Friday 28 October 2011

Colombia's Gold Rush - Al Jazeera | PeaceMedia

Gold fever is sweeping across South America. Nowhere is it more lethal than in Colombia, where the gold rush has become a new axle in Colombia's civil war. Turf wars are erupting between paramilitaries, and leftist rebel groups fighting to take control of mining regions. It's fueling an old ideological conflict and has displacing hundreds of people. Al Jazeera's Fault Lines traveled to Colombia to speak to the people caught in the middle. The rural workers and artisan miners who've mined for generations, and some whose ancestors were enslaved during the first gold rush centuries ago. Others are former coca farmers, put out of work by the US-led Plan Colombia