Andean Scapes team · Updated
Guaqueros: the people who search on their own
Before dawn, hundreds of people wait at the gates of the mines for the earth the companies throw away. This is how emerald searching works for those without a mine.
Who is a guaquero?
A guaquero is an independent emerald searcher who works without a mining title. In the emerald towns of western Boyacá such as Muzo, Maripí, Pauna, Santa Bárbara, Otanche and San Pablo de Borbur, guaquería has existed for more than seventy years.[1]
Some dig holes in the mountain on their own account without permits, others walk the inactive tunnels companies once worked, and the boldest go into active ones at night. People in the region call it minería de hecho, de facto mining.[1]
A guaquera’s morning
One guaquera interviewed in Muzo gets up at 3:30, cooks for her four children and, by 4:30, waits at the market square with about forty others for the trucks to the mines, 50 minutes away. She carries the 10,000-peso fare out and hopes to find a stone to pay the fare back.[1]
When there is no money for the fare, she leaves at two in the morning and walks.[1]
Fighting for the earth
Companies hand out the earth that comes out of their tunnels, and guaqueros wash it hoping a stone slipped through. Businessmen in the region estimate that ten tonnes of barren earth are explored for each carat of emerald.[1]
Every morning between 50 and 500 guaqueros wait at the mine gates; if word spreads that a mine is showing color, more than 3,000 come. The places where the earth is dumped are called voladoras, and the scramble brings shoves, fights and broken bones.[1]
From open pits to tunnels
In the mid-1970s the first open-pit operations cut the mountain with bulldozers, and the earth fell into the creeks, where guaqueros shoveled the mud for stones. It was called tambreo, and it drew people from all over Colombia into improvised settlements such as La Catorce, Matecafé and La Nevera, between Muzo and Quípama.[1]
By 1980 Muzo had as many as 35,000 guaqueros.[2] When mining later moved into tunnels, there was less earth for them, and they say they now find fewer and poorer stones, so they work in groups and share what they find.[1]
Women in the mines
Searching is a trade full of women, because there are few jobs for them in the mining companies.[1]
In the voladoras women have taken the worst of it, from crushing scrambles to harassment, and in the emerald towns many are widows of the Green Wars.[1]
Everyone guaquea
“Soldiers, police, judges, mayors, priests, engineers, everyone guaquea at night, setting the uniform aside. Emeralds drive everyone mad,” the journalist Pedro Claver Téllez wrote in La guerra verde, as quoted by Verdad Abierta.[1]
The habit is old. In the decades when the central bank ran the mines, hundreds of Colombians already tried to make a living searching illegally, in the middle of state indifference.[3]