Andean Scapes team · Updated
The emerald peace of 1990
After three wars, the emerald groups of western Boyacá agreed a ceasefire in an abandoned cockfighting pit. Unlike most Colombian ceasefires, it held.
What was agreed
On 12 July 1990 the warring emerald groups of western Boyacá signed a public peace built on a declaration of respect for life.[2]
Spanish Wikipedia records it as an accord between the leaders of the two main factions, signed on 12 July 1990.[1]
A ceasefire in a cockfighting pit
After the area was militarized in May 1990, the authorities withdrew and the groups began meeting to talk about a ceasefire. It was agreed on 6 June 1990 in an abandoned cockfighting pit in Quípama.[2]
The talks were mediated by the bishop of Chiquinquirá.[2]
The public signing
The peace was signed in public on 12 July with a declaration of respect for life.[2]
The agreement also reorganized the ownership of a Coscuez mining company among the groups that had fought over it, and brought a civic spokesman of western Boyacá to the table.[2]
Why it mattered
Writing in 1992, Semana noted that, unlike most ceasefires signed in Colombia, this one had been respected.[2]
The same report described the dealers wanting to enter the legal system, with talk of fully legalizing the business.[2]
The business after the peace
By 1991 Colombian emerald production was estimated at 300 million dollars in commercial value, about half of it registered as exports; Semana reckoned that made emeralds the country’s third export after coffee and oil.[2]
A year after the peace, the same mediation was sought to bring peace to the Rionegro region of Cundinamarca.[2]
The trade’s next worries were not bullets: buyers who dominated pricing, and stones bathed in mineral and vegetable oils to look finer, some of which cracked on flights or darkened within months.[2]
What remained
The war ended; poverty did not. In 2016 Verdad Abierta reported that, with no war left, poverty, lack of opportunity and the absence of the state persisted in the emerald towns, and that women had borne the worst of it.[3]
Violence returned years later, and tensions persist around the restructuring of mining and the arrival of foreign companies.[1]