Opening Up Colombia’s Emerald Fraternity

Explosions shake the narrow tunnels dug a mile into the mountain. Huddled together, the miners calmly count them off.

When they reach six--the number of charges set--a dozen men and women scramble into the dynamited hole. Eyes filled with desperation search the cave walls for a speck of green. Eager hands sift through the rubble, hoping to pick out a crystal.

Such hope has sustained the miners for the seven months since their last find--seven months without wages, working only for meals, a cot and a chance to share in anticipated riches.

These miners, knee deep in water and covered with fine black powder, are looking for some of the costliest gems to sparkle in jewelry store display cases: emeralds.

They are members of what has been Colombia’s most closed fraternity, bound together by geographic isolation and a fierce determination to guard a fortune worth nearly half a billion dollars a year. They form a sort of anti-elite with its own code of honor and a violent history that leaves no doubt about its power to enforce that code. They are esmeralderos.

For most of this century, the esmeralderos in the province of Boyaca, in the remote shale mountains north of Bogota, the capital, have successfully fought the government, leftist guerrillas, drug traffickers and even one another for control of the mines that produce 60% of the world’s emeralds.

The bloodiest of the emerald wars lasted for six years and ended in 1990. It left 3,500 dead, a figure approaching the number who died in the battle waged by the late drug lord Pablo Escobar against the government early this decade.

Now, after more than seven years of peace--the result of a year of negotiations and a formal agreement signed here in 1991--the emerald fraternity is opening to outsiders.

Colombia will sponsor its first international emerald conference in February. Further, a mining company based in Canada is introducing new technology and management practices--such as paying wages--to Chivor, one of Boyaca’s four major emerald-mining areas. If the experiment works, it could revolutionize an industry that has changed little since the arrival of the Spaniards and could revive mines that are playing out.

To succeed, the foreigners will have to learn to coexist with a subculture that few Colombians understand, one that is based on risk and is rich in superstitions and contradictions.

Esmeralderos are devoted to the Virgin of Carmen, a vision of Mary, without being religiously devout; bosses demand absolute loyalty but tolerate petty theft. Women are respected as engineers, traders and even miners, but, after working hours, men seek company a la lata (“in quantity”), in one miner’s words. “A wife of 24 and various mistresses of 14,” he explained.

Like other specialists, esmeralderos have their own jargon. Tusa is the cloth bag where miners put emeralds; rebusque is the miners’ share of production; morralla is the lowest-quality emerald.

“When esmeralderos prosper, they buy ranches and build swimming pools and discotheques on them,” said one former mining official. “They do not try to join fancy social clubs, because they are not comfortable in that setting.”

Men and women alike wear emeralds--set in gold chains, in rings that stretch to their first knuckle or on the hands of watches--which is shockingly ostentatious in dark-suited, striped-tie Bogota society.

One of the few glimpses that outsiders have of esmeralderos is a prime-time soap opera, “Green Fire.” The show has become a hit by perpetuating the reputation of the mining zone as a sort of Wild West.

“Even here in the emerald zone, people from good families do not get involved with mining,” said one young woman, who defied her parents to work as secretary in a mining company.

Esmeralderos take a similar view of outsiders. “When you arrive at the mines, looking for work, the first thing anyone asks is, ‘Who sent you?’ ” said Luis Murcia, who oversees the operation of the La Paz “front,” one of about 60 shafts that lead into the emerald-rich mountain here.

Strict Code of Honor

References are essential, from the mines to the cutting rooms, because of the emerald culture’s strict code of honor. Esmeralderos base their business on trust, on being able to take someone’s word.

In downtown Bogota’s emerald district, couriers rush in and out of gem dealer Nelson Beltran’s office, their pockets bulging with cash and sandwich bags full of stones worth $1,000 or more a carat. No one ever signs a receipt.

“To break one’s word is the most severe offense and is punished by death,” anthropologist Maria Victoria Uribe wrote in “Clean the Land,” her respected study of the emerald culture.

“Knowing what group [a person] belongs to and where his loyalties lie is fundamental. That is why someone in the local community must vouch for an outsider,” Uribe said. Fewer than a dozen Boyaca families control the 300,000 people who work in the emerald trade.

Loyalties are complex even in emerald families such as Murcia’s. His family led the Coscuez faction during the six years of fighting among esmeralderos. Luis is the son of Tomas Murcia, the assistant administrator of the mine in Coscuez.

But he is also the brother-in-law of Pedro Elias Delgadillo. As part of the emerald peace accord, Delgadillo became a major shareholder in Emeracol, the company that holds the government concession for the Coscuez mine. During the fighting, Delgadillo was allied with Victor Carranza, now the undisputed lord of Colombian emeralds and one of the most powerful men in the country.

Carranza is credited with keeping the emerald zone free of both drug traffickers and Marxist guerrillas, who frequently cripple oil production but never interfere with gem production. While his success is undisputed, his methods are often questionable.

He kept narcotics traffickers out of the business by leading last decade’s six-year war, which targeted esmeralderos allied with Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a drug lord who had started out in emeralds and was once a close friend of Carranza.

Because of his efforts against guerrillas, Carranza is under investigation for allegedly underwriting illegal private armies that fight the rebels. The probe is the latest in a series that has yet to produce clear evidence of wrongdoing against him.

“Systematically, if people declare against [Carranza], they are killed. So no one does,” said Robin Kirk, a Colombia expert for Human Rights Watch. Anthropologist Uribe now declines interviews about Carranza or the esmeralderos because she received death threats after her study was published.

Daring, Loyalty, Luck

Carranza epitomizes esmeraldero values: He is a short, nondescript man of obscure origins who made it to the top with daring, loyalty and, most of all, luck.

According to legend, after Carranza visits a mine, emerald finds follow. Young people such as Oscar Gonzalez, who is 16 and has a fifth-grade education, are drawn to the mines in search of such luck.

For three weeks, Gonzalez has been a guaquero, the lowest rung on the emerald mining ladder. He sifts through the dirt dug from mine shafts, hoping to find a stone. Unlike miners, he is entitled to neither food nor a cot.

But two weeks after he arrived in Coscuez, he found a morralla that he sold for about $70.

“I was a farm worker before,” Gonzalez said, standing on a hill of mine muck, covered in grime. “I like this a lot better.”

Some guaqueros begin to amass fortunes this way. Twenty-seven years ago, Luz Marina Riveros was a bookkeeper for a baker with connections to the emerald trade. When the bakery closed, she took off for Muzo, the mine that produces Colombia’s highest-quality emeralds. Riveros was a guaquera for five years. Then she found a stone worth $2,500.

“That was a lot of money,” she recalled, crossing and recrossing her bejeweled fingers. “I had never had so much money. I was surprised. I was excited. I put the money to work, buying [gems]. Everything began because of that stone.”

Riveros, known as “the Cat” for her emerald-green eyes, is now one of Colombia’s most respected gem dealers and the president of a federation that represents 5,000 cutters, dealers and small traders.

Most of the gems that find their way to Jimenez Street--Bogota’s informal, open-air market for emerald traders--are found by guaqueros. The rest are smuggled out by miners.

“They have little veins that they work independently,” Luis Murcia said. “You see it when you walk through the mine, but you look the other way.” Most of the stones are poor quality.

In addition, miners receive their rebusque, a legitimate share in any emerald production.

The good gems are sold at auctions organized by the mining companies. At Coscuez, any of the 1,200 Emeracol shareholders are eligible to bid on the emerald lots. But in reality, only half a dozen major shareholders have the tens of thousands of dollars needed to bid. As Tomas Murcia noted, “The only rooster who crows around here is named Pedro Elias Delgadillo.”

Every two or three months, shareholders in cowboy hats trimmed with feathers and snakeskin arrive by helicopter or four-wheel drive at the mine offices, a two-story white concrete building here. Emeralds classified by quality--from morralla to good--are grouped into lots and spread out on a table.

Bidding is mostly a discussion of who will offer more for each lot. Payment is strictly cash, often suitcases full of bills.

Such scenes are becoming increasingly rare. After 1,000 years of exploitation, the known veins of the Muzo mine are playing out. Once, the Chibcha Indians traded emeralds as big as one’s palm. Now, Muzo occasionally produces a few small stones.

The rediscovery of the Chivor mine at the beginning of the century helped overall production. But now, most Colombian emeralds come from Coscuez. The stones here are Colombia’s lowest quality--blue-green gems that compete with African and Brazilian production.

Price of Corruption

Two decades of incompetent and corrupt government mine administration, starting in 1961, followed by the emerald war of the 1980s depleted the mines’ capital.

At first, such internal problems were masked by an international gem crisis. Investors feared that diamonds would flood the market after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. They turned to emeralds as an alternative, driving up prices. Exports rose from 1993 to 1995, reaching $456 million. But then diamond prices stabilized and emerald prices dropped.

The esmeralderos have brought in geologists and engineers to run the mines and try to find emeralds, but they complain that government concession terms make exploration too costly.

Most recently, Carranza gave the nod for the owners of the Chivor mine to bring in foreign partners. Chivor Emerald Mining--a Toronto stock exchange-listed company whose major shareholders are U.S.- and Venezuela-based Cuban exiles--is boring tunnels big enough to drive a truck through.

They are searching each promising vein foot by foot.

In 1997, the mine hit two significant emerald productions of about 2,000 carats each. They were auctioned quietly at the company’s Bogota office to reputable dealers. Some of the gems were of good quality, but the proceeds were not enough to cover costs.

A new mine manager has reduced costs to about one-third of 1996 levels. Still, shareholder representative Alberto de la Campa admits, “What we really need is [more emerald] production.”

But that depends on luck. Ultimately, that is the biggest factor in the emerald business, from the mines to the cutting rooms, where experts trim away 60% of a raw stone, hoping to find a gem worth $1 million or more. That only happens about 3% of the time, dealer Beltran said.

He recalled a day five years ago when four men gathered in his cutting room, watching Ricardo Jimenez prepare a diamond-embedded blade to cut a 700-carat rough emerald. Each had $50,000 riding on the stone, a one-quarter share in an investment they hoped would yield $20 million.

The crystal was obscured by rock on three sides, so they were taking a huge gamble. Jimenez, a cutter with 20 years’ experience, sliced away the rock to reveal a light green crystal with a cloudy center--a major disappointment in a jewel valued for its sparkle and depth of color.

The polished gem sold at an auction two years later for $10,000. “Stones don’t always turn out the way they look,” Beltran recounted with a shrug. “Some come out better, others worse.”