556 worth of
Colombian emeralds, while the Bank only registered exports of
$574,919 (Gutiérrez and Guerrero, 2008:109). This would seem to
indicate that the illegal emerald market was at least five times
bigger than the legal market. Summoned to the senate to account
for itself, the Bank stated that it was not competent to administer
the police functions associated with operating the emerald mines
(Steiner, 2005:154). Indeed, members of the police requested
permission from Don Isauro Murcia to mine illegally themselves
(Uribe, 1992; Marı́n, 1979).
Don Isa had been working through legal channels to legitimize
his business. His first victory was overturning the ban on private
citizens possessing rough emeralds (Beltran and Ordoñez,
13
Solano et al. (1996) are also political scientists who provide a detailed history of
the violence in the emerald mining area, written shortly after the end of the last
war. The chronology they present provides much of the skeleton of this article. It is
not clear the circumstances under which their 109 page essay was or was not
published, but it is readily available over the internet.
 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283
1995:87). Once it became legal to own emeralds, the authorities
had little grounds on which to imprison the illegal miners. But
Murcia’s true goal was to start a company, receive a concession and
mine emeralds in partnership with the Colombian State (Téllez,
1993; Marı́n, 1979). He would encounter two obstacles.
First, the illegal emerald miners were thought to be a
particularly sanguinary mafia by the political elites and the
residents of urban Bogotá (Guerrero, 1986:245, Parra, 2006:18).
This would make it difficult for the State to enter into partnership
with them, no matter how much money the miners lavished on
political campaigns. Second, Murica’s military chief, El Ganso Ariza,
was an escaped prisoner who had confessed to committing several
multiple homicides. El Ganso knew that Murcia’s plans to legalize
the business would inevitably exclude him. This strained and
eventually snapped his loyalty to his former bosses (Téllez,
1993:55; Marı́n, 1979).
Unwilling to partner with Isauro Murcia, the Colombian
Government created ECOMINAS, the Empresa Colombiana de las
Minas, or Colombian Mining Company (Guerrero, 1986:246).
Murcia used his customary tactics of bribery and intimidation to
corrupt it from the inside from the very beginning (Marı́n, 1979;
Téllez, 1993:54). His aim was to show that organs of the state were
incapable of administering emerald mines (Téllez, 1993:50). In
retrospect this seems to have been a reasonable proposition. The
newly founded ECOMINAS was as bad, if not worse as the Bank had
been when it came to stemming thievery and corruption and
sending royalties to the state (Solano et al., 1996:26–27).
Meanwhile, Humberto ‘‘El Ganso’’ Ariza turned against Isauro
Murcia and his organization. He raided a mine belonging to Isauro’s
brother and killed one of its workers. This began the first Guerra
Verde, or Green War (Solano et al., 1996:55–56). The two main
mining areas in Boyacá are Muzo and Coscuez. They are only 12 km
apart as the crow flies, but the area is mountainous and heavily
forested and the government has never paid much attention to
transportation infrastructure (Keller et al., 1990:113). Thus the
trek from Coscuez to Muzo can easily become a day’s journey.
El Ganso set up his operation in Coscuez. He organized the
illegal miners into an hierarchical force and armed them.
Eventually access to mining areas came to depend on people’s
willingness to serve as bodyguards and to attack the members of
the rival group (Solano et al., 1996:56). Isauro Murcia’s organiza-
tion retained control over the illegal mining operations around
Muzo. As the area became more and more violent, Murcia and his
followers emigrated to Bogotá. Both groups used their own miners,
or hired assassins, to kill members of the rival faction. The fighting
quickly spread to Bogotá and the Santa Isabel neighborhood where
the leaders made their homes (Solano et al., 1996:56; Téllez,
1993:59; Marı́n, 1979).
Murcia enlisted an unlikely ally in his fight against El Ganso: the
Colombian Army (Téllez, 1993:55). El Ganso’s association with
Efraı́n Gonzalez and the era of political violence he represented,
made him an attractive target for the forces of the law. Murcia also
seems to have obtained stolen army uniforms and materiel for his
own squad of ex-military assassins (Téllez, 1993:60). Eventually
they managed to capture Humberto, El Ganso, Ariza at his hideout
in the mining area. He escaped being gunned down only because he
emerged with his infant child in his arms (Téllez, 1993:60; Marı́n,
1979). He returned to prison to serve out his sentence. The conflict
came to an end, or at least a hiatus. There were 670 reported deaths
in the first emerald war. It would be difficult to estimate how many
people were simply killed and thrown into the Rio Minero
(Guerrero, 1986:246). The conflict was also used as a cover for
homicidal robberies and score settling among miners who had no
affiliation with the bands in conflict.
At the same time, Murcia’s legal efforts were bearing fruit. The
state mining company, ECOMINAS, had failed. The government
281
militarized the entire emerald mining region and completely shut
down all official production from 1973 to 1976. In 1976 and
1977 The Sociedad Minera Boyacense (Mining Society of Boyacá)
and Esmeralcol were granted mining concessions at Muzo and
Coscuez respectively (Solano et al., 1996:26–27). These companies
were owned and operated by Isauro Murcia and his associates.
Esmeralcol, operated by Francsico ‘‘Pacho’’ Vargas, was granted the
right to form its own security force, a harbinger of the
paramilitaries that would arrive in Boyacá a few years later
(Gutiérrez and Guerrero, 2008:111; Téllez, 1993:61).
Be that as it may, the emerald mines were being run profitably
for the first time (Gutiérrez and Guerrero, 2008:112). The
Colombian state was even receiving royalties. Emeralds became
Colombia’s third largest export product, after coffee and bananas
(Téllez, 1993:66). Murcia and his associates soon found themselves
victims of their own success. Now that they were legitimate
businessmen, sanctioned by the state, they had to contend with the
bands of illegal miners who demanded their ‘‘traditional’’ rights of
guaquerı́a at Muzo and Coscuez (Téllez, 1993:64). The strongest
faction of illegal miners was headquartered near the Coscuez mine,
in the ‘‘neighborhood’’ of La Culebrera, ‘‘The Snakepit,’’ so-named
for the sinuous road that provided the only access in or out (Téllez,
1993:65).
Two brothers of Pacho Vargas were killed by people loosely
associated with the Muzo mines. Vargas, the main owner of the
Coscuez mine, joined the illegal miners of La Culebrera in a series of
assassinations that pitted Muzo against Coscuez once again. The
conflict between the private owners of the mines and the illegal
miners took place from 1975 to 1977. It was known as the second
Emerald War (Solano et al., 1996:58).
This time, the state did not intervene. The FARC, a communist
insurgent army, took advantage of the absence of the state to
establish their own presence in the mining area. In 1977 the
leaders of the opposed factions of miners signed a peace agreement
in the presence of the governor and the Bishop and the region
returned to relative stability once again (Solano et al., 1996:59).
Isauro Murcia would not live to enjoy his success. He was a pilot
and he died flying his own plane back from a cockfight in Medellı́n
in 1979. It appeared that his gas tank had been perforated and he
ran out of fuel over the mining area that he had fought so hard to
control (Marı́n, 1979; Téllez, 1993:66).
11. The last Emerald War
The last of the Guerras Verdes took place between 1984 and
1991. It was the most deadly conflict to roil the mining area since
the Spanish Conquest. It was also the first time that the money and
military power associated with narcotics trafficking came into the
mining area (Solano et al., 1996:63). The event that precipitated it
was in itself unremarkable. A relatively innocent guaquero was
killed coming down from Peñas Blancas. But the killing unleashed
long-simmering tensions between the Muzo and Coscuez factions
and divided the mining area for years (Téllez, 1993:72).
In 1984 the Coscuez mines were controlled by Pacho Vargas
while the Muzo mines were controlled by Gilberto Molina
(Gutiérrez and Guerrero, 2008:112). Both Vargas and Molina were
veterans of Isauro Murcia’s organization. A series of revenge
killings cut the Coscuez mines off from the towns around it.
Residents of Otanche, Borbur and Santa Bárbara could no longer
practice their guaquerı́a in Coscuez and had to make the overland
trek all the way to Muzo. The only guaqueros with access to the
Coscuez mines were those who lived in barrios, really little more
than mining camps, of La Culebrera and Chicó (Téllez, 1993:65).
In 1985 Pacho Vargas was killed. He probably would have
survived the shooting, but he was injected with poison as he lay in
the hospital (Téllez, 1993:94). Bereft of its leader, Coscuez looked
282 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283
like a ripe target for acquisition by Gilberto Molina and the Muzo
faction. Molina had a powerful ally in his attempts to consolidate
control of the two largest mines in Colombia. This was Gonzalo
Rodriguez Gacha, known as El Mexicano (Solano et al., 1996:63).
Rodriguez Gacha was born near the mining area and had been a
guaquero in his youth. But he went on to join Pablo Escobar’s drug
trafficking organization, The Medellı́n Cartel. Eventually El
Mexicano would become its military leader. It is hard to
overestimate the wealth and power of the Medellı́n Cartel in
Colombia in the mid 1980s. Gacha became a major destabilizing
force in the mining area (Téllez, 1993:93).
He had been childhood friends with Gilberto Molina, and
Molina approached him with a proposition: Muzo was producing
fantastic emeralds. Molina had men, arms and money at his
disposal, but he was encircled. There were only two roads out of
Western Boyacá. One passed through the town of Pauna and the
other through Maripı́. Both of these towns were controlled by the
Coscuez faction. Molina could travel by helicopter between Bogotá
and the airport he had built in Quı́pama. But his men and their
families were effectively trapped. He wanted to build a road
through Gacha’s hometown and stronghold of Pacho. The road
would lead to Zipaquirá and from thence to Bogotá providing an
alternate route out of the mining area (Solano et al., 1996:64,
Téllez, 1993 94–95).
Gacha agreed, but in return he wanted access to the vast
landholdings that Molina, and his associate Vı́ctor Carranza, had in
the Magdalena Medio Valley. He would use this land to grow coca
and process cocaine hydrochloride for the Medellı́n Cartel. It
appears that the agreement was reached (Téllez, 1993:92).
However, Molina would not allow him to buy shares in the
Muzo mine itself. Presumably El Mexicano wanted a share of the
mine to launder a portion of his illicit profits from the drug trade.
Molina refused (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012:48). Eventually,
coca plantations and cocaine laboratories were discovered on the
lands and in the buildings owned by Molina and Carranza. The two
miners presented themselves to the authorities and claimed that
they had no knowledge of what was taking place on their land. The
properties had been rented for years to Gacha and his front men
(Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012:52).
Angered by this perceived betrayal, Gacha offered his services
to the embattled owners of the Coscuez mine and joined the fray
against his former friend, Gilberto Molina (Téllez, 1993:92). The
divisions in the mining area hardened. Tit for tat assassinations
became commonplace. Both factions armed their miners and
killing again became a prerequisite for access to the most
productive mines. It became almost impossible for men to transit
the mining area by road. Women could barely move to buy food
(Uribe, 1992).
In 1990 Gilberto Molina, his entire corps of bodyguards, and
many of his friends, were killed in a massacre at his ranch in Saisma
(Téllez, 1993:105; Solano et al., 1996:63). A few months later El
Mexicano was killed by the Colombian army (Gutiérrez and
Guerrero, 2008:114).14 With the two most bellicose antagonists
dead, peace became possible.
12. Concluding remarks: reflections on peace and the rise of a
new Czar
The survivors of the third emerald war gathered to sign a peace
accord in 1991. The pact was made in the presence of Monseñor
Raul Jarro Tobos and Monseñor Hector Gutiérrez Pabón, Bishops of
the Catholic Church. The esmeralderos also invited representatives
14
He was alleged to have participated in the assassination of a presidential
candidate who had pledged to extradite drug traffickers to the United States for
trial.
of the civil and military authorities. Violence did not end
immediately. A logic of ‘‘ajustes de cuenta,’’ or settling of accounts,
kept the murder rate among emerald miners and dealers high for
the next three or four years (Beltran and Ordoñez, 1995:151,
Steiner, 2005). The killings decreased gradually and emerald
production increased substantially. The main beneficiary, as well
as the main guardian of the peace accords was Don Vı́ctor Carranza.
Vı́ctor Carranza was born in 1936 to a family of campesinos. He
lost his father at age two, was working in the fields at age five, and
by age eight was looking for emeralds at the mines of Chivor in the
Eastern part of the Boyacá Department. Throughout his life he had
an uncanny (many would say God-given) knack for finding
emeralds (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012:32). He made his first
fortunes in the mines of Chivor and Gachalá. These mines are fairly
distant from Muzo and Coscuez. They have never equaled those
famous mines for the quality and volume of their production. But
they were more than enough to cement the prosperity of the young
Vı́ctor Carranza. Because his attention and activities were more
focused on the eastern mines he managed to steer clear of most of
the violence of the emerald wars. He had shares in Gilberto
Molina’s Muzo mines, but he was not part of the inner circle that
was massacred at Saisma. This fact has led one author to claim that
he engineered that massacre, but I have not seen evidence
elsewhere to substantiate that claim (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo,
2012:52).
When the peace accords of 1991 brought the war to an end,
Vı́ctor Carranza ended up with substantial shares of the Muzo and
Coscuez mines. He also found himself working with the same
illegal miners of the Culebrera and their allies whom Molina had
fought against so doggedly. But the mines prospered under Don
Vı́ctor’s direction and the wealth that they produced was enough to
bury the sanguinary conflicts of the years past (Gutiérrez and
Guerrero, 2008:114).
Vı́ctor Carranza continued his long-standing partnership with
Juan Beetar Dow, the Syrio-Lebanese merchant who had managed
the international aspects of the illegal emerald trade since the time
of the Bank of the Republic. Juan Beetar helped Carranza translate
his fantastic wealth into political influence and diversify his
fortune from the notoriously unpredictable business of emerald
mining into many other sectors (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo,
2012:41).
Most emerald miners trace their roots to campesino families for
whom the most honorable occupation is cattle-raising. Carranza
bought vast tracts of ranch land in the Llanos Orientales,
Colombia’s eastern plains. Many were purchased through front
men ‘‘testaferros.’’ The true extent of these holdings may never be
known. They constituted a veritable empire, run from Carranza’s
seat in the town of Puerto Lopez (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo,
2012:53).
The Llanos Orientales were also an important theater of
operation for the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionárias Colombianas,
the FARC. The FARC is perhaps the world’s most tenacious guerrilla
insurgency. It is ostensibly dedicated to land reform and breaking
up huge holdings such as the one Carranza was amassing for
himself. The FARC also took advantage of the chaos, born of
violence and the absence of the state, in the mining area to set up
coca plantations and processing facilities there (Solano et al.,
1996:65). The FARC with its communist ideology is anathema to
the traditionally conservative patrons of the emerald mining area.
Although he had brokered the peace among the esmeralderos
Carranza found himself embroiled in Colombia’s half-century long
civil war. What role he played is a matter of considerable debate.
Some authors hold him responsible for forming right-wing
paramilitary groups that terrorized and despoiled the peasantry
and even ran narcotics under the cover of their ‘‘anti-subversive
activities.’’ It is further alleged that he enjoyed the tacit support of
 B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273–283
the Colombian Government and even the governments of the
United States and Israel for his private war against the communist
guerrilla (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012:64–67).
Carranza himself contended that his so-called paramilitary
armies were nothing more than miners and peasants with
shotguns protecting their lands and their mines from the
incursions of Maoist narcoterrorists (Steiner, 2005:148). These
debates were swirling in 1998 when Carranza convened an
international conference on Colombian emeralds to resolve issues
in the trade related to the use of resin treatments on gems. The
conference was in full swing. Experts from the major gem
certification laboratories of the world, as well as the most
important merchants and miners were in attendance, when
Carranza was arrested in his mansion in Bogotá (Cepeda and
Javier Giraldo, 2012:91).15
He was tried and convicted and served 46 months in a posh,
private prison cell where he still managed to run his emerald
empire. Then, thanks to the efforts of his lawyers and associates he
was exonerated of all charges and indemnified in cash for lost
income and ‘‘moral prejudice.’’ Whether this was represented
justice for an innocent and fervent supporter of the state or a
masterpiece of corruption in a deeply flawed judicial system is
another matter of intense debate (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo,
2012:111).
What is incontrovertible is that Carranza was never convicted of
anything again. He was astute in his self-portrayal in the media,
beloved of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and probably
appreciated for his anti-subversive activities by an embattled state.
He continued to consolidate his empire throughout his life. He also
held the peace among the emerald miners. It was not a perfect
peace. There were occasionally killings or attempted killings of
prominent figures in the business. There were also several
attempts on Carranza’s own life. Once, when his motorcade was
attacked with rocket-propelled grenades, an aged Don Vı́ctor,
dying of cancer, grabbed a gun from his dead bodyguard and
returned fire on his assailants (Monroy, 2010). There were new
strikes of emeralds and new players who wanted military might to
match their economic power. But these violent individuals and
individual acts of violence had never devolved into the cycles of
selective assassination and vendetta that had characterized the
three emerald wars.
Near the end of his life, Vı́ctor Carranza sold a concession to his
most modern and productive mine to an anonymous group of
foreign investors. He received an astronomical sum up front as well
as a substantial share of the expected production of the mine.
These profits were divided among the surviving leaders of the
emerald war, keeping them united by shared economic interest
(Hernández, 2013).
When Vı́ctor Carranza died on April 4, 2013, he left a note for his
friend the Bishop Monseñor Hector Gutiérrez Pabón exhorting
those who survived him to keep the peace (El Tiempo, 2013a). At
the time of this writing the peace looks fragile and threatened, but
it has held.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge the support of California
State University, Chico for financial support and the Instituto
Colombiano de Antropologı́a y Historia (ICANH) for logistical
support in Colombia.
15
Rumor has it that he was hiding in his water tank, breathing through a straw,
but that his whereabouts were given away to the police by his own dog.
283
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