Romancing the stone: The ups and downs of the conflict in the emerald region of Colombia
| Autor | Ralf J. Leiteritz and Manuel Eduardo Riaño |
| Páginas | 287-330 |
Romancing the stone: e ups
and downs of the conict in the
emerald region of Colombia* †
R J. L M E R
Introduction
e new political economy of armed conicts focus es on understanding which
natural resources are li nked to which kind of organized violence and in what
way (Collier ; Humphreys ; Le Billon ; Ross ; Snyder ;
Weinstein ). According to the ourishing literatu re on the link between nat-
ural resources and violence, t he countries which export basic primar y products
(commodities) are vulnerable to high levels of organized v iolence, due to the fact
that, in principle, these resources oer an easy source of nancing for rebels.
In addition, the countries which produce these goods have relatively weak state
capacities. As a result, the control of basic products, such as dia monds or oil, are
an attractive priz e for armed insurgent groups (Fearon ).
However, as the introduction to this book points out, such literature has
mainly focused on an a nalysis at the national level. What has received less at-
tention is the dynamics of the loca l or regional armed conict associated with
* To cite this chapter: http://dx.doi.org /./..
† e primary d ata cited in this chapter a re the result of our eld work in t he emerald zone of
western Boyacá bet ween July and Januar y . Due to the condential nat ure of the in-
terviews we held du ring our eld work, we were not able to direc tly associate some data to t heir
sources. We would like to t hank Jacinto Pineda a nd Claudia Steiner for shari ng their profound
knowledge of thi s region with us, and li kewise, Juan Diego Pr ieto, Horacio Coral and Federic o
Segura for the ir excellent research assista nce; Sarah Nieto, for her editoria l help; the Interna-
tional Development Rese arch Centre of Canada for its na ncial support, and our c olleagues at
the Universidad de los Ande s, Angelika Rettber g and Carlo Nasi, for their valua ble comments
on previous versions of thi s chapter.
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different resources, different conflicts?
Map . Emerald region of Boyacá
Source: Map drawn by Paola Lu na, Cartogr aphy Laboratory, Universidad de lo s Andes, based on in formation from the auth ors, drawn from the C olombian Mining
Information Ser vice (SIMCO),
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the exploitation and commercialization of natur al resources. e focus on the
national level does not enable one to take into account dierences in the re-
source-conict link on a loca l or regional level. As a result, there may be a link
between a specic natura l resource and an armed conict at the national level,
even though vast regions of the country l ive in relative peace. In other words,
the exploitation of natural resources is general ly concentrated in some areas of
the country, so that it may be related to violent conicts in those regions but not
in others (Collier and Hoeer ). With this key to understanding the subject
matter, the extraction or industry of emera lds in Colombia becomes an exam-
ple of the above. e exploitation of this resource is limited to a small region
of the country where there has been a long history of v iolence, caused, in large
part, by clashes between ac tors who ght for the distribution of revenues from
the industry (see map ). Historically, the eects of these g hts have been re-
stricted to the area of ext raction, even though they have spread to other regions
of the country in recent years as t he conict between the owners of t he mines
(th e patrones or bosses) has increased in sca le. Also, emeralds do not represent
a major source of income at the national level, since, in , the value of their
exports only amounted to around . of Colombian GDP. Even so, they are
an important cause of conic t in the area of extraction. e available literatu re
on the relation between natural resources and con icts does not regard emeralds
as a source of conict, due to their relative insign icance at the national level.
Only an analysis at t he subnational level enables the researcher to see the nat-
ural resources which are impor tant on a regional or local level and their links
with the specic dy namics of the armed conict (Snyder ). While there is
no doubt that there are connections between the actors and ma in drivers of the
armed conict, t he sub-national dynamics of conict and peace is inext ricably
linked to the politica l, economic and social context of the specic geographica l
e emerald-produci ng zone has an area of a lit tle more than , km², which is the equ ivalent
of of the area of the depa rtment of Boyacá, and a popu lation of around , inhabitants
(). It is divided into municipa lities.
According to the re port on the performa nce of mining product ion and exports in C olombia
published by the Colombia n Mining Information System (SIMCO), of the Mi nistry of Mines
and Energy, the product ion of emeralds was ,,. karats in , wh ich was . less
than the g ure for , or ,,. karats. However, both g ures represent a strong growt h
in comparison w ith the gure for , ,. karats. e doc ument also gives an estim ate
of the value of the emer alds exported in (USD ,,.) and in (USD ,,
.) (SIMCO, ).
Our own est imates, based on dat a from the World Bank and emera ld exports by t he Banco de
la República (Colombian Cent ral Bank). Banco Mundia l, “Data: Colombia”, http://data.world-
bank.org/count ry/colombia; “Principale s productos no tradiciona les de exportac ión”, Banco de
la República, , http://www.banrep.gov.co/sites/default/les/paginas/sec_ext _.xls (last
accessed October , ).
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