Gold and coca: the curse fuelling war in the Putumayo rainforests

Pedro José received the order the evening he was coming back from planting cassava on his plot of land in Puerto Guzmán, Putumayo, a departament in the Amazon region of Colombia that borders Peru and Ecuador. Men who identified themselves as members of the illegal armed group Border Commandos told him that he now worked for them and that his mission was to collect 12 grams of gold a month from the owners of the backhoes used for the group’s gold-mining operations in the depths of the Colombian rainforests.

Pedro, a peasant who has dedicated his life to plowing the land for his and his family’s sustenance, wanted to reject the order, but the commander of the Border Commandos, a man known as “Spider”, issued him a stark warning: “either you comply with our orders, or you leave these lands”. 

The peremptory order given to the farmer is just one of many imposed on inhabitants of the area by Border Commandos and the Carolina Ramírez Front, two illegal armed organizations that emerged after the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the former FARC was signed in 2016. The former is led by Giovanny Rojas, a.k.a “Spider”, a guerrilla chief whose arrest warrant was temporarily overturned by Gustavo Petro’s government to allow him to attend peace negotiations in Venezuela. The latter is helmed by a rebel commander known as “Danilo Alvizú”, whose position regarding negotiations with the current Colombian president has been left in doubt.

Both organizations have turned Putumayo, Caquetá and Amazonas into warzones just to gain control over illicit mining and coca farming, which can generate annual revenues of over 10 billion pesos (roughly USD $2.4 million), according to documents published by the Colombian National Army.

To get their hands on this money, the two groups have directly intervened in every stage of the gold mining production chain, from hiring peasant or indigenous workers to mine the gold in shifts that can last up to 12 hours, to collecting extortion payments in exchange for bringing backhoes into mining sites, and even imposing extra fees for bringing in the mercury and fuel required to operate small dredges and motors used in rivers and on land.

Their illegal funds are topped up by the “vaccines” they apply to small-scale miners (a cash fee or monthly tax) in exchange for allowing them to extract the precious metal from the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers, or even for the gold that artisanal miners have started to unearth in their own backyards.

“The most curious thing is that they don’t request payment in cash. All the fees they demand from the miners must be paid in grams of gold, which they can then trade on the black market that operates along the borders with Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil,” explained a judicial investigator, speaking to VORÁGINE. 

More than the extortion, what has most caught the attention of the authorities is the direct participation of both illegal armed groups in gold mining activities in the Putumayo and Caquetá rivers, where, according to the Army’s Illegal Mining Brigade, they own, hire, and even sponsor construction of artesanal barges equipped with hoses for extracting gold from rivers. These are rafts that can go unnoticed by authorities: some could be mistaken for small fishing boats belonging to locals.

General Edilberto José Moncada, commander of the Army’s 26th Jungle Brigade, recognizes the presence of the Border Commandos and the Carolina Ramírez front in these rivers. He confirms that both criminal organisations profit from the extortion of the dredges and boats known locally as “dragons” which sail the region’s rivers. 

A lucrative business

In a report entitled “On the trail of illicit gold procedes: strengthening the fight against illegal mining finances”, the Department against Transnational Organized Crime of the Organization of American States (OAS) notes that “illegal mining in Colombia, in particular the special role of gold, is becoming the most important source of financing for illegal armed groups, surpassing even cocaine trafficking”. 

Indeed, the high price of a gram of gold, valued by the Bank of the Republic at 311,073 Colombian pesos (around USD $74) and the ease of transporting it without raising the suspicions of pólice or military authorities is what caused the Border Commandos and the Carolina Ramírez front located in Putumayo, Caquetá y Amazonas to turn their attention to the mining of this mineral and the juicy profits it brings.

The Border Commandos and the Carolina Ramírez front employ various methods in pursuit of the exorbitant sums that illegal mining has to offer. One of them is extortion. First in line is informal or ancestral miners. In field interviews conducted for this report, during which members of the Border Commandos were present, multiple ancestral miners insisted that they were not obliged to pay a fee to such groups. However, VORÁGINE, was able to establish that in fact they are obliged to do so, or they risk being banned from working in the mines, displaced, and, in some cases, even murdered.

In order to work in the mines, they must give the illegal group 10 sticks of gold a month. One stick is equivalent to a matchstick head-sized amount of gold, which is worth at most 15,000 Colombian pesos (roughly USD $3.58) on the black market in the region, with 10 sticks making a gram. According to this rule, an informal miner would be paying the illegal groups a gram of gold, which would be worth 15,000 pesos (USD $35), except that, according to local reports, the armed organizations then negotiate it up to around 300,000 Colombian pesos (USD $71).

That is what Joaquín* told VORÁGINE during a visit to Santa Elena in the municipality of Puerto Guzmán, en in Putumayo. “We’re facing serious problems here. One of the groups (Border Commandos) started charging us for the luxury of working. They ask us for a proportion of what we mine, but it tends to be a gram. The other group (the Carolina Ramírez front) found out about it and declared a strike, which has been going on for a month now.”

The miner says that “the Carolinos” (as members of the Carolina Ramírez front are known) called a meeting in which they forbade work in the mines, and said that anyone who did would leave themselves open to anything that may happen. “But we have to work in the mines, otherwise how will we surive? We have to go, even if it means losing some of our gold to pay them and to get our food. There are no other ways for us to survive here,” Joaquín insists. 

He says that the most difficult part of their situation is that some months they don’t even manage to get five sticks of gold, so whatever they do get they use to support their day-to-day needs. That is why barter has become the basis of their economy, as it has been for ancestral communities for centuries. 

“Sometimes we set a little bit of gold aside so that whenever someone needs salt, oil, a tool, or something for the house, they can exchange it for sticks of gold. Here in Puerto Guzmán at least, we don’t have anywhere to sell what we mine, so we exchange the little gold we get for products we need,” Joaquín tells us. 

But in the barter economy, one trader will always end up accumulating the gold, and given the lack of sales points in the more remote municipalities, that trader is the illegal armed group, which acquires those grams of gold at a price well below their official value. So as not to risk being robbed in the process of going to sell the gold in Puerto Asís (a town of 100,000 inhabitants near the border with Ecuador), or the authorities confiscating it if there is no legal backing, the miners end up doing business with these armed organizations or disreputable traders, which then trade the gold in big cities.

The second link in the illegal gold chain are the machinery and vessel owners and operators. Backhoe owners who illegally mine on land are charged 12 grams of gold, while dredge and dragon operators who do not own the vessels must hand over 10% of the gold they extract from the Caquetá, Putumayo, Puré and Cotuhé rivers and the Colombian section of the Amazon river.

State Intelligence reports indicate that one of these artesanal rafts can suck up to 35 grams of gold from the riverbeds per day, which equates to 12,775 grams of gold extracted from these rivers per year, or 12 kilos and 775 grams of the precious metal. 

By paying the 10% fee imposed on them, each raft would be handing over 1,277 grams of gold per year to the illegal organizations; translated to money, this would mean the Border Commandos and the Carolina Ramírez front would be receiving sums of up to 383 million pesos (roughly USD $91,000) per dredge or dragon, according to official calculations.

General Moncada has reported that military operations conducted in 2024 have resulted in the destruction of 20 artisanal barges, which represents a yearly loss for the two illegal armed groups of 7.662 billion pesos (roughly USD $1.673 million).

The latest major blow to the 48th front of the Border Commandos occured on 24 April, when the authorities turned up in Los Cristales in Puerto Caicedo, Putumayo and seized 5 dredges, 6 motors, 6 sorting machines, 10 galons of fuel and 1,600 metres of hose, the collective value of which exceded one billion Colombian pesos (roughly USD $239,000). The operation was performed by troops from the 27th Engineers Batallion and the Counter Drug Trafficking and Transnational Threats Command, with support from the Colombian National Navy and the police.

“According to information obtained by military and pólice intelligence agencies, the seized ítems were used to extract almost 3,600 grams of gold a month, generating illegal spoils of over one billion pesos that were funneled into the logistics and criminal networks of ex-FARC dissident organization no. 48, the Border Commandos”, reported the Sixth Division of the Colombian National Army.

Even with the authorities’ sights set on illegal mining, the Border Commandos and the Carolina Ramírez front continue to put their faith in the business. Their strategy is to sell the gold not in Colombia but abroad, where it fetches a better price and where they have longstanding contacts. 

They use the Putumayo, Caquetá, Cotuhé and Amazon rivers to take the precious mineral to Tefé, a small town of 60,000 inhabitantes nestled in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, where emissaries of both illegal groups trade the gold freely and bring back along the same route the proceeds that they use to pay their illicit armies.

Yet the yellow machines keep coming in the Putumayo and Caquetá rainforests. Local residents say that there is a lot of gold to be mined, although this bonanza is not reflected in the reports of the Colombian Mining Information System. The latest reports show that 2,652 grams of gold were mined legally in Putumayo in 2019. Caquetá is registered as having 24,725 grams mined in 2022. The most recent report from Amazonas is from 2016, and shows 512 grams. 

According to local leaders, this phenomen is occuring because illegal mining is winning the race against State controls. As the mayor of Puerto Guzmán, Miguel Ángel Muñoz said in conversation with VORÁGINE, “The backhoes come here from Bogotá, Antioquia, and other parts of the country to take our gold and leave us with nothing but holes.”

Other illegal income

Classified state documents that have been seen by this publication set out other sources of financing for the Border Commandos and the Carolina Ramírez front, not only from Colombian municipalities, but also from towns bordering Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. 

In statements made to the Army following his demobilization, an ex-member of the Carolina Ramírez front revealed that extortion extends to all trade in the departments in which the group is active. In this confidential document, the ex-fighter says that “all units in the area collect extortion fees, with the money being centralized by the two men known as “Alonso 45” and “Danilo Alvizú”. He also indicates that the man known as “Cabbage”, who is leader of the finance unit that operates in the Caquetá River area, is the person in charge of collecting money from drug trafficking and fuel on the route to Brazil.

In his testimony, the demobilized fighter gave a breakdown of the fees, which they call a “war tax”: livestock farmers with 100-300 animals pay whatever the group feels like asking for, while those with 300 animals or more must hand over 10,000 pesos per animal (USD $2.39). In addition, they must pay 30 pesos per liter of milk produced daily (less than a dollar). For each arroba of cheese, the fee is 2,000 pesos (USD $0.48).

As for trade, “there are annual fees, which are centralized by the heads of unit in each area. For example, grain and grocery stores have to pay between 500,000 and 1,000,000 pesos (between USD $119 and USD $239). Warehouses and distributors, drugstores, supermarkets, neighborhood stores, clothing stores, restaurants, and the like are also obliged to contribute. Gas stations must pay 200 pesos (USD $0.05) per gallon sold.

“We all have to pay here, or they take things from us, steal from us, burn our vehicles or even kill us. People don’t report it out of fear,” says a storekeeper from Puerto Guzmán, Putumayo, who asked for his name to be withheld for security reasons.

The list of those eligible to pay the illegal armed groups a fee or “vaccine” also includes transporters, who are forced to contribute according to the size of their vehicle. Their fees range from 500,000 to 800,000 pesos (between USD $119 and 191).

The former fighter said that the Carolina Ramírez front at least, which he belonged to, collects extortion fees for electrical connection and communications services too.  “They contact the engineer or contractor, who are charged between 5 and 7% of their contract. Oil companies are also extorted,” he affirmed. He said he did not know the details of those deals “because the leaders negotiate them directly with the company managers”.

In Putumayo, illicit crop farming has become a complementary activity to illegal mining. On the one hand, local residents state that the fields are abandoned and “are getting overgrown with weeds” because many crop farmers have turned to mining.  A kilo of coca does not exceed 1,200 pesos (USD$ 0.29). This contrasts with the information reported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, (UNODC) as part of their latest monitoring mission in coca crop territories. They indicate that Putumayo went from having 28,205 hectares planted in 2021 to 48,034 hectares in 2022.

The coca business continues to be so lucrative that, according to the former fighter, the illegal groups have set up laboratories on the other side of the border in Ecuador and Peru, and charge 50,000 pesos (roughly USD$ 11.95) for each kilogram of coca paste bought by the “commission agents” who pass by; the same amount is charged for marijuana shipments sent along the Caqueta River to Brazil.

The business continues to expand beyond Colombia’s borders. General Edilberto José Moncada, commander of the 26th Jungle Brigade, has had to fight gangs such as the Brazilian Red Commandos, an organization with which Colombian guerrillas trade the cocaine that is sent to the rest of the world via Brazil.

Damage that can’t be reversed

Josefina Almanza spent six days looking for a calf that went missing from her corral. The peasant woman searched many corrals and pastures until she tired of looking. One Thursday afternoon, her friend Camilo, who had just got back from a shift in one of the mines in the Jauno area of Puerto Guzmán, gave her bad news. On his way home, the miner had found the calf drowned in one of the flooded pits left by the backhoes that had been used to look for gold for six months. The pit had been abandoned as a result of pressure from the Border Commandos to pay an unsustainable extortion fee. 

Throughout this rural community, and others in Puerto Guzmán such as Siberia, Santa Lucia and La Chorrera, you can see large pools of stagnant grayish water. Next to them lie rusted remnants of machinery that miners once used in their quest to mine gold.

Huge pits flank the landscape like wounds. These are the scars left by the large illegal-mining machinery in the rainforests of Putumayo and other municipalities in the Colombian Amazon, where the gold rush has unleashed unchecked and uncontrolled environmental damage. As reported by Corpoamazonía, indiscriminate logging and deforestation have in turn brought about changes in the ecosystems.

One of the first warnings about the deterioration of forests and jungles came from the Ombudsman’s Office. Its 007-24 Early Warning stated: “The effects of iIlegal mining are compounded by those of other human activities such as the excessive felling of timber, indiscriminate logging, clearing for cattle pastures and agricultura, and the expansion of illegal crop farming. These human pressures accelerate the process of deforestation, which drives environmental imbalance and socio-environmental conflicts.

Reports of deforestation and logging by those engaging in illegal mining have set off alarm bells. The most recent figures published by the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies, (IDEAM), on August 20, indicate that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon region had decreased by 38%, from 71,725 hectares deforested in 2022 to 44,274 hectares in 2023. However, unofficial information suggests that the rate started to rise again in 2024.

The IDEAM register shows that Putumayo went from 10,852 hectares deforested to 5,169. In Caquetá, 19,193 hectares of forest were deforested in 2022, dropping to 12,647 in 2023. The department of Amazonas, however, saw an increase: from 1,157 hectares deforested to 1,862 hectares.

For the Minister of Environment, Susana Muhamad, the 2023 decrease in deforestation rates can be attributed to the “It Pays to Conserve” program, which gives 900,000 pesos per month to those who refrain from cutting down trees. “We have focused our efforts on the Amazon because it is the region that, historically, has suffered more than 50% of deforestation. We achieved a historic milestone with this rate decrease because the figure for this region spearheads reductions across the whole country, which was 36%. We know that in 85% of the places where we have signed agreements with families, the forest is being protected,” Muhamad said. 

But last year’s reduced logging and deforestation rates cannot only be attributed to the government program. In Putumayo a method for tackling illegal mining and deforestation was created five years. It was called the Environment Bubble and was intended to educate and raise awareness about the consequences of environmental damage caused by unregulated practices such as mining. 

Even so, Putumayo’s residents believe that there are more effective ways of achieving a pause in indiscriminate logging, such getting the illegal armed groups to order people not to do it. Whoever does do it would be exposed to large fines that, in many cases, a humble farmer could not afford.

“Notwithstanding the regulations, sources consulted have told the Ombudsman’s Office that, although these norms are sanctioned for non-compliance, there are specific sectors where large-scale deforestation by foreign actors is taking place. Such measure would send a contradictory message, as the illegal armed group would be controlling the indiscriminate logging of trees in the territories by local communities, but would leave the door open for large-scale deforestation depending on the payment capacity of third parties,” indicates the Ombudsman’s Office in its Early Warning. 

But the environmental damage that most worries General Moncada, commander of the 26th Jungle Brigade, is that being wrought by mercury. “There are no controls on this mining, and it is causing enormous environmental damage. The indigenous communities that live in these departments survive largely by hunting and fishing, but the Caquetá River is showing high or significant mercury levels, meaning it is not suitable for human consumption. And we have indigenous communities living there by those rivers”.

An uncontrolled war

The image looks like something out of a horror movie: a dump truck unloading 18 lifeless bodies in a field as if they were stones. But it is not a movie, it is the image of the deterioration of the conflict that has been going on in Putumayo between the Border Commandos, an armed group made up of former FARC members, drug trafficking groups such as La Constru and the Sinaloa mafia, and the Carolina Ramírez front, a more purist organization in ideological terms, if you will, made up only of ex-FARC dissidents. 

The image described was from November 2022 between the communities of La Estrella and 4 de Octubre in Puerto Guzmán. The dead ended up exposed to the sun, decomposing out in the open because neither the dissidents, the drug traffickers nor ex-guerrillas allowed anyone to pick up the bodies. After this, the offensives got worse and the confrontations more constant, leaving people on all sides dead and the civilian population defenseless in the midst of the bullets.

“We are once again having to suffer war and all that comes with it. Sometimes we have to sleep under our beds to avoid bullets. At 7 p.m. our town becomes a ghost town fear that a fight will break out and we will not have time to run,” a farmer from Puerto Guzmán said to VORÁGINE, preferring not to give his name.

In order to take control of drug-trafficking routes, coca-growing territories, and illegal mining revenues, the Border Commandos Second Marquetalia unit and the Carolina Ramirez front Central State unit declared a war that has left only blood, death and pain. 

In 2023 alone, 60 people who had nothing to do with the armed conflict lost their lives; some played important social leadership roles. One of the crimes that most shocked the communities was that of Mrs. Feliciana Martínez, an elderly peasant farmer who was forcibly taken from her plot of land in the village of Brasilia, in Puerto Guzmán, and killed at the door of her home by the Border Commandos. Her crime? She had sold a soft drink to a member of Front 1 of the FARC dissidents.  

Both illegal organizations have resorted to old war practices that affect the civilian population, leaving aside all respect for human rights and international humanitarian law. 

One of these is the recruitment of minors. Many are seduced by the promise of salaries that sometimes go unpaid, and young people, whose opportunities are cut short almost as soon as they finish high school, are easily tempted and end up joining the ranks of one of the two illegal armed groups.

“They are put in charge of surveillance points so that they can warn of troop movements or of the “caleteros” (those who hide weapons and money for the commanders), but most of them are tasked with collecting extortion money,” a judicial investigator explained to VORÁGINE. 

The Ombudsman’s Office made it clear in its 007-24 Early Warning: “The warlike confrontation between the groups has had a far-reaching humanitarian impact, seen in the huge amounts of forced displacement and confinement, as well as in discriminatory and threatening acts, including homicides, attacks, threats, forced displacements, forced disappearances, linking children and adolescents to armed structures (forced recruitment, use and utilization)”. 

Added to this is the planting of antipersonnel mines that affect indigenous and peasant communities, who cannot go to and from their plots of land for fear of finding these explosive devices, as happened last May 7 to Miguel Pantoja, an resident of La Floresta, in the municipality of Puerto Caicedo, Putumayo. The farmer was on his way to work when he stepped on a mine located 300 meters from the community school. 

But it is not only violent actions that are part of the daily life of the communities that live under pressure from these violent organizations. The social control exercised by both illegal groups has gone to the extreme of demanding documentation from people to enter and leave the territories. They even issue permits for the entry of people from outside the villages and prohibit movement along rivers or roads between six in the evening and five in the morning.

This war has even moved to the Colombian borders and has affected at least 35 indigenous Secoya, Kichwa and Huitoto communities living in both Peru and Ecuador. They have been banned from moving between the two countries, Mongabay reported.

The war has become so entrenched in these towns in and around Putumayo that their inhabitants seem to have become accustomed to it. On lonely nights they prefer to take shelter early on and watch from their windows the boots of the men who resurrected a war they thought they would never see again.