ELN en Venezuela - Colombian Guerrilla acting Hybrid Strategy

The disruption of the FARC as a guerrilla group and the political use of FARC together the politics is a great strategy for the restraint of the group, but there is a kind of holding to the drug cartel and the political solution was to fight the smallest groups and have a political dialogue with the bigger ones. FARC was not only a guerrilla group but they had a big army and have a legitimate political ideology to implement communism through Colombia and also, through North of South America.

The problem is that, the neighboor Venezuela also claimed to be a military and political alied to FARC and other drug cartel groups to help through the disruption of the legitimate government, implement the Marcuse plan of marginalization of the society, the anti-hero image of the guerrilla members and later the socialist parties.

That plan was used before in Nicaragua, before the Contras had finished them, than now, Venezuela and Colombia has very serious problem between them because of the territorial dispute by the legitimacy of the guerrillas through the borders of both countries, one as hunter the other as the protector.

The FARC and other groups has the Venezuelan government support to act in Venezuelan territory. Also, ELN and other Colombian Guerrillas too. ELN is one of the groups that keeps the projection to the territory and plays for the control of the drug market. This control makes them powerful beyond other groups, because FARC had that political treaty between government and the group, other groups became more able to operate free.

According to InSight Crime, "An ongoing conflict between Colombia’s two last remaining guerrilla groups continues to escalate along the Colombia-Venezuela border, highlighting the region’s role as an increasingly important and disputed organized crime hub in Latin America."

The problem also goes beyond both countries, in Brazil, the Foro de São Paulo, the PT party, had supported the action of these groups and inside the Brazilian territory, the PCC and CV, both urban guerrilla groups had freedom of action through urban guerrillas, through slums, and acting against the society in normal routine.

These groups had international support of FARC and other Latin America groups, that had freedom of action by the socialist politicians.

According to InSight Crime, "Following a recent series of violent clashes in northeast Colombia’s embattled Norte de Santander department, former insurgents of the Popular Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Popular – EPL) have “publicly declared war” against the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN), according to a statement published recently on Twitter by the ELN."

Groups used their social networking to recruit people and use it as their social imagery, to promote propaganda, publicity and recieve international support. One of the leftist supporters world wide is the George Soros foundation, that promotes social programs and de-criminalization of drug crimes. These international philantropes had been pariah to the combat of the international drug trafficking and to the combat of the drug cartels, specially in Latin America and Mexico.

According to InSight Crime, "In the statement from the ELN’s Northeastern War Front, the guerrilla group interprets the EPL’s latest monthly announcement as a declaration of war due to the inclusion of a threat to “confront [the ELN] without consideration until [the EPL] recovers its territory and people.” The ELN also took issue with the EPL’s claim that “all organizations present in the Norte de Santander territory will align themselves with [the EPL’s] rules.”"

The ELN stated that militants and family members of the EPL not actively engaged in the clashes will be “respected” and that “once the current confrontation is cleared up and resolved” the two guerilla groups should work to reach a “final solution” with the local communities of the fought-over region of Catatumbo, considered to be the cocaine hub of the department of Norte de Santander.

Norte de Santander Governor William Villamizar told El Colombiano on March 21 that the intensity of confrontations was beginning to dwindle compared to the deadly clashes of the week prior, and called on the groups to “resolve their differences through actions other than confrontations and leave the civilian population out of it.”

Edgar Andrés Pallares Díaz, the head of Norte de Santander’s institution in charge of public security and human rights, has called on the Colombian government to raise the issue of civilians getting caught in the crossfire at the recently reconvened peace talks with the ELN.

ELN is another guerrilla group with socialist propections through Colombian terriroty, international socialism projection and they claim to be in control of cocaine market through Latin America, the first step to European drug distribution. But they have international prospections, like to Cuba and Cuban international guerrilla supporters, financial supports from socialist governments, and have the interaction with ex-members of FARC, to promote their recruitment.

They have their tactical and operative paramilitary actions in the Hybrid Scenario, where they fight with military and police legitimate, both in between public and private wars. Colombia is well known for the very great training and operative capability of Special Forces and the Mercenary Operatives.

The image of Anti-heroes, that promote social security and nationalism through the paralel government, marginalization of the society, invertion of the social pyramid and the drug trafficking, that spread drugs in change of a peaceful relation between guerrillas and society, same as in Brazil.

ELN have to operate in Mercenary Scenario also, with PMCs and PSCs in urban and jungle guerrillas. With use of paramilitary and armed civilian. Use of propaganda to receive the population support and anti-government propagandas. Also the technological scenario, the virtual, to propmote recruitment, propaganda, and recruitment of virtual mercenaries and hackers.

They have this tactical capability to operate in diverse fronts and are armed to a direct long range combat with the military personel. 

Accordint to InSight Crime, the profile of the group: 

https://www.insightcrime.org/colombia-organized-crime-news/eln-profile/

Leadership

The ELN operates using columns and so-called “War Fronts.” The group also has urban militias in some of the major cities and many of the smaller villages where it operates. The ELN’s National Directorate (Dirección Nacional) has 23 members, and the Central Command (Comando Central – COCE) has five commanders. Each commander is in charge of a different area: military affairs, political functions, international affairs, financial functions, or communications between the COCE and the “War Fronts.” The commander-in-chief of the ELN is currently Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, alias “Gabino.”

After peace talks began between the Colombian government and the FARC in November 2012, the ELN repeatedly expressed their desire to be involved, even reportedly sending an unauthorized delegation to Havana, Cuba. After numerous false starts and lengthy behind the scenes discussions, in February 2017 talks officially commenced in Quito, Ecuador. Despite these ongoing negotiations, the government has been keeping military pressure on the group, while the ELN has also continued carrying out attacks across the country.

At the same time, the ELN has been establishing or strengthening its presence in areas formerly under FARC control as the latter group demobilizes. In some cases, the ELN has been absorbing dissident FARC elements into its ranks.

In chaotic Venezuela, guerrillas from Colombia find new territory to grow

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article212293514.html

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA 

With dark curly hair and a wiry frame, the 29-year-old gold miner said she had grown used to the violence, lawlessness and the rule of strongmen in southeastern Venezuela.

For years, the muddy patch of land that she worked with her family had been trapped in a turf war between rival gangs that left dozens dead.

But life changed abut a year ago when a new gang arrived: Colombia’s National Liberation Army, or ELN.

The miner said more than 100 well-armed ELN soldiers — hauled in by truck and wearing unmarked fatigues — descended on her isolated mining village along the border with Guyana and almost 500 miles away from the Colombian border.

“People were saying ‘the guerrillas are coming, the guerrillas are coming from Colombia,’” recalled the woman, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear her family could face retaliation. “And then from one day to the next, they were there.”

The guerrilla group has been present along the Venezuelan-Colombian border for decades, but there are indications that the Marxist-inspired rebels are growing stronger and more brazen as they capitalize on the general chaos and security breakdown in Venezuela.

On Thursday, Javier Tarazona, with the Venezuelan human rights group REDES, asked Venezuela’s attorney general to investigate a spate of homicides and kidnappings along the border that he attributes to the ELN and other Colombian gangs.

The guerrillas “are shamelessly advancing in Venezuelan territory to completely control all of the border crossings and all of the areas along the border,” Tarazona said. “And what surprises us is the complacent attitude of the Venezuelan authorities. What surprises us is that no one is trying to stop these actions.”

Earlier this year, REDES reported that the ELN was helping deliver boxes of government-subsidized food in Venezuela and slapping its own propaganda on the products. In addition, Tarazona has accused the ELN of distributing leaflets, notebooks and coloring books at primary schools in at least eight states as part of an “indoctrination program.”

The reports emerge as Venezuela is in economic free-fall. Hyperinflation, international sanctions, collapsing oil prices and widespread corruption have created a breeding ground for organized crime.

In January, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, from Florida, and Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, warned the White House about the hemispheric risk.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, “in an effort to cling to power and promote a failed political ideology, has dismantled democratic institutions, repressed political opponents, and starved the Venezuelan people through economic mismanagement,” they wrote. “This lawless environment threatens the stability and security of the region, including the United States, by providing fertile ground for drug cartels and U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, such as the FARC and the ELN, to operate.”

While it's clear that the ELN is operating in Venezuela, some doubt the group has punched so deep into the country.

Jeremy McDermott, the executive director of Insight Crime, a non-governmental organization that studies criminality in the Americas, said the ELN has traditionally stayed closer to the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

“Venezuela is an enormously important strategic rearguard for the ELN,” McDermott said, noting that key ELN leaders are thought to live in the country. “It’s an extremely important place for them to sit and plan without the risk of getting bombed.”

While the account of the gold miner in southeastern Venezuela couldn’t be independently confirmed, Américo de Grazia, an opposition congressman from Bolivar state, said the ELN now controls at least seven mining areas in his district — including the region around Tumaremo, where the gold miner was working.

De Grazia said the Maduro administration, desperate for foreign investment, essentially invited the ELN to subdue warring gangs, or pranes, who have traditionally controlled gold, diamond and coltan — metallic ore used in cellphones — mines in southern Venezuela.

“Big multinationals have been demanding more security in the area in order to invest,” de Grazia said. “And the state is trying to guarantee that security by using the ELN, which they believe are more reliable than the pranes.”

“It’s an all-out war with the ELN liquidating the pranes — and it allows the armed forces to keep their hands clean,” he added.

When the guerrillas first moved into the area last year, they sometimes identified themselves as the Bolivarian Liberation Front, de Grazia said. But as they’ve consolidated power, they’ve dropped the subterfuge. And while they don’t wear the distinctive ELN armband, it’s clear who they are, he said.

Calls to Venezuela’s Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Communications seeking comment went unanswered.

The female gold miner said the ELN was unlike some of the other gangs she had worked under. In exchange for 10 percent of the gold that miners extracted, the guerrilla brought a degree of order to the chaotic village. Crime decreased and people were punished for domestic violence or stealing from neighbors. The ELN even helped guarantee that government-subsidized food, called CLAPs, were distributed in the town, she said.

While the core of the guerrilla army was made up of Colombians, there were also Venezuelans, Ecuadoreans, Bolivians and Guyanese, she said. And the ELN were constantly recruiting.

The woman, a former paratrooper who deserted the Venezuelan army in 2008, said her parents were afraid she might be forced to work for the ELN, so she and her sister fled to Colombia three months ago.

Fears of the ELN’s international expansion come as Colombia is trying to hammer out a peace deal with the group in Cuba — similar to the 2016 pact that led the majority of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to lay down its weapons.

But the ELN, which was founded in 1964 and is thought to have about 1,500 fighters, has been far more cagey and reluctant to embrace a deal. Part of the reason is the group's decentralized command structure, but it's growth in Venezuela is also relevant.

“Venezuela offers the last safe haven for the ELN and it’s the principal base from which this guerrilla army is planning its expansion,” Insight Crime wrote in a recent report called ‘Venezuela: A Mafia State?’ “The ELN’s safe haven in Venezuela, in large part, explains their lack of interest in committing themselves to negotiations.”

Those peace talks are hanging in the balance as Colombia is heading toward a June 17 presidential election runoff between two diametrically opposed candidates. Iván Duque, with the right-wing Centro Democratico party, has been a harsh critic of the FARC peace process and is unlikely to pursue a similar deal with the ELN. His rival, Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla himself, has said that negotiations are key to ending Colombia’s half-century conflict.

The gold miner said the ELN has every reason to feel safe in Venezuela — the military turns a blind eye to all of the illegality in the gold-mining area. When the region was under the control of murderous gang leader known as “El Topo” — The Mole — she said soldiers would snap to attention when he passed. And the ELN are also treated with deference.

Now the woman works at a toy store in Colombia’s capital. She’s thankful for the job, but longs for the days in the dark, hot mine where the lure of striking it rich made the hard work worthwhile.

“Gold mining is an adventure but also a huge risk,” she said. Some weeks she would make nothing at all, but one week, she found 25 grams of gold — enough to buy a house.

“It’s another world,” she said of the mining town. “As soon as things get better over there, I’m going back.”

A previous version of this story gave an incorrect political affiliation for Sen. Bob Menendez.

Dirty gold is the new cocaine in Colombia — and it’s just as bloody

http://www.bradenton.com/news/nation-world/world/article194839904.html

BARBACOAS, COLOMBIA 

The Black Hawk helicopters roared over a remote jungle in southwestern Colombia, ignoring the patchwork of emerald-colored coca fields that seemed to make easy targets.

Instead, they homed in on a yellow backhoe, far from the nearest village or road, tearing into a riverbank searching for a metal that has inspired dreamers and criminals since the Spanish quest for El Dorado: gold.

As the choppers hovered over the muddy clearing, heavily armed police, bristling with grenades, body armor and automatic rifles, rushed at the machine. The stunned backhoe operator fought back briefly, swinging the mechanical arm like a club, before running into the jungle amid a cloud of tear gas.

Within minutes, police had packed the backhoe with C-4 explosives and the $100,000 Kobe excavator burst into a ball of fire — another small victory in the country’s outright war on illegal mining.

Colombia’s illicit mining industry, like the far-flung operation that police raided late last year, generates about $2.4 billion a year in criminal cash — three times more than the country’s notorious cocaine industry, according to some intelligence estimates. And like cocaine, the vast majority of illegal gold is being sent overseas to cities in Europe and the United States — including Miami.

In the process, the precious metal has become the lifeblood of gangs and guerrillas and is turning once-pristine jungles into toxic landscapes tainted with mercury and cyanide.

“Today, criminal mining brings more money to criminal groups, to guerrilla groups, to mafias ... than drug trafficking,” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos warned in 2015. And that dynamic isn’t changing.

For decades, Colombia has been synonymous with the drug trade. And it remains the world’s largest cocaine producer, despite billions of dollars in U.S. military aid. Even so, many of the strategies and tactics developed during the long, bloody drug war are now being used to combat the illegal mining trade.

As he watched the backhoe smolder, Col. Juan Francisco Peláez, the commander of the National Police Force’s Illegal Mining Unit, said any number of armed groups that also have deep cocaine ties were likely getting rich on this far-flung operation.

In this part of the country, the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN), the criminal group Clan del Golfo and former members of the now defunct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), are all fighting for control of gold riches.

“Personally, I think illegal mining is even worse than coca crops,” Peláez said, as he surveyed the primary forest that had been turned into a denuded mud pit stretching for hundreds of yards. “Look at this lunar landscape. When they tear up the vegetation like this it could take 100 years to recover — even more if it’s contaminated with mercury.”

Colombia’s illegal mining, like similar operations in Peru and Brazil, is concentrated — perversely — in some of the most pristine and biodiverse spots in the region.

In Colombia, illegal gold mining is the largest single cause of deforestation, sweeping away more than 60,100 acres of forest in 2014 alone, according to U.N. figures. And the unregulated use of mercury and cyanide — to extract the gold from ore — has poisoned water and wildlife to such an extent that some riverside communities in northern Colombia have quit eating fish for fear of mercury poisoning.

Despite the country’s efforts to control the trade, about 80 percent of Colombia’s gold is being mined illegally, without permits or even basic environmental precautions, authorities say.

As miners punch deeper into the forest hoping to strike it rich — and feed the global demand for gold jewelry, bullion and smartphone components — once sleepy villages are being turned into hellish underworlds of deforestation, sex trafficking, forced displacement and child labor.

In some ways, the war on mining makes the war on drugs look easy, said Anibal Fernández, Colombia’s vice minister of defense. In Colombia, every step of cocaine production is illicit, from growing the coca, to processing it, to moving it and selling it.

“Every link in that chain is illegal and going after it is very clear,” he said. “With illegal mining, once gold is gold, it’s a legal product. ... And that’s forced us to be much more focused on how we fight it.”

Key to that fight is destroying and seizing the costly heavy machinery that’s being used in the operations — most blatantly the diggers and dredges employed in riverside, or alluvial, mining.

Relying on some of the same aerial imagery used to identify coca fields, authorities are spotting backhoes and dredges operating in areas where there are no legal mining concessions.

When the machines are close enough to a town to be impounded, Colombian authorities do so. But often they find the equipment in areas so remote that destroying it is the only viable solution. Peláez said that criminals sometimes dismantle the machines, move them on river barges and then reassemble them on-site.

“And sometimes we have no idea how they got there,” he said. “It’s as if a giant hand just set them down in the middle of the jungle.”

Easy to exploit, hard to prosecute

In the illegal mining food chain, the dredges and backhoes are the apex predators, the most obvious and destructive aspect of the trade.

But just as crucial is the web of corruption and deceit that transforms the ill-gotten metal into the legal bullion coveted by central banks and South Florida jewelry shops.

It’s impossible to know exactly how much illegal gold is sloshing through the system, but government and industry figures provide some clues.

On paper, Colombia exports more gold than it actually produces. While large-scale, legal mining operations unearthed eight tons of gold in 2016, according to the Colombian Mining Association, the country exported 64 tons worldwide, much of it to the United States.

That discrepancy is due in part to unlicensed mining operations — some of which are tied to criminal groups — and to gold that’s smuggled across the border from neighboring countries as part of money-laundering schemes, said Leonardo Guiza, a law professor at Colombia’s Universidad del Rosario and an expert in illegal gold mining.

Here’s how it works: Gold is purchased from illegal operations throughout the region at a steep discount using dirty cash, then unscrupulous middlemen fake the paperwork to make the metal appear to come from legitimate sources. Once it has been “laundered” and made indistinguishable from legal gold, it’s exported to the United States or Europe, sometimes in exchange for cash produced by drug profits.

“It’s a very lucrative activity, hard to prosecute, and it’s easily used to move and launder money,” Guiza said.

Crucial to the scheme are the merchants who are introducing illegal gold into the pipeline of legal exports, said Carlos Andrés Cante, Colombia’s deputy minister of mines.

Those who sell gold to exporters are required to provide details of where it came from. In most cases, however, the merchants will provide a list of dozens, or even hundreds, of individual gold miners, or barequeros.

The system was designed to allow small-scale miners to benefit from being part of the global gold trade, but the reality is that it has been co-opted by criminals, Cante said.

In 2016, the ministry researched about 110,000 barequeros whose names showed up on the export registry. They found that more than 8,000 were either dead or didn’t exist. In some cases, a single miner panning for gold was credited with selling 200 grams a month — more than 10 times what could reasonably be expected.

“It’s obvious that the mechanism of barequero is being used to launder gold that’s being exploited illicitly,” Cante explained.

In August, Colombian police arrested a woman known in the underworld as “the queen of gold,” Mara Cecilia Gordillo.

She and four associates are accused of buying illegal gold, passing it off as legal product purchased from barequeros and sending a staggering three tons of the metal to foundries in Colombia and in Miami. Their illicit mining operations produced so much silt and debris that they stopped a river in its tracks, authorities say. Gordillo, who is in a Colombian jail awaiting trial, did not respond to requests for comment.

In many cases, the barequeros aren’t even aware that merchants are doing business in their names. But stopping the practice hasn’t been easy.

Earlier this year, the government began requiring the small miners to register in person with the tax department, in hopes of making it harder for criminal networks to use them as phony sources of gold. The move sparked more than a month of miner protests and a handful of deaths. And it’s still unclear if the new regulations will help solve the problem.

Jaime Pinilla, a Colombian engineer and legal gold mine owner, said there are only a small number of large, legitimate operations.

“At least half of the gold is coming from somewhere else,” he said. “No one knows where.”

And some of it isn’t even real.

Criminals sometimes simply fabricate shipments of “phantom” gold to justify large transfers of money from abroad, making drug profits look like legitimate gold deals.

“Most of it is pure fabrication. It’s a huge money-laundering scheme,” said one former Colombia law enforcement official who asked to remain anonymous. “We sent people on the ground [to where the gold was supposedly extracted], and there weren’t even mines.”

Trapped miners

But the war on illegal mining is replete with unintended consequences. And as the government cracks down on illegal mining, communities with long histories in the gold trade are finding themselves on the wrong side of the law.

Late last year, deep inside a mine called Las Brisas, near the town of Segovia in the northeastern Antioquia department, sweaty miners were carrying 100-pound loads of rocks on their backs as they’ve done for generations.

The operation supports at least 80 families. An additional 100 people, mostly older women and single mothers, work as chatarreros, processing discarded rock, or tailings, from the mine, trying to find trace amounts of gold.

But in the eyes of the law, the mine is illegal, since the workers don’t have formal title to the property.

Fernando Gomez, the secretary of mines for Segovia, said the vast majority of miners in the municipality are, strictly speaking, illegal miners. But it’s the government, with its excess of rules and lack of guarantees, that has forced them into that situation, he said.

For example, the government is trying to encourage miners to use environmentally friendly practices that minimize the use of toxic mercury — such as panning for gold or using high-speed centrifuges — but most of those techniques are either too inefficient or expensive to be viable, he said.

In addition, in Segovia and nearby Remedios, the government is now helping enforce a massive 22,000-acre mining title that dates back to the 1800s and blankets hundreds of ancestral mining areas.

That means miners who have worked gold veins for generations are now being told they are trespassing on the property of Gran Colombia Gold, a Canadian-backed operation.

“We’re trapped inside of their title,” Gomez explained. “Now if we keep working where we have all our lives, we’re considered criminals, illegal miners.”

“The government doesn’t understand that to be a traditional miner isn’t the same as being a criminal miner,” he added.

Eliober Castañeda, the president of Segovia’s Mining Council, which represents about 8,000 independent miners, said they’re being squeezed between the government’s untenable regulations and violent gangs that see the informal miners as easy and lucrative targets.

Members of the Mining Council routinely receive death threats when they speak out against the criminal activity, he said, and their lawyer was murdered a few years ago.

“Not only are criminal groups killing our people and threatening us,” Castañeda said, “but then the government treats us like criminals.”

The criminal groups squeeze the miners in several ways. Sometimes mines will be forced to put gang-appointed workers on the payroll or required to buy fuel and machinery through gang contacts. But most often, the gangs extort money from the miners through a weekly or monthly vacuna.

Carlos Durango, a 40-year-old gold miner, said the government seizes on those extortion payments to accuse miners of being part of the criminal networks. But if making payments to stay in business and stay alive makes him a criminal, then he’s in good company, he said. Shakedown payments happen across the country in all industries, he said.

“Everyone in Bogotá is a criminal and everyone in Medellín is a criminal,” he said of the country’s two largest cities, “because everyone is paying the vacuna.”

And any miners who try to go the legal route do so at great personal risk, said Ivan Díaz Corzo, with the security consulting firm ORCA Risk Corp and a former member of Colombia’s anti-criminal mining task force.

“Any time somebody tries to do it in the correct way, they kill them just for show,” he said.

It’s not just small players who are vulnerable to the criminal gangs. In 2009, Canadian mining company Continental Gold hired a manager to help oversee operations in the town of Buriticá in northwest Colombia and three years later the man was promoted to vice president of corporate affairs. Unbeknownst to the company, its new VP was secretly working for two drug trafficking groups, according to prosecutors — the Oficina del Envigado, the criminal descendants of Pablo Escobar’s cartel, and El Clan del Golfo.

According to the Colombian attorney general’s office, the man shared information about locations of gold deposits and mine security with the gangs, allowing criminals to oversee the extraction of at least $2.3 million worth of gold from two mines.

Criminal groups “easily infiltrate companies, they infiltrate the authorities ... because the amount of money they move is enormous,” said Julian Bernardo Gonzalez, Continental’s vice president of sustainability in Colombia.

If profits remain high and the risk of getting caught remains low, criminals will always be attracted to the trade, Díaz Corzo, with ORCA Risk, predicted.

“Compare how much it costs to put one ton of gold in the state of New York and how much it costs to put one ton of cocaine,” he said. “Criminal groups make so much more money from gold than from coca and it’s so much easier.”

The golden ‘cancer’

A few hours after the initial police raid on the Colombian riverbank, the unit attacked a much larger mining operation where three backhoes were working. As police were preparing to detonate the machines worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the camp’s caretaker broke down crying, begging them to hold off.

He said he’d been kidnapped recently and needed the job to repay the ransom and support his family.

“Those are the real criminals and the terrorists,” he said of the unnamed gang. “Why don’t you go after them? Instead, you’re forcing us farmers to starve to death and eat s---.”

Peláez, the commander, said he could understand the man’s frustration. In many parts of rural Colombia, illegal mining and coca growing seem like the only viable economic options.

“We don’t accomplish anything in destroying and eradicating if there’s not another component coming in behind us,” he said, explaining that unless the government can create jobs in these isolated areas, villagers will likely resume mining.

Peláez calls gold a “cancer” that’s marred the Colombian landscape. And like some cancers, illegal mining often seems incurable.

Since Peláez’s police unit was started in 2014, it has destroyed or seized more than 400 pieces of heavy machinery, including 142 in the first nine months of 2017. But the illegal mining operations are never gone for long.

In February, the unit spent weeks attacking sites along the Atrato River in northern Colombia, destroying more than 47 backhoes and other machinery and seizing cash and gold worth more than $18 million.

Less than two months later, diggers and dredges were back on the banks of the river.

“Yes, it’s frustrating,” Peláez said of the cat-and-mouse game. “But we just have to keep doing our job — not give up.”