Reason / Elisa Medrano / La Paz

 

Guardatojo lamp Yellow Juvenal, 50, looks out into the darkness of the Virtus pithead Pata Amayapampa on the hill in the town of the same name potosina. A few minutes later the illuminated face of the man who carries 38 years in the mines, face down, sweaty, exhausted appears.

Wearing a helmet, coveralls and steel-toed boots, dragging a cart full of rocks wheels two of his companions help you push it. That journey took them about half an hour and repeated at least twice a day. Like them, other 278 workers extract the gold for their own means, by hand, as if they were mining cooperatives.

Move the rocks in dump trucks. The destination are rustic mills, located beside the river Wirquicocha. There the ground in the hope of finding the metal, because that saves a rich gold deposit reserve. But a year ago and five months his situation was different. It depended on the company Minera Nueva Vista, a subsidiary of the firm LionGold Corp. of Singapore (owned by the Australian Castlemaine Goldfields), which he bought in 2012 100% of the shares to the Australian Republic Gold Limited (RGL), which paid US $ 7 million. There are a total of 37 concessions in 2,892 hectares.

Workers say they received a monthly salary of about Bs 5,000, although the Government states that the average reached 3,000 Bs. Contributed to the Pension Fund Administrators (AFP), receiving medical care National Health Fund (CNS), among other social benefits, recalls Juan Condori Marcani, secretary general of the Joint Union of Mine Workers Amayapampa. However, all vanished when the firm operators wordlessly disappeared without a trace.

" Not only that abandoned (the project) but fled the country," denounces the Minister of Mining and Metallurgy, René Navarro. Why? It is a question that still has no answer, however, the Executive has a hypothesis: money laundering. LionGold went to the workers owe us about $ 7 million in salaries and other social benefits, accounting obligations inherited from other concessionaires since 2007.

In his time he spent at least $ US 13 million, not counting the $ 7 million it paid for the concession. All this without removing or produce a single gram of gold in two years.

With the departure of the company, the Amayapampa mine has paralyzed 22 years, during which none of the five foreign companies bought the shares could reactivate it. The project did not materialize, it became a " ghost" . Explotadora Mining Company SA (CEMSA) was the last to produce the metal in industrial quantities.

In 1994 he transferred his rights to Da Capo Resources Ltda., Which was until 1996. It was later that year, almost at the end of the first government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who Amayapampa was the epicenter of a conflict that led to the killing of eight people in that population and three in Llallagua.

The fact was recorded in the country' s history as the " Slaughter Christmas" . Then came three more signatures. Until LionGold took root in the vein of the municipality Chayanta, Rafael Bustillo province.