Should you look for a physical place as a symbol of the trade of emeralds in Bogotà, just go between Avenida Jimenez and the Septima. In these two roads you can see the comings and goings of the crowd, the buzz of the central district. Here comisionistas and buyers have been meeting for decades to exchange rough and faceted material. And those who had arrived there on 28th April 2017 would have been amazed. All these faces typical of the world of emeralds were not gathering in a knot of people or along the pavements, but they were walking in the centre of the street to protest like any group of demonstrators. What happened? What drove isolated and individual operators to gather into a union? “Every time we dig we break the regulations against our will. Only to do what we have been doing for centuries. The regulations no longer comply with our way of working”. These words were pronounced by Mauricio Gómez, President of the Confederación Nacional de Mineros de Colombia. The novelty lies in the change of the government mining policy. The Bill 216 revolutionises the mining sector and it seems to put an end to the subsistence extraction, the activity that originates the distribution chain of Colombian emeralds and employs 250,000 people. The exploitation model has been changing over the few years favouring the big mining companies, mainly foreign, leading to a strong haemorrhage of artisan jobs. “What we do – Germán Suárez, President of Confedesmeraldas claims – is to pick up rough emeralds, transport them on a helicopter to the Free-trade area (VAT -free) to send them to the United States to be cut. Moreover, there is also the problem connected to the usurpation of areas with violent methods due to the total absence of state authorities”. In the 80s and 90s the system was based on the feverish work of an army of guaqueros looking for those gems that can change the course of a life. Today the protection of the concentration of properties has put an end to the economy of the small diggers. “At the moment – Villamil Delgadillo, social operator in Boyaca remarks – there is no longer work, here people live in utter poverty in a territory hiding a treasure. Children are undernourished and look for a shelter in emergency houses”. The economy of emeralds is marked by adventurous stories, by rushes to reach eldorado, dark individuals, along with many honest operators. It cannot be historically schematized in a generic contrast between good and bad people. The distinctive feature has always been the lack of transparency that led to discretional uses of the territory with paramilitary trenches and collusions with the world of narcos. Along these paths appeared the big criminality of almost legendary figures, such as Efraín González, the ‘Ganzo’ Ariza and Isauro Murcia, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, ‘El Mexicano’, Gilberto Molina and Víctor Carranza. The aim of the projector of the new law, Argenis Velásquez, is exactly to oppose the power of the old masters of emeralds. They are replaced by a policy focusing on the multiplication of royalties and on such big companies as MineríaTexas Colombia, Esmeraldas Santa Rosa and Gemfields (that, however, has recently left). The big industry is fulfilling its fiscal duties, respecting the working conditions. But this phase would not be painless. “You can’t – Santiago Ángel, president of the Asociación Colombiana de Minería says – limit the export to the rough and neglecting the rights of those working legally with the excuse of ensuring the exponential increase of royalties”. The vertical integration decreases the intermediation and is already cutting many operators out of the market, from Boyaca to Avenida Jimenez. Will we still see people trading emeralds on the Septima?
Gem News by Trasparenze News, published on Rivista Italiana di Gemmologia #2, September 2017.
