Word: goldings
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...unpaved streets. Houses are often built of nothing sturdier than flattened gasoline drums, and the surrounding terrain looks moonscaped from the slash-and-burn deforestation. Chávez has begun to organize the miners into some 3,000 government-backed cooperatives, which would be given legal access to any gold-mine reserves the government might take away from idle concessionaires, foreign or Venezuelan. But many miners remain skeptical, especially since the cooperative funds are moving as slowly through Caracas as Crystallex's environmental permits. "We're always living with conflict and manipulation," says Humberto José Alonso, 37, an illegal miner...
...Brazilian border. They blocked the border highway, burned trucks and threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at national-guard troops. Their main target was Crystallex, a Toronto-based company that since 2002 is said to have held the legal rights to Las Cristinas--the world's fifth largest gold mine, with 12.5 million oz. of proven reserves...
...meantime, the mine continues to be worked by thousands of illegal miners such as Henri González. Laboring under a sweltering sun, he blasts a water cannon against clay to loosen any tiny gold-bearing nuggets. He then extracts the gold with mercury, which sticks to gold like glue. "Sometimes I spend 15 days at a time in here without finding anything," he says. Like most of his fellow miners, González, 29, typically earns only enough to afford a shack made of zinc sheets and tree branches, set in a seedy mining camp where kids play in mercury-contaminated...
...recover the national power and sovereignty of our resources," Venezuela "will not give any more mining concessions to transnationals," and it may even revoke some. The day after that broadside, Crystallex's share price on the Toronto Stock Exchange plummeted 40%, to $1.50. Shares of other firms mining gold in Venezuela, like Idaho-based Hecla, also took hits--especially when Chávez promised to create a competing, state-owned company that would employ the illegal miners. Jonathan Goodman, CEO of Toronto-based mining firm Dundee Precious Metals, told Bloomberg News, "Chávez scares the crap...
Next to Venezuela's gargantuan oil industry, gold once seemed an unlikely target of resource nationalism. But Venezuela possesses about 2.5% of the world's 1 billion oz. of unmined gold reserves, and experts say about half its gold is mined by some 30,000 illegal miners. So as bullion approaches $500 per oz.--and as miners call attention to their squalid lives--gold has become a hot political as well as economic commodity...