The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273283

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

The Extractive Industries and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/exis

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:
Received 16 July 2014
Received in revised form 28 August 2014
Available online 22 September 2014

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

Keywords:
Emeralds
Mining
Colombia
History

1. Introduction: the Czar is dead

On April 4, 2013 Vctor 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
Colombias emerald mines. He was accused of forming paramilitary 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 Carranzas 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, assassinations, 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 conicts over emeralds encapsulate their countrys
whole violent history (Guerrero, 2002:123). The brutality of the
conquest, the Bolivarian revolution, the political violence of the
rst 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
worlds longest running civil war seems poised to end. Political

E-mail address: [email protected].

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2014.08.006
2214-790X/ 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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 Bogota. 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 difcult to nd, even in
Colombia, they might not be accessible to this journals 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 ner 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 selfcongratulatory 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 scientic and
mythological detail. There is a journalistic expose and some ghostwritten pseudonymous pulp ction. 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 inexorable ways in which this history repeats itself.

274

B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273283

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 difcult 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 ction. These sources
interweave history and biography and make it sound as though the
processes that unfolded in the emerald mining area were the results
conicts 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 afnity 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 lch 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
fulll the traditional role of patrons, serving as godfathers to peoples
children, helping them out in times of trouble, throwing huge parties
on religious occasions and distributing largess in sundry other ways
(Uribe, 1992).2
1
Parras (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 afnity that tie patrons to their
followers are forged by and through women. Parras work highlights their roles. She
was born and raised in the mining area, to a mining family and much of her work is
drawn from information provided by her own family members.
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 dened 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 rst published in 1992.

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 ght, and to die for them
(Uribe, 1992). So if I describe the conicts in the emerald mining
area in the twentieth century as conicts 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 difcult 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 conicts
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 nd 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 rst 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 conicts 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 conicts. 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 Colombias
national imaginary. Colombian emeralds are generally held to
be the nest 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 nest
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 Bogotas elites (Parra, 2006:18). They
are described, in academic and popular discourse alike, as a Maa
(Uribe, 1992, Paramo, 2010). Nearly everyone I met in Colombia
who was not afliated with the trade urged me to stay away from
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) 273283

the esmeralderos. The people who were in the trade urged me to use
my writings to burnish their tarnished image.
But Colombians are fascinated by their emeralds and their
esmeralderos. They are the subject of songs, soap operas, movies
and novels. They are featured in the culmination of the exhibit at
the Museo del Oro (The Gold Museum) which Michael Taussig
argues is the symbolic bedrock of the national identity (Taussig,
2004). Every rumbling of violence in the emerald mining area
unleashes a torrent of speculation in the press. The occasional
reporter who ventures into the mining area, a few scant
kilometers from the capital, describes a journey into the heart
of darkness. It is held to be a sphere where traditional social mores
are inverted and lust and violence given free reign (Pachon, 2008).
Anthropologists have learned to be suspicious of such exoticizing
depictions of the other, especially when the other is so close to
home.
Colombias own anthropologists have turned a critical gaze on
the mystique and romance of the emerald mining area. Its political
scientists and historians have chronicled the troubled past of the
mines and tried to understand the root causes of the violence that
has taken place. These academic sources are cited in the footnotes
throughout this article. Popular sources are similarly cited and
described briey. But a few books merit additional discussion.
Two important but problematic sources on Colombian emerald
mining and trading came from the organizations responsible for
the mines themselves. The rst is Esmeraldas de Colombia,
oz and Villalba,
published by the Bank of the Republic (Mun
1948). This is a celebration of the history of Colombian emeralds,
published when the Bank must have been very optimistic about its
chances for success in managing the emerald mines. The book is
illustrated in several colors with woodcuts and is a beautiful
typographic object. The history it presents is one of progress: from
Noble Savages to benevolent Conquistadores, to a technocratic and
scientic administration by the Bank on behalf of all Colombians.
Whatever violence this presentation may perpetrate on the
historical facts, it is certainly ironic in light of the violence that
would erupt in the years after the books publication.
The second source to have emerged from the trade is the El Gran
Libro de la Esmeralda Colombiana, The Great Book of Colombian
Emeralds (Retana, 1990).4 This is another impressive typographical
object: a mighty tome lavishly illustrated with color photos,
tipping the scales at over 10 pounds. It was published in 1990, as
the last emerald war was drawing to its bloody conclusion. The
publication seems to have been sponsored by Tecminas, the
company operated by Vctor Carranza and his then recently
deceased associate, Gilberto Molina. It was published under the
auspices of the newly created Federacion Nacional de Esmeraldas de
Colombia or National Federation of Emeralds of Colombia.
The book provides an incredible wealth of information. It
purports to record every mention of emeralds in literature from
Babylonian times to the present. It examines the religious and
magical lore of emeralds, their use in heraldry, philately, medicine,
gemmotherapy, and ction. It includes articles by the foremost
scientic experts on the chemistry and crystalline structure of
emeralds, their optical properties, lapidary techniques, and the
instruments used to examine and evaluate them. It describes the
synthesis of articial emeralds, emerald identication by patterns
of inclusions, other green gems that might be mistaken for
emeralds and more. There is a glossary of every word that means
green and has been used to refer to emeralds in many different
languages. There is even introduction by His Royal Highness, Juan
Carlos I, the King of Spain who says:

4
This edited volume includes the articles from Arcienagas (1990), Macho and
Sinkankas (1990) and Keller et al. (1990) cited below.

275

Fragile and permanent at the same time, the emerald has the
warmth of the hope that is born in the entrails of America, and
as the messenger of the ideals of the American peoples within
the great project of universal peace. (Retana, 1990: unnumbered page, my translation)
This talk of universal peace, emanating from the emerald mines
in 1990 seems troublesome. The book omits any mention of the
emerald wars of the twentieth century. Hundreds of people must
have been killed in Boyaca as this ponderous volume was being
prepared. The Great Book of Colombian Emeralds is a classic
example of what Rolph Trouillot has described as silencing the
past through the production of history (Trouillot, 1995).
It seems to be intended to sit like a rock on top of any other
historical investigation of the events that have transpired in and
around Colombias emerald mines. It seeks to rehabilitate
Colombian emeralds by burying their recent, violent history under
a mass of much older historical facts and timeless scientic data.
The only hints of the bloody career of emeralds in the twentieth
century come in the second glossary where there are entries for
Isauro Murcia, El Ganso Ariza and Gilberto Molina. There are also
some colorful slang terms for assassins and assassinations, but
they are buried very deep.
Emeralds have also captured the popular imagination in
Colombia. History and ction written for mass consumption
provide perspectives on the emerald economy that academic
research might miss. The greatest popular historian of the emerald
mining area is Tellez (1993). Tellez is related to Efran Gonzalez,
the Bandit of Seven Colors. He has devoted much of his life to
expounding the exploits of his ancestor and recounting the events
that unfolded in the wake of his death. His work does not conform
to the canons of academic history. Much of the detail he presents
could only be of his own invention. But he has an ethnographic
insight into the emerald wars that cannot be ignored.
The work of Ivan Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012, is more
problematic. They present a biography of Vctor Carranza in the
mode of a journalistic expose. It was published almost exactly one
year before his death. Their book details both his activity as an
emerald miner and his alleged formation of paramilitary groups. In
2013 this book was in the window displays of many of the popular
bookshops in Bogota. They clearly captured an audience, but they
also clearly have an axe to grind.
Ivan Cepeda, like his father before him, is a politician afliated
with the Union Patriotica (UP) party. The UP is an offshoot of the
FARC, that espouses the same goals as the guerilla insurgency, but
which has renounced violence and works through the political
process. Members of the UP were frequent targets of paramilitary
assassinations. Cepedas own father was a senator who was killed
in Bogota for his communist political activity (Steiner, 2005). So
their inquiry into of the life of Vctor Carranza seems to have been
undertaken with a clear personal and political agenda.
Their sources are journalistic accounts as well as the statements
of ex-paramilitary soldiers. Some of these depositions were
collected in the course of interrogations conducted by the DAS,
Colombias intelligence agency, which was notorious for torturing
suspects in its custody (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012:60). This
makes the content of these interviews suspect. Carranza was
absolved of most of the charges leveled by Cepeda because the
evidence brought against him was compromised. Cepeda takes this
very lack of evidence as evidence that he corrupted the judiciary
(Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012:84). This is as intuitively
plausible as it is logically unsound. The things that Cepeda claims
about Carranza and his association with paramilitaries could very
well be true, but the issue of reliability is complex.
The issue of reliability is equally complex for those books about
emerald mining and trading that are ostensibly works of ction.

276

B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273283

Some of these books appear to be ghost written biographies of

specic miners. In most cases, these books are ctionalized enough,
that it was not possible (at least for this researcher) to associate most
of the characters in the stories with specic individuals.
This is not the case for Felix Marns massive, Guerra de las
Esmeraldas (Marn, 1979). Marns text is an historical account of
the rst 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 avor of this authors prose.
3. A note on geography, geology and gemology
Colombias 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 Boyaca (el Occidente de
Boyaca). When people refer to the emerald mining area they
generally mean western Boyaca.
The trip from Bogota 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
Territorio 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, sumece.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 prot 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, ne, 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 Gachala are outside of Western Boyaca and
have not be affected by violence to the same degree.
6
Sumece 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 rst inhabited by Muisca peoples, the legendary goldsmiths of
Colombias 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 Boyaca
(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 ez, 1995:30, Levi-Strauss,
pological literature (Beltran and Ordon
1949:216). Their villages were acephalous groups of matrilineal
kin without political titles or hereditary ofces. 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 behetras, after the autonomous
Iberian communities who refused to submit to a king (Paramo,
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. Colombias most famous mines
are in the Western province of the Department of Boyaca in the basin
of the Rio Minero. A few kilometers upriver from the mines, near the
town of San Pablo de Borbur stands the regions 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 Baron (2002:127128).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 indelity. Having
betrayed her lover of centuries, Fura was so overcome with grief
that she aged immediately.

7
Paramo (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 Baron 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 signicant events, describes the relationships among the various actors
and frames them within the political history of Colombia. One of his articles
(Gutierrez 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) 273283

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 suns punishing rays. But before the metamorphosis
could be effected, Zarbi tore out his own entrails. The torrents of his
blood owed between Fura and Tena, separating them forever and
becoming the river Zarbi, later to be knows as the Rio Minero.
Furas anguish knew no bounds. Her cries of despair became
blue morpho butteries (Morpho cypris) that still it along the
rivers edge. Her tears became emeralds. Those who mine them are
cursed to relive her tragedy (Guerrero, 2002:127128).

5. Poisoned arrows and murder by dog and harquebus

The greatest tragedy to afict the Muzos came from the Spanish
Conquest. The pillage of the South American Viceroyalty of Nueva
Granada was fueled by the myth of El Dorado. The use of gold in
indigenous rituals led the conquistadors to believe that there was a
golden city in the jungle and they set out to nd it. Soon they were
infected with the ebre verde as well. This green fever of lust for
emeralds has aficted generations of would be miners (Guerrero,
1986:227).
Emeralds were known in Europe before the conquest. However,
these were inferior specimens from Egypt and the Austrian Alps
with none of the re and brilliance of Colombia gems (Giuliani
et al., 2000). The rst European to handle emeralds on the South
ez,
American coast was Pedrarias Davila (Beltran and Ordon
1995:61). Soon they became the preferred booty of the quixotic
conquistador Jimenez de Quesada. He looted them as he razed
villages and slew or ransomed their leaders. He brought them back
to Spain where he was known for handing them out in taverns to
women of questionable repute (Arcienagas, 1990:5972).
Quesada was a strangely literary conquistador and may well
have been a model for Cervantes Don Quixote. But rather than
tilting harmlessly at windmills he was busily despoiling as much of
the continent as he could and consecrating it to his God. One of his
more troublesome lieutenants was Luis de Lancheros. In order to
get rid of him, Quesada sent him out against one of his most
intractable opponents, the Muzos (Guerrero, 1986:227). Lancheros
survived and his expedition succeeded, but it was a near thing.
The Muzos excelled in pitched battles and guerrilla warfare
alike. They beat back successive incursions by Lancheros forces in
spite of their Sevillian steel and their harquebuses which they
claimed would fell ten or more of the savages with each shot
(Guerrero, 1986:227). Their arrow poison turned many Spanish
brides into widows. The Muzos were only overcome when the
Spaniards brought their perros de presa, famously murderous dogs
bred for war in the Canary Islands (Guerrero, 1986:227).
The nal subjugation of the Muzos is the fodder for another
myth of Furatena that shades off into history. Again I follow the
telling of Javier Guerrero Baron (2002:128). The Muzo Cacique
Tisquesusa had been the bulwark of Indigenous resistance against
the Spanish incursions into the Rio Minero basin. One day he saw
the Princess Furatena walking naked through the valley, with black
hair trailing down to her thighs and an emerald diadem that
reached to the ground. He sent his messengers to proclaim and
offer his love to her. Just as they arrived they found the Spaniards
massacring their people, turning the black waters of the Zarbi river
red with their blood. They returned and told their chief that a
immense black bird had come down from the sky and eviscerated
his beloved princess. She had died with a fearsome curse. The
warrior chief never recovered from the shock and the Spaniards
were able to conquer his land and enslave his people (Guerrero,
2002:128).

277

A Spanish account of the nal victory over the Muzos tells the
story of the rst 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 Ursua, 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
Spanish succeeded in conquering the Muzos. They established the
town of Villa de la Santssima Trinidad de los Muzos in 1560,
complete with church and pillory, the two indispensable tools of
civil and ecclesiastical administration in Nueva Granada (Machuca,
2008). The towns indigenous inhabitants were loath to reveal the
location of the emerald mines that had so piqued the avarice of the
Spaniards. It was only after four years of exploration and brutal
interrogation that Juan de Penagos discovered the mines at Muzo.
It was only in 1567 that Spanish mining began in earnest (Rojas,
1974:91).
The Spanish reserved the rights of the subsoil to the King, but
miners were permitted to exploit it if they paid the Quinto Real, or
Royal Fifth. This was a 20 percent tax on the production of mines in
ez, 1995:64).9 This law proved
the colonies. (Beltran and Ordon
difcult to enforce in the remote fastness of Muzo. They
established a Caja Real, or outpost of the royal treasury, in
1594. The Caja Real was supposed to collect the production of the
mines, evaluate it and insure that the Quinto was paid. But many of
the emeralds produced never reached its coffers (Macho and
Sinkankas, 1990).
Laborers in cahoots with illegal miners would steal from
productive veins at night. A lively trade in stolen stones grew up
around the mines. People from Cartagena would come to Muzo,
buy stones and embark them on ships headed around the world
(Lane, 2010). Even the wife of the rst administrator of the Caja
Real was caught purloining emeralds10 (Guerrero, 2002:129).
Emeralds have always proved refractory to government regulation.
They are so small, valuable and easy to steal. The pattern would
change little in years to come.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would see a decline
in Muzos fortunes. From time to time the Spanish Crown would
get word of irregularities in the exploitation of the mines and order
them closed. This would do little to stop the illegal mining. Then
the Crown would auction the mines to the highest bidder and the
cycle would begin again. There was always the hope of great
wealth. There were rumors of fortunes made and lost, but very
little prot from emerald mining ever accrued to the Spanish
monarchy (Rojas, 1974).
The Most Holy Trinity of Muzo began to decline as a religious
center as well. The city of Chiquinquira in the nearby highlands
was home to a miraculous apparition of Our Lady of the Rosary.
Soon it was home to a Basilica and several convents. The convents
of Muzo closed and its church fell into disrepair. Ecclesiastic and
9
ez (1995) unpublished masters thesis also provides a wealth
Beltran and Ordon
ez grew up in
of information with a distinctly local perspective. Antonio Ordon
Otanche, the town that saw some of the heaviest ghting in all of the emerald wars.
He attended some of the peace meetings that brought these wars to an end, and had
access to the documents that they produced. He also has a personal knowledge of
the conict because he came of age in the middle of it.
10
One is reminded of Laurie Heitt, the wife of the Colonel who commanded United
States counter-narcotic operations in Colombia and who was convicted of
smuggling cocaine to the US in diplomatic pouches in 1999 (McFadden, 1999).

278

B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273283

civil divisions changed and Muzo became another backwater rural

parish among hundreds (Guerrero, 1986:229).

Colombian government. Finally, lawmakers decided to grant the

contract to exploit the mines to a respected and technocratic organ
of the state, El Banco de la Republica.

7. From Nueva Granada to Gran Colombia and back again

The nineteenth century saw even greater upheavals. The war for
the Independence of Nueva Granada from Spain began on July 20,
1810. On April 4, 1811 independence was declared. The battle of
Boyaca, fought in the same Department where the emerald mines
are located, was decisive in the struggle. By 1822 the Spaniards
were defeated. By 1823 the former viceroyalty was incorporated
into the Republic of Gran Colombia, a new nation encompassing
Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and parts of Peru, Guyana
and Brazil (Macho and Sinkankas, 1990).
Bolivars government was not long in signing its rst contract to
exploit emeralds. They granted the concession to a Captain in the
Army of the Libertador named Jose Ignacio Paris (Rojas, 1974:96).
Ignacio Paris would control the mines, experiencing only a few
vicissitudes of nationalization and failed attempts at regulation,
until his death in 1849.
Paris used the open air, tajo abierto system that had been used by
the Spaniards and the indigenous people before them and he
prospered. He sent his brother, Joaquim Paris, to the city of Paris to
sell emeralds at great advantage. He used the proceeds of the sale to
pay off the debts contracted by Colombia during the War of
Independence and to erect a statue of Bolivar in the main square of
Bogota. The statue remains there to this day (Macho and Sinkankas,
1990).
But Bolivars vision of a unied Northwestern South America was
not to be realized. The area that is now Colombia would become the
Republic of Nueva Granada, The Confederacon Grenadina, The
Estados Unidos de Colombia and nally la Republica de Colombia
with its current borders and constitutional government. In spite of
this political turmoil, the late nineteenth century was a time of
relative calm in the emerald mining regions. The Coscuez mines a
few kilometers from Muzo were rediscovered and reopened. Miners
found, to their horror, the skeletons of hundreds of indigenous
miners and their Spanish overseers who were killed in a collapse
centuries before. The conquistadores still wore their armor.
The mines at Chivor, in the eastern part of the Boyaca
Department, were also rediscovered. Francisco Restrepo, a mining
engineer, found documents related to the lost mines in a
Dominican convent in Quito, Ecuador. They described a view of
distant plains seen between two mountains. Restrepo roamed the
countryside until he found that view, and then he dug until he hit a
vein of emeralds. Restrepo received the rights to work the Chivor
deposits in perpetuity. The mines of Muzo and Coscuez were
transferred more or less peacefully among English, French and
Colombian companies (Macho and Sinkankas, 1990).
This peaceful expiry of mining contracts ended as the twentieth
century began. In 1901 the Colombian government nationalized
the mines and the rights to exploit them were granted to
government administrators. But the British and French combine
that worked the mines refused to hand them over. The threw in
their lot with an anti-government rebel force who took over the
mine headquarters and looted their accumulated production
(Macho and Sinkankas, 1990).
By 1902 control of the Muzo and Coscuez mines was restored to
the state and its administrators. For the rst time, the mines
managers founded a private police force, El Batallon de Zapadores, or
the Sappers Battalion, made up of miners (Macho and Sinkankas,
1990). This state-sanctioned use of force by miners foreshadowed
the paramilitarism that would sweep the region a few decades later.
The mines opened and closed, were privatized and nationalized
and the stones were exported to England and France under a series
of arrangements, none of which were quite satisfactory to the

8. The Bank, the violence and the guaqueros

The contemporary history of emerald mining and trading in
Colombia began when the state signed a contract with the Bank of
the Republic. The contract gave the Bank the exclusive right to
mine stones in Western Boyaca Province and to sell them abroad.
To understand the tribulations and ultimate failure of this
arrangement we must rst examine the background of political
violence that convulsed Colombia in the early twentieth century.
This era is known simply as The Violence or La
Violencia. When it is divided into periods, these periods are
described as The Violence of the Thirties, The Violence of the
Forties and so on (Steiner, 2005). The violence was ostensibly
political, with liberal and conservative factions ghting to purify
the ideology and electoral loyalty of large swaths of the country.
Whether there were actual political principles at stake or this was
just an effort by large landowners to displace and despoil the
campesinos who lived in their territory, remains open to question.
Each faction counted on the assistance of bandits (bandoleros) to
enforce their will. The Conservative faction had another powerful
ally: the Catholic Church, and especially its Dominican order
(Steiner, 2005).11
Isauro Murcia would become the rst Emerald King, but in
1948 he was just a boy. Bandits chased his family from their small
farm in Yacop, a town in the Department of Santander. Liberals
were taking control of the region. His displaced family made the
trek overland to Qupama, a conservative bastion near the Muzo
mines in Western Boyaca. Along the way, they met another family
that had been hounded out of Qupama by conservative bandits.
The fathers of the two families agreed to exchange the titles to their
respective farms, sight unseen (Tellez, 1993:11; Marn, 1979).
By the time young Isauro Murcia would arrive in Qupama, the
Bank of the Republic had already been operating the emerald mines
for one year. The agreement signed in 1946 gave it the exclusive right
to exploit the mines in the so-called National Reserve. The stones
extracted were brought directly to Bogota. In Bogota the Bank made
its own arrangements to sell the emeralds, either rough or polished,
to foreign buyers. It became a crime for anyone not associated with
the Bank (or the independent mines at Chivor) to mine, or even
possess uncut emeralds. The Banks monopoly should have
guaranteed them vast prots as well as endless royalties for the
Colombian state, but these prots were never realized. The Spanish
Crown could never control illegal mining and commerce in emeralds
and neither could the Bank of the Republic.
Two men were key in subverting the Banks monopoly: Pablo
Emiliano Orjuela and Juan Beetar Dow. Orjuela was a campesino
who became rich when he struck a vein of emeralds. Unlike most
informal miners, he was able to retain the prots of his early
success and build an illegal but apparently benevolent empire. He
would recruit young men, provide them with food and tools and
send them to mine for emeralds in the National Reserve. When
they found the gems, they would bring them to him. This
traditional role of provisioning illegal mining crews is referred to as
being a plantero. As his proteges succeeded, they would recruit
crews of their own, becoming planteros in their own right but
remaining subordinate to Pablo Emiliano Orjuela (Tellez, 1993:22).
Juan Beetar Dow was the main buyer for the stones wrested
from the earth by Orjuela and his men. He is of Syrio-Lebanese
11
Claudia Steiner is a Colombian anthropologist whose 2005 dissertation is an
important, English-language source for understanding the emerald mines and the
legacy of violence in Colombia.

B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273283

descent and lives to this day in the coastal city of Cartagena. He had
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 ock 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 jewelers loupe
and a scale in the tabernacle with the Sacred Host (Marn, 1979;
Tellez, 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 Bogota (Marn,
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 specic conuence of geological and chemical factors in
order to form. In Colombia, one nds 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
ssure in a host rock and then cools and solidies as it gets closer to
the earths 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 5065 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
ez, 1995:60). More than
their divine transports (Beltran and Ordon
a century of scientic, 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 tted 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

279

relatively easy for mine employees and illegal miners to raid the
productive deposits at night and extract the stones before they
could nd their ways into the coffers of the company (Tellez,
1993:1718).
Another, perhaps even more perilous tactic, was to dig a tunnel
(or socavon) into the crumbly shale, hoping to intersect with the
productive vein underneath the spot where it was being exploited
by the ofcial 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 nest quality (Marn, 1979).
Illegal miners in Colombia are called Guaqueros. The word is
derived from guaca or huaca which refers to an indigenous, preColumbian 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 contemporary archeologists would probably call looting or grave-robbing,
but which miners simply call guaquera (Paramo, 2010).
This notion of illicit digging for buried treasure is metaphorically 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 Banks 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 gures 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 ercely independent region. In this context,
there was little motivation for impoverished local communities to
respect the Banks monopoly (Guerrero, 1986:223, Marn, 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 Juvencio
as Blancas hacienda
Morales was hunting for armadillos on the Pen
near San Martn, an outlying territory of the town of San Pablo de
Borbur.12 In addition to catching an armadillo, Morales brought
home a stful of green crystals (Marn, 1979; Tellez, 1993:32).
His son, who had dabbled in guaquera, 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 fathers good fortune when he
imprudently divulged the source of his newfound wealth to one of
the planteros in Pablo Emiliano Orjuelas organization (Marn,
1979; Tellez, 1993:34).
Orjuela and the Padre mounted simultaneous, competing
as Blancas. Before long,
expeditions to the new deposits at Pen
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 shovels edge.

280

B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273283

word spread across the region and the country. The area became a
buzzing and unruly mining camp full of fortune hunters and
fugitives. The vast wealth made possible by alluvial emerald
mining, combined with the difculty of realizing this wealth by
bringing the stones back to Bogota, 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
(Marn, 1979; Tellez, 1993:35).
He enlisted the help of Efran Gonzales, El Bandido de Siete
Colores. Efran was fresh from ghting 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.
Efran had only two ghting 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 Efran 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, Tellez, 1993:2427).
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. Efran Gonzalez moved into the hills near
as Blancas and began to enforce the law that Orjuela was
Pen
creating (Marn, 1979; Tellez, 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 gure who would become important in the history of the
emerald wars. This was Humberto Ariza, known as El Ganso, or
The Goose (Marn, 1979; Tellez, 1993:29).
With Pablo Orjuela as the civil leader and Efran Gonzalez as the
military leader of the guaqueros, a semblance of calm returned to
as Blancas. This helped to forestall any unwelcome intervenPen
tion by the national authorities. Members of the Senate demanded
to know why the Bank was allowing illegal mining to occur. The
as Blancas was within the
Bank replied by letter that while Pen
National Reserve, its contract with the state was only for the
as
exploitation of the mines at Muzo and Coscuez and that Pen
Blancas was outside of its jurisdiction (Guerrero, 1986:232). The
Bank also created a means by which miners could bring their
stones to Bogota, have them evaluated and be compensated if and
when the Bank sold them. It is difcult to imagine that many
guaqueros availed themselves of this opportunity (Beltran and
ez, 1995:87).
Ordon
as Blancas was not destined to last. To the forces
The peace in Pen
of law and order, Efran Gonzalez was an unwelcome reminder of an
era of banditry and political violence. His brothers and members of
his ghting force had been responsible for some horric 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 Bogota in 1965 (Tellez, 1993:48).
When Efran Gonzalez was nally 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 (Tellez,
1993:48; Marn, 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 Bogota in
1966. Isauro Murcia was named as Orjuelas successor by his fellow
planteros and would henceforth be known as Don Isa (Tellez,
1993:49; Marn, 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, Colombias 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 (Tellez, 1993:1122; Marn, 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 ne (or perhaps a bribe) to free him. He
returned to his home in Qupama and joined the ranks of Orjuelas
illegal mining organization. He advanced until he became its leader
on Orjuelas death (Tellez, 1993:1920; Marn, 1979).
With Orjuela and Efran Gonzalez both dead, there was an
as Blancas mines. Murcia
uptick in violence in and around the Pen
had stepped into Orjuelas 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 Bogota having confessed to some his crimes. This did not
prove to be too much of an obstacle (Tellez, 1993; Marn, 1979).
Murcia and his followers staged a spectacular escape. The Goose
ew the coop and was spirited back to the mining area. There,
Isauro Murcia offered him the mantle of Efran Gonzalez and the
support of the dead bandits brothers. Together they consolidated
their monopoly over the illegal business (Tellez, 1993:49; Marn,
1979).

10. The incompetence of the Bank and the rst Green Wars
As this underground commerce was thriving, the legal trade in
emeralds, controlled by the Bank of the Republic, was hemorrhaging 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, lowgrade material worth little more than green gravel (Tellez,
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; Marn,
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 (Gutierrez and Guerrero, 2008:109). This would seem to
indicate that the illegal emerald market was at least ve 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; Marn, 1979).
Don Isa had been working through legal channels to legitimize
his business. His rst victory was overturning the ban on private
ez,
citizens possessing rough emeralds (Beltran and Ordon
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) 273283

1995:87). Once it became legal to own emeralds, the authorities

had little grounds on which to imprison the illegal miners. But
Murcias true goal was to start a company, receive a concession and
mine emeralds in partnership with the Colombian State (Tellez,
1993; Marn, 1979). He would encounter two obstacles.
First, the illegal emerald miners were thought to be a
particularly sanguinary maa by the political elites and the
residents of urban Bogota (Guerrero, 1986:245, Parra, 2006:18).
This would make it difcult for the State to enter into partnership
with them, no matter how much money the miners lavished on
political campaigns. Second, Muricas military chief, El Ganso Ariza,
was an escaped prisoner who had confessed to committing several
multiple homicides. El Ganso knew that Murcias plans to legalize
the business would inevitably exclude him. This strained and
eventually snapped his loyalty to his former bosses (Tellez,
1993:55; Marn, 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 (Marn, 1979;
Tellez, 1993:54). His aim was to show that organs of the state were
incapable of administering emerald mines (Tellez, 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., 1996:2627).
Meanwhile, Humberto El Ganso Ariza turned against Isauro
Murcia and his organization. He raided a mine belonging to Isauros
brother and killed one of its workers. This began the rst Guerra
Verde, or Green War (Solano et al., 1996:5556). The two main
mining areas in Boyaca are Muzo and Coscuez. They are only 12 km
apart as the crow ies, 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 days 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 peoples
willingness to serve as bodyguards and to attack the members of
the rival group (Solano et al., 1996:56). Isauro Murcias organization retained control over the illegal mining operations around
Muzo. As the area became more and more violent, Murcia and his
followers emigrated to Bogota. Both groups used their own miners,
or hired assassins, to kill members of the rival faction. The ghting
quickly spread to Bogota and the Santa Isabel neighborhood where
the leaders made their homes (Solano et al., 1996:56; Tellez,
1993:59; Marn, 1979).
Murcia enlisted an unlikely ally in his ght against El Ganso: the
Colombian Army (Tellez, 1993:55). El Gansos association with
Efran 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 (Tellez, 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 (Tellez, 1993:60; Marn,
1979). He returned to prison to serve out his sentence. The conict
came to an end, or at least a hiatus. There were 670 reported deaths
in the rst emerald war. It would be difcult to estimate how many
people were simply killed and thrown into the Rio Minero
(Guerrero, 1986:246). The conict was also used as a cover for
homicidal robberies and score settling among miners who had no
afliation with the bands in conict.
At the same time, Murcias 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 ofcial production from 1973 to 1976. In 1976 and
1977 The Sociedad Minera Boyacense (Mining Society of Boyaca)
and Esmeralcol were granted mining concessions at Muzo and
Coscuez respectively (Solano et al., 1996:2627). 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 Boyaca a few years later
(Gutierrez and Guerrero, 2008:111; Tellez, 1993:61).
Be that as it may, the emerald mines were being run protably
for the rst time (Gutierrez and Guerrero, 2008:112). The
Colombian state was even receiving royalties. Emeralds became
Colombias third largest export product, after coffee and bananas
(Tellez, 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
guaquera at Muzo and Coscuez (Tellez, 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 (Tellez,
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
conict 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 ying his own plane back from a cockght in Medelln
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 (Marn, 1979; Tellez, 1993:66).
11. The last Emerald War
The last of the Guerras Verdes took place between 1984 and
1991. It was the most deadly conict to roil the mining area since
the Spanish Conquest. It was also the rst time that the money and
military power associated with narcotics trafcking came into the
mining area (Solano et al., 1996:63). The event that precipitated it
was in itself unremarkable. A relatively innocent guaquero was
as Blancas. But the killing unleashed
killed coming down from Pen
long-simmering tensions between the Muzo and Coscuez factions
and divided the mining area for years (Tellez, 1993:72).
In 1984 the Coscuez mines were controlled by Pacho Vargas
while the Muzo mines were controlled by Gilberto Molina
(Gutierrez and Guerrero, 2008:112). Both Vargas and Molina were
veterans of Isauro Murcias organization. A series of revenge
killings cut the Coscuez mines off from the towns around it.
Residents of Otanche, Borbur and Santa Barbara could no longer
practice their guaquera 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 Chico (Tellez, 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 (Tellez, 1993:94). Bereft of its leader, Coscuez looked

282

B. Brazeal / The Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2014) 273283

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 Escobars drug
trafcking organization, The Medelln Cartel. Eventually El
Mexicano would become its military leader. It is hard to
overestimate the wealth and power of the Medelln Cartel in
Colombia in the mid 1980s. Gacha became a major destabilizing
force in the mining area (Tellez, 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 Boyaca. One passed through the town of Pauna and the
other through Marip. Both of these towns were controlled by the
Coscuez faction. Molina could travel by helicopter between Bogota
and the airport he had built in Qupama. But his men and their
families were effectively trapped. He wanted to build a road
through Gachas hometown and stronghold of Pacho. The road
would lead to Zipaquira and from thence to Bogota providing an
alternate route out of the mining area (Solano et al., 1996:64,
Tellez, 1993 9495).
Gacha agreed, but in return he wanted access to the vast
landholdings that Molina, and his associate Vctor Carranza, had in
the Magdalena Medio Valley. He would use this land to grow coca
and process cocaine hydrochloride for the Medelln Cartel. It
appears that the agreement was reached (Tellez, 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 prots 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 (Tellez, 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
(Tellez, 1993:105; Solano et al., 1996:63). A few months later El
Mexicano was killed by the Colombian army (Gutierrez and
Guerrero, 2008:114).14 With the two most bellicose antagonists
dead, peace became possible.
12. Concluding remarks: reections on peace and the rise of a
new Czar
The survivors of the third emerald war gathered to sign a peace
or
accord in 1991. The pact was made in the presence of Monsen
or Hector Gutierrez Pabon, Bishops of
Raul Jarro Tobos and Monsen
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 trafckers 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
ez, 1995:151,
the next three or four years (Beltran and Ordon
Steiner, 2005). The killings decreased gradually and emerald
production increased substantially. The main beneciary, as well
as the main guardian of the peace accords was Don Vctor Carranza.
Vctor Carranza was born in 1936 to a family of campesinos. He
lost his father at age two, was working in the elds at age ve, and
by age eight was looking for emeralds at the mines of Chivor in the
Eastern part of the Boyaca Department. Throughout his life he had
an uncanny (many would say God-given) knack for nding
emeralds (Cepeda and Javier Giraldo, 2012:32). He made his rst
fortunes in the mines of Chivor and Gachala. 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
Vctor 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
Molinas 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,
Vctor 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
Vctors direction and the wealth that they produced was enough to
bury the sanguinary conicts of the years past (Gutierrez and
Guerrero, 2008:114).
Vctor 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 inuence 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,
Colombias 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 Carranzas
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 Revolucionarias Colombianas,
the FARC. The FARC is perhaps the worlds 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 Colombias 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) 273283

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, 2012:6467).
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
certication laboratories of the world, as well as the most
important merchants and miners were in attendance, when
Carranza was arrested in his mansion in Bogota (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 indemnied 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 awed 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 gures in the business. There were also several
attempts on Carranzas own life. Once, when his motorcade was
attacked with rocket-propelled grenades, an aged Don Vctor,
dying of cancer, grabbed a gun from his dead bodyguard and
returned re 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, Vctor 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 prots were divided among the surviving leaders of the
emerald war, keeping them united by shared economic interest
(Hernandez, 2013).
When Vctor Carranza died on April 4, 2013, he left a note for his
or Hector Gutierrez Pabon exhorting
friend the Bishop Monsen
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 nancial support and the Instituto
Colombiano de Antropologa 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

References
Aguado, P.F., 1956. Recopilacon Historial. Bogota, Biblioteca de la Presidencia de
Colombia.
Arcienagas, G., 1990. Verde Que Te Quiero Verde. In: de Retana, J.M.M. (Ed.), El Gran
Libro de la Esmeralda. Editorial La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca, Bilbao, Spain, pp.
5972.
ez, A.T., 1995. Conicto y Pacicacion en Occidente de Boyaca,
Beltran, A.T., Ordon
19701995. Tesis de Grado, Programa de Magister. Universidad de los Andes,
Bogota, Colombia.
Cepeda, Ivan, Javier Giraldo, S.J., 2012. Vctor Carranza alias el Patron. Random
House Mondadori, Medelln.
ltima Carta de Vctor Carranza April 4.
El Tiempo, 2013a. La U
El Tiempo, 2013b. Muerte de Carranza Genera Incertidumbre Sobre Paz Verde.
April 5.
El Tiempo, 2013c. Atentado a Pedro Orejas Revive el Fantasma de la Guerra Verde.
November 11.
Field, L., 2012. El sistema del oro: exploraciones sobre el destino (emergente) de los
objetos de oro precolombinos en Colombia. Antipoda: Revista de. Antropologia
y Arqueologia (Colombia) 14, 6793.
Giuliani, G., Marc, C., Schubnel, H.-J., Piat, D.H., Rollion-Bard, C., France-Lanord, C.,
Giard, D., de Narvaez, D., Rondeau, B., 2000. Oxygen isotopes and emerald trade
routes since antiquity. Science 5453 (287), 631633.
Guerrero, J.B., 1986. La Economa Esmeraldfera y la Violencia: La Micro-Historia
Institucional y Contra Institucional. In: Memorias: V Congreso de Historia,
Armenia. Universidad del Quindio-ICFES, Serie de Memorias de Eventos
Cientcos, pp. 227247.
Guerrero, J.B., 2002. La Madicion de Furatena: Historia y Mito, Amor y Desamor en la
Guerra de las Esmeraldas. Ensayo Sobre la Cultura Popular de una RegionIn:
Pensamiento y Accion 10. , pp. 122130.
Gutierrez, F., Guerrero, J.B., 2008. Ordenes Subsidiarios: Coca, Esmeraldas: La Guerra
y La Paz. Subsidiary Orders, Coca, Emeralds: War and Peace. Colombia Internacional 67, , pp. 102129.
ltimo Negocio de Carranza: La Joia de la Corona Podra
Hernandez, N.Q., 2013. El U
Venderse. El Espectador April 6.
Keller, P.C., Forero, H.O., Valdiri, J.W., Carmona, R.A., 1990. Yacimientos Esmeraldferos en Colombia. In: de Retana, J.M.M. (Ed.), El Gran Libro de la Esmeralda.
Editorial La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca, Bilbao, Spain, pp. 107132.
Lane, K., 2010. The Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder
Empires. Yale University Press, London.
Langbaek, C.E., 1987. Mercados, poblamiento e integracion etnica entre los Muiscas.
Departamento editorial, Bogota, Banco de la Republica.
Levi-Strauss, C., 1949. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Beacon, Boston.
Macho, I.C., Sinkankas, J., 1990. Historia Por Fechas de la Esmeralda Colombiana. In:
de Retana, J.M.M. (Ed.), El Gran Libro de la Esmeralda. Editorial La Gran
Enciclopedia Vasca, Bilbao, Spain, pp. 81106.
Machuca, B.de.V., Lane, K., Johnson (Trans.), T., 2008. The Indian Militia and
Description of the Indies. Duke University Press, Chapel Hill.
Marn, F., 1979. La Guerra de las Esmeraldas. Ediciones Baal.
Marx, K., 1964. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. International Publishers, New York.
McFadden, R., 1999. U.S. Colonels Wife Named In Bogota Drug Smuggling: Army
Wife Is Accused Of Mailing CocaineIn: New York Times A1. .
Monroy, J.C., 2010. Las 7 Vidas de Vctor Carranza. El Colombiano August 29.
oz, G.O., Barriga Villalba, A.M., 1948. Esmeraldas de Colombia. El Banco de la
Mun
Republica, Bogota, Colombia.
Pachon, D.M., 2008. Embrujo Verde. El Tiempo July 27.
Paramo, C.G., 2010. El Corrido Del Minero: Hombres y Guacas en el Occidente de
Boyaca. Maguare 25 (1), 25109.
Parra, J.B., Familia, P.Y., 2006. Esmeraldas: Relaciones de genero y estructura
economica minera en el occidente de Boyaca, Colombia. Rev. Colomb. Antropol.
42, 1553.
Retana, J.M.M., 1990. El Gran Libro de La Esmeralda. Editorial La Gran Enciclopedia
Vasca, Bilbao, Spain.
Rojas, M.E.A., 1974. La Explotacon Esmeraldfera de Muzo A Traves Del Tiempo: Su
Origen Precolombino Cambios y sobrevivencias en distintos periodos historicos. Bol. Antropol. 4 (13), 87102.
Solano, A.M.P., Escobar, P.F.R., Mancera, E.Y.M., 1996. Conicto Esmeraldfero En El
Occidente de Boyaca. Pontca Universidad Javierana, Bogota.
Steiner, C., 2005. Memories of Violence, Narratives of History: Ethnographic Journeys in Columbia. (Ph.D.) dissertationUniversity of California Berkeley.
Taussig, M., 2004. My Cocaine Museum. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

os de Conctos Entre Los EsmerTellez, P.C., 1993. La Guerra Verde: Treinta An

alderos. Intermedio Editores, Santa Fe de Bogota.
Trouillot, M.-R., 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.
Beacon, Boston.
Uribe, M.V., 1992. Limpiar La Tierra: Guerra y poder entre esmeralderos. Ediciones
Antropos, Bogota.