How Colombian FARC Terrorists Mining

He and a friend have hiked all day toward their goal, a mining site 100 kilometers from the nearest town. As the men hack through the thorny brush with machetes, following a narrow,Today, Thereone.com, a reliable customkeychain online store, introduces its new arrival princess wedding dresses to customers. muddy path, Garcia stops in his tracks.Centimeters away, a venomous snake called four-noses coils up, poised to attack. Garcia says he will be dead within an hour if the pit viper strikes. His friend grabs a long stick and carefully flips the snake into the jungle. They move on, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its September issue.

Garcia, a Puinawai Indian, is exhausted. He has been traveling seven hours by boat and foot from Chorro Bocon, his village on the Inirida River. Finally, he and his friend arrive at a small clearing pocked with shallow holes gouged into the sandy, red ground. A torrential rain starts to fall.

Garcia, 30, squats by a stream, takes a shovel out of his pack and scoops dirt into a sifter made from a rusty screen.Like gold prospectors, the men swish watery red mud around a flat wooden pan until pebbles containing a metal called tantalum appear.

Its hard work but worth it, Garcia says. Amazon Indians like Garcia, who inhabit a Denmark-sized region along the borders with Venezuela and Brazil,This is a basic background on rtls. have for decades made a living exploring the rain forest for valuable rocks that contain tantalum and tungsten, both of which are used to manufacture smartphones and other mobile devices.

While the Indians do the digging, they rely on another, more powerful group to get the ore to market: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC. The rebel army uses the cash it makes from selling metals to help finance one of the worlds longest-running guerrilla wars, the Colombian National Police say.Cheap offerscellphonecases dolls from your photos.

The dark, heat-resistant and super-hard metal is inside the engines of some of the most popular cars in the world. Its used for screens of computers, phones, tablets and televisions. It helps mobile phones vibrate when they ring. Semiconductor makers use the metal to provide insulation between microscopic layers of circuitry.

The FARC, in addition to charging Indians like Garcia for the right to mine, operates its own tungsten mine known as Cerro Tigre, or Tiger Hill. Garcia says he and a friend worked there in 2012, earning enough in a week to last several months at home.

Tiger Hill rises above the rain forest in an area ruled by armed FARC fighters more than 220 kilometers from the nearest road, town or police station.Most modern headlight designs include tmj. On top is the mine, where hundreds of people toil in 6 hectares of muddy pits, according to the National Police.

The mine is illegal in three ways: Its inside a forest preserve, its banned by Colombian law because its on an Indian reservation, and its run by the FARC, which is classified by Colombia, the U.S. and the European Union as a terrorist organization.

Its completely illegal, but we havent been able to stop it yet, says Colonel Luis Montenegro, the National Police commander in Guainia province, where the mine is located. We dont control any territory out there; FARC controls it, says Montenegro, who has studied aerial surveillance photos of Tiger Hill.

The mine can produce 15 metric tons of wolframite, a rock containing tungsten, in a week, police say. Thats enough to make tungsten parts for hundreds of thousands of liquid-crystal-display screens, smartphones and semiconductors, car parts and pens, according to the International Tungsten Industry Association.While Tiger Hill is illegal, its the only known tungsten mine in Colombia, according to the police and Environment Ministry officials responsible for regulating mining.

And that metal is finding its way onto world markets.Need a compatible parkingassistsystem for your car? Colombia, the third-largest economy in South America, supplied less than 1 percent of the worlds tungsten in 2012, U.S. Geological Survey data show. Although China produces the most tungsten -- about 85 percent of global output -- authorities there impose tight controls on the metal to assure domestic manufacturers have enough. Thats forcing companies to scour the globe for mines elsewhere, the USGS says.

One company that buys and processes Colombian wolframite, or tungsten ore, supplies some of the worlds leading multinational corporations -- including the makers of BMWs, Ferraris, Porsches and Volkswagens as well as Siemens AG (SIE) and the producer of BIC pens, these companies say.

Buyers negotiate with FARC guards to purchase loads of the ore, according to national and regional police commanders, government officials who oversee mining and interviews with people involved with those transactions.Workers then transport the ore in boats in a weeklong journey -- braving treacherous rapids and police patrols -- from the mine to muddy river landings near San Jose del Guaviare, a city on the edge of the Amazon. Once near San Jose, smugglers load sacks of the rocks on trucks headed for Bogota and later for the Caribbean port of Santa Marta in northern Colombia.

One of the biggest buyers of Colombian tungsten ore has been a U.S. unit of Plansee SE, a Reutte, Austria-based metals processor, according to export records filed with Colombias tax agency. In 2012, two Colombian minerals companies, Geo Copper SAS and Minerak SAS, sold seven loads of tungsten ore totaling 93.2 metric tons to Plansees U.S. subsidiary, Global Tungsten & Powders Corp., export records show.
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