Deep inside mountain tunnels where the warmth is so intense it causes headaches, women with power tools are chipping away at boulders in quest of gems. They have opened a difficult path for themselves in Colombia’s emerald industry, a sector long dominated by men.
The lack of job opportunities, combined with the hope of a find that can make them wealthy, has pushed the ladies into mining. Colombian emeralds are known around the globe for his or her quality and one of the best will be sold for hundreds of dollars, though most individuals within the industry aren’t wealthy.
“There are months or years by which I don’t even make $250” from the emerald mines, said Yaneth Forero, certainly one of the ladies at a small, informal mine near the town of Coscuez, where production has long been centered.
“But we proceed to struggle here for the dream of getting a house with tiles on the floors, a spot that smells good and where nobody can kick me out,” she said. She lives in a precarious hillside house where the partitions are unpainted and the ground is made from cement.
Some of the largest emeralds on the earth have been mined in Colombia, including one weighing 3 kilos (1.36 kilograms) that broke the world record in 1995. In Coscuez, rumors flow into that one miner recently found an emerald that sold for $177,000, and left the ramshackle town without end.
In 2022, Colombian emerald exports were price $122 million, in accordance with the national federation of emerald corporations. The gems are certainly one of the nation’s most iconic products, and are sold in jewelry shops in cities like Cartagena and Bogotá.
But most emerald profits go to merchants and huge corporations which have invested thousands and thousands of dollars in technologies that help them find the most dear stones.
Workers at small, unregulated mines like Forero, who still use dynamite sticks to open tunnels, have a slim likelihood of finding the emeralds that may change someone’s destiny.
In her home outside Coscuez, Forero keeps some small, opaque emeralds that she has gathered over the past three months. She reckons that they aren’t price greater than $76 in all.
Her earnings aren’t enough to keep up her 4 children or help her father, who has developed a respiratory illness after working in emerald mines for many years and wishes an oxygen tank to breathe.
So she also works random jobs to make ends meet like washing uniforms, ironing clothes and cleansing homes.
The 52-year-old said she has struggled to go away this manner of life since the economy in Coscuez revolves around mining, and there are few other opportunities.
Working within the mines is tougher for girls. Once they’re done drilling in deep tunnels and sifting through rocks, they have to take care of their children and do domestic tasks that men are sometimes reluctant to do.
Flor Marina Morales said she began to work within the mines around Coscuez because she needed to supply for her kids.
She said she used to reach home from the mines at 3 a.m. and stay up to make breakfast for her children and send them to high school.
Morales’ children at the moment are in university studying psychology and law.
“I’m glad they’ve a special outlook,” she said. “Mining is exhausting, and on this job you place up with numerous hunger, cold and lack of sleep.”
To enter the small mines around Coscuez, women wear rubber boots and helmets and carry drills identical to the boys.
After they enter in a single file, they branch off in numerous directions and head into tunnels where everybody has a chosen area to drill. The rocks that break off the partitions are carried outside in carts, washed and sifted through.
This form of involvement by women was unthinkable a number of many years ago in Colombia. Older villagers said that men previously barred women from approaching the mines because they believed that if women were around, the emeralds would hide.
“That was pure machismo, they only didn’t want us to work,” said Carmen Alicia Ávila, a 57-year-old miner who has been within the industry for nearly 4 many years.
She said that between the Sixties and Nineteen Nineties, when miners attacked one another for control of the realm in a period referred to as the “green wars,” women who attempted to work in mines were threatened, and a few were raped.
Ávila said she began to work on the mines when she was 19, but she was not allowed to enter the shafts. Instead, she sifted through rocks picked by the boys.
“Women were only allowed into the shafts twenty years ago” she said.
The area has change into less violent after a series of peace deals brokered by the Catholic church. Many miners who were behind the violence have died. Some sold off their properties to international corporations as finding helpful emeralds became tougher and required more cash.
Currently there are 200 women working within the mines around Coscuez, in accordance with the local association of female miners. Some work alongside men, while others work in five small mines owned by women, where only female miners are allowed.
Because the tunnels are so small, the ladies take turns working inside them.
Like others who work in small mines, they try to get the federal government to officially recognize them as artisanal miners. That would give them the precise to legally exploit the mines. It would also give them more stability and make it easier to get loans.
Colombia’s government has already granted greater than 900 titles to corporations and individuals to take advantage of emerald mines. But in accordance with the National Mining Agency, 576 requests are still under review, including those from small-scale miners.
Luz Myriam Duarte Ramírez, president of the National Federation of Mines, said that her organization is backing the efforts of the Coscuez miners to be registered as artisanal miners, in addition to the legalization of the five mines owned by women.
Despite these efforts to enhance conditions, Forero said she doesn’t need to stay within the industry for long. She said that if she gets lucky and finds a helpful gem, she is going to buy a house and arrange a small business to maintain her away from the new, dark tunnels where she has labored for years.
“Life is hard in these mines, even when some people have found emeralds that were sold in Dubai,” Forero said. “Sometimes I sit in those tunnels and seek advice from God. But unfortunately, it looks like we haven’t had a great connection.”
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