Word: colombia
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...Colombia, which produces almost all the world's emeralds, the gems lie so close to the earth's surface that they have been turned up by foraging pigs. Yet from the viewpoint of the government's supposed emerald monopoly, most of the stones might as well be buried beyond reach. The real rulers of the jungle-matted minefields are the esmeralderos (emerald buccaneers); they buy and steal illegally mined stones, smuggle them out, engage in endless shootouts and wind up with most of the estimated $150 million that global sales of Colombian emeralds generate each year...
Along Bogota's 14th Street, the trading center for small-time dealers, illegally mined emeralds are openly hawked on the sidewalks or in seedy bars and backrooms. The esmeralderos sell the better gems to major dealers or big international combines, which smuggle them out by light planes from Colombia's hundreds of private airstrips. The biggest emerald buyers by far in recent years have been the Japanese, who have bought an estimated $300 million worth since 1967. Prices for emeralds in Japan have more than doubled in the past two years, and a dealer can be assured...
...greatest collection of such pre-Hispanic gold as survived the ravages of conquistador and tomb robber belongs to Bogotá's Museo del Oro. In an effort to stem the flow of these exquisitely wrought masks, figurines, pectorals and pins out of Colombia and into foreign collections, the museum-underwritten by the national Banco de la República-has preserved some 20,000 pieces, dating from the end of the 1st millennium onward, since it began collecting 35 years ago. Two hundred of these are now on view, through July 28, at the Center for Inter-American Relations...
...echo the sweep of the gold blade beneath his feet. The sharpness of execution - perfect corrugated threads lying in their parallel curves, the sense of exacting formal detail at every part of the design - is formidable. Indeed, the goldworking cultures that flourished in the isolated river valleys of western Colombia from the end of the 1st millennium B.C. - Quimbaya and Tairona, Tolima and Muisca, Narino and Calima - shared, whatever their differences of society and religion, a superb instinct for the vital shape. Whether the object is a heart-shaped Calima pectoral with a fierce mask glaring from the center...
...this is how they were meant to be seen: gold was not a means of exchange in pre-Hispanic Colombia, for its origins were held to be divine. It had not become what John Maynard Keynes called "a barbarous relic." Fort Knox and Tiffany have corrupted our responses to gold in art, but this remarkable show does at least enable one to get some sense of a culture in which the metal was not yet ruined, as a sculptural material, by its role as an economic fetish...