Colombia’s police lift road blocks set up by protesting miners

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombia’s national police on Friday lifted protests and road blocks that disrupted movement and supplies of food and medicine in a dozen rural municipalities located in the Andean country’s Antioquia and Cordoba provinces, the police said in a statement.

Small-, medium- and large-scale gold miners had protested the destruction earlier this month of nine “dragons” – floating machines that suck up silt and mud from rivers in search of alluvial gold.

The machines were damaging the environment and endangering the lives of people living in the region, the government said, adding that road blocks set up by protesting miners led to shortages of food and medical supplies, such as oxygen tanks.

Up to 300,000 people were impacted by the protests, government ministers said on Thursday.

“Freedom of movement has been guaranteed with these interventions … enabling the mobility of people, food, medicines and transport in general,” the police said in a message to journalists.

Illegal mining in Colombia and other countries in South America is considered an environmental disaster due to the destruction it wreaks on numerous ecosystems, including mercury contamination in rivers.

According to Colombia’s Environment Ministry, some 100 excavators pump out almost 30 million cubic meters of earth in the Cauca river which flows through the region, known as Bajo Cauca, and dump tonnes of mercury into the water at the same time.

After drug trafficking, illegal mining is considered the second biggest source of financing for illegal armed groups operating in Colombia, according to security sources.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said 65% of Colombia’s alluvial gold production in 2021 was illegal.

The police also reported the reopening of an access road for a gold mine run by Zijin Mining near the municipality of Buritica, also in Antioquia, which had blocked workers’ access to the gold project.

(Reporting by Oliver Griffin and Luis Jaime Acosta; Editing by Leslie Adler)