Black-market coltan likely making its way to high-tech manufacturers' supply; it's used in everything from smart phones to smart bombs

Crouched near a mound of rocks and dirt, Ramón swings a short-handled pick at a shallow hole, showing off the technique he uses to mine what he calls “black pebbles” — stones laced with minerals important to high-tech manufacturers worldwide.

Over the last couple of years Ramón has labored at small, out-of-the-way mines, walking up to a week to reach claims he’s staked out deep in southwest Venezuela’s Amazon jungle, near the country’s border with Colombia.

It’s worth the backaches and sweat, Ramón said, rolling a near-black rock in the palm of his hand. He said he earns good money supplying brokers with stones that hold coltan ore.

Applied to microchips, the metal enables electronic capacitors to perform superbly in an array of devices, like smart phones in the pockets of more and more consumers. Refined into a powder and applied to solar panels, coltan increases energy efficiency.

And as a strategic mineral, Coltan carries weight because it allows guidance controls in smart bombs to work in extreme climate conditions. Because of that, Venezuelan coltan has raised concerns in Washington, D.C., as the government of President Hugo Chávez has selected Iranian, Chinese and Russian firms to explore minerals and is looking to develop future supplies of different ores.

Today it is illegal to mine coltan in Venezuela. But thanks to the likes of Ramón, Venezuelan coltan is already coming on to the international minerals market — as black-market contraband.

In government documents in several countries, police and military reports and interviews with miners and residents in South America’s northern Amazon jungles, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found a robust, illicit trade in coltan and growing risk for small-scale miners chasing ore.

Children, women and vulnerable native Indians are exposed to dangerous work conditions, drug smugglers and armed gangs that have been smuggling ore. Illicit Venezuelan coltan, experts said, is likely being mixed with legitimate minerals in smelters around the world, and then sent to high-tech manufacturers.

Alarm bells in Washington
There is concern that while there’s a regulatory vacuum in Venezuela — there are no rules, even for miners who want to legitimately mine coltan — it will be difficult to keep illicit coltan out of the global minerals supply stream.

“Venezuela could emerge as a big problem because it represents another source of conflict coltan, coming from an area where there is no regulation, no transparency and no security for the people working in the mines,” said Aaron Hall, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Enough Project.

This means that consumer-driven demand for everyday electronics may be supporting criminal gangs and organized crime in an illicit market for valuable minerals in South America. In Colombia, for example, police recently confiscated 83 tons of coltan and other minerals from an operation reportedly run by smugglers who, according to U.S. law enforcement officials, also supply cocaine to Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.

Much of coltan territory in Venezuela hugs the border with Colombia — an area of inaccessible jungle and meandering rivers and streams — where armed paramilitaries and drug smugglers for years have been recognized as powerful forces. Cross-border violence is on the rise in the area, turning the zone into a flashpoint in an increasingly tense relationship between the anti-American Chávez and the pro-U.S. government of Colombia.

This is why American national security experts have noted the proliferation of black-market coltan, while Chávez plans the future coltan trade with the help of Iran.

The Iranian government is assisting in soil and mineral studies and the mapping of mining regions. Sadra, an Iranian-government-owned industrial company, operates a Latin American subsidiary and maintains an office in Caracas.

In 2010 it participated in a conference in Venezuela to show Iran’s capabilities in the country and hosted a meeting of local and Iranian diplomats and government officials, including José Salamat Khan, Venezuela’s mining minister.

Later, Khan confirmed that Venezuela was working with Iranian mining experts. “We decided to work with the Iranian brothers in the exploration of mines in Bolívar State,” Khan said.

Sadra’s parent company, Khatam al-Anbiya, is on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of entities subject to sanctions because of Iran’s nuclear programs.

China, which uses most of the world’s coltan supply, recently pledged mining-industry support to Chávez and to Brazil, one of the biggest exporters of processed coltan.

An instant black market
In the fall of 2009, President Hugo Chávez announced the “discovery” of huge coltan reserves in Venezuela’s Amazon jungle. Chávez’s proclamation came despite coltan’s long existence on a list of valuable elements known to rest in abundance in Venezuela. For a time one company was even allowed to legally prospect for coltan.

Nonetheless, Chávez outlawed private mining and launched “Operation Blue Gold”: 15,000 troops deployed to pursue smugglers he said were sneaking ore into Colombia.

The action heightened tensions between the two countries in an area where cross-border violence was already on the rise. Since Chávez’s announcement, however, Venezuela’s Amazon military patrols have failed to stop coltan smuggling and the government has been silent on new rules for prospectors.

“Colombia or Brazil get this big business because the exploitation of minerals is official there, or at least is not illegal,” Liborio Guarulla, governor of Venezuela’s Amazonas state, told ICIJ. Venezuelan mining officials declined requests from ICIJ to talk about coltan.

Other factors have made it easy for black-market coltan to flourish: In the global coltan trade there is no public commodity price index. Most deals are shrouded in secrecy.

Coltan is a composite of metals — primarily columbite and tantalite — and moves through the supply chain as tantalum or niobium. “Tantalum and niobium materials are not openly traded. Purchase contracts are confidential between buyer and seller,” notes a USGS advisory.

Still, some analysts have reviewed industry statistics and established that in the high-quality coltan sector, about a fifth of the $150 million-a-year global marketplace comes from black-market sources in conflict zones, mostly in Central Africa. Smugglers there sneak coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Rwanda, where it is relabeled and sold to the global market.

Central Africa, Brazil and Australia are the world’s leading suppliers of coltan. The metal’s pivotal role in high-tech manufacturing became clear in 2001, when Sony delayed the rollout of new video game players because of a shortage of coltan. Prices at the time reached an estimated $300 a pound.

Since 2007 the growing smart phone market has fueled more mining of high-quality coltan, at an estimated rate of 3 million pounds per year. About 1.1 million pounds each year are used by U.S. manufacturers who apply it to high-tech microchips and to an array of other products, from industrial turbines to synthetic hip replacements.

The coltan price has been on a rollercoaster since the 2001 shortage, due mainly to ramped up production in Central Africa, a decision by the U.S. in 2007 to unload its reserves on the open market, and the shuttering of one of the world’s biggest mines, in Australia. With more coltan on the market today, the overall price for high-quality material has hovered around $50 a pound of late.

Today coltan from Central Africa mostly feeds a global spot market that manufacturers tap when long-term contracts with legitimate suppliers are not enough.

The spot-market supply has grown in recent years. But because minerals and metals from different sources are routinely mixed in spot-market supply lines, analysts say it’s almost impossible to tell good coltan from the bad.

Today there is no accurate test of origin for coltan ore — geo-fingerprinting — like there is for diamonds.

One pilot study in Germany is exploring a geo-fingerprint for coltan, measuring mineral concentrations, soil type and radiation levels surrounding an ore sample, to identify the ground where it was pulled from.

And there’s talk of applying pressure on producers via the U.S. government’s Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which bars American manufacturers from buying natural resources extracted in territory controlled by organized crime or terrorists.

Artisanal mining
Experts believe the global spot market is where illicit coltan from Venezuela and Colombia may be destined. They’re concerned the illicit trade in South America will grow and mimic the business in Congo, where coltan profits have helped sustain factional violence.

Government research on smuggled minerals in the two countries is limited, but some police and military reports reviewed by ICIJ show that authorities have confiscated about 190,000 pounds of coltan since 2009 — some of it taken without proper permits even before Chávez outlawed all coltan private mining.

What is clear is that a lot of Venezuelan coltan is being dug up in a conflict zone, a bit at a time, in what the industry calls “artisanal mining.”

This scale of mining is essential to a black market.

“Artisanal mining tends to be hazardous for laborers, with tough and unsafe conditions, poor pay and likely environmental damage as waste is discarded into streams,” said coltan researcher Michael Nest. “When artisanal mining occurs where it is not supposed to, such as in national parks, or where there are bans on private mining like in Venezuela, a black market will inevitably develop if there is someone willing to buy the ore.”

In places like the town of Parguaza, on the banks of the Orinoco River in southern Venezuela, there’s a buzz about coltan — and plenty of buyers.

Residents said that in mid-2010, after Chávez outlawed private mining, a group of businessmen arrived and promised that jobs and houses would follow if they signed petitions to the federal government in support of legitimate coltan extraction.

The government ignored the petition and the businessmen never came back, said Flandes, a Parguaza miner who didn’t want his full name used, fearing reprisals from authorities and smugglers.

But buyers still arrive in search of coltan. Local land owners told ICIJ that mineral brokers have come from neighboring Colombia and far-off Australia and South Korea.

Despite the traffic, Amazon miners remain wary of outsiders. After several requests a group eventually met with ICIJ in Parguaza. They offered only single names like Flandes, Efraín, Ramón and Camilo.

They described a difficult but potentially rewarding life in coltan mines. Their claims are far from roadways and roving military patrols. Walking is the only way in, so once they’re sure no one is watching, they pack their picks and take to hidden trails.

Because of coltan’s growing popularity, Venezuelan miners said they no longer have to tote heavy bags of ore along clandestine trails into Colombian territory. Now the Colombian buyers cross into Venezuelan territory and haul off the minerals.

“Colombians are the ones who move this stone here. They are the ones who are taking it and giving life to the business,” Flandes said. “As cars don´t enter in this region, [buyers] come with motorbikes and then go to the port of El Burro, where they take a motorboat that leaves them in Puerto Carreño,” just a 15-minute trip across the Orinoco River from Venezuela.

Like generations of small-scale miners in this region, Flandes once hunted for gold and diamonds. Now he’s interested in coltan because it’s easier to find and earns him good money.

Coltan in Venezuela’s Amazon jungle is often found in small rocks close to the surface. A coltan plot might yield other minerals like tin or titanium ore — also wanted by high-tech manufacturers — so a new mine attracts dozens of would-be prospectors.

One lucky miner said he found a coltan-filled rock, weighing almost seven pounds, which fetched $23. That’s good money in remote Venezuela, but prices can go up to about $55 a pound as coltan reaches manufacturers, according to the Venezuelan Ministry of Basic Industries and Mining.

Dealing with the military
Another miner, Camilo, remembered that soldiers recently arrested two women and some children who were working a claim. “They took the minerals from them,” he said, adding that the women and kids didn’t know what experienced miners have learned: splitting coltan loads with soldiers is a good way to avoid being jailed.

Locals — including church leaders and area government officials — quietly complained of military involvement in smuggling. Few reports have been pursued, however, as people whisper that it’s unsafe to accuse an officer.

In 2009, the Foundation for Science and Technology Development in Amazonas State investigated rumors of Colombian smugglers moving Venezuelan coltan. This followed the government’s first acknowledgement that the ore had become cross-border contraband: coltan traces and mining equipment were found on an isolated farm in Bolívar state.

Court records show that 3,960 pounds of mined material containing coltan was seized by Venezuelan border guards between 2009 and 2011. The suspects — including a 30-year-old woman, four men, a Colombian citizen and a 16-year-old native Indian — were charged with illegal trafficking “of metals, precious stones, strategic materials and its products or derivatives.”

In September, 2009, another 54 tons of ore containing an unspecified amount of coltan were confiscated from a Colombian citizen.

Chávez’s announcement followed a month later: “A strategic mineral called coltan has appeared now, and we have militarized the zone because people have been taking coltan to Colombia and exploiting it illegally.”

A cross-border threat
Since then, local leaders said, children have been found working at family-run mines in Venezuela and Colombia, with little attention to safety.

Miners said they accept the risks because coltan is one of the few work options in this poor region. Venezuela’s Amazonas state, roughly three-quarters the size of the United Kingdom, is home to 144 thousand of the country’s almost 30 million people. In the region’s huge rural tracts, the only real private-sector work is subsistence farming or fishing.

The territory is hard to get to and difficult for outsiders to navigate; well-suited to multinational smuggling, especially along the 1,350-mile Orinoco River which marks part of the border between Venezuela and Colombia.

One suspected destination for coltan is Brazil, the second-largest exporter of the metal. It’s also home to a number of smelters that process ore imported from around the world.

Brazilian mining law experts have urged politicians and the country’s growing high-tech manufacturing business to tighten controls on mining. They said inadequate, outdated laws have allowed a black market to grow in the country’s northern Amazonian provinces.

“Legislation is the same as 40 years ago,” said Sergio Rocha Brito Marques, a lawyer who reviewed Brazil’s coltan trade for ICIJ. The result is mining chaos near Brazil’s borders with Colombia and Venezuela — where prospectors have no clues on global prices for ore and buyers don’t demand proof of origin for coltan.

Internet market
Despite Venezuela’s crackdown, willing coltan traders — some of them Colombian — have been found on Internet sites that offer buyers and sellers private space to negotiate deals.

Korea TPC Development de Venezuela, a subsidiary of a South Korea-based shipping and construction company, has boasted online of having offices in Venezuela and of its ability to move minerals, including coltan.

“Clients can interact directly with every major global exchange while maintaining control of their order flow in a conflict-free, anonymous environment,” the firm says on its pages at tradeboss.com. The company promised quick delivery.

Korea TPC was registered on July 29th, 2010, in Valencia, Venezuela’s leading industrial city, describing itself as involved in “construction of bioenergy and gas plants.” But there’s little physical evidence of Korea TPC in Venezuela.

The company lists offices and phone numbers in an upscale hotel and apartment building in Caracas. Yet visits to the addresses yielded shrugs from residents who said they knew nothing about the company.

After ICIJ began inquiring about Korea TPC’s interest in Venezuelan mining, its website went silent.

Business registration documents list Moisés Gonzalez as Korea TPC’s Venezuelan partner, but ICIJ could not find him, although he is listed as the target of civil actions claiming he did not deliver on lease payments for office space.

In a drab office in an industrial park south of Seoul, Korea TPC President Ha-Young Yang told ICIJ he’d given up on the Venezuelan coltan business in 2010 because supply deals with his Caracas contact never materialized.

Yang said he was misled by Gonzalez.
Other Internet sites such as Alibaba.com and tradetag.com offer coltan for sale and list offices in Venezuela. But those offices do not appear in Venezuelan commercial registries.

One company, Florida-based Global Impact USA, lists Aribel Ojeda as its Venezuelan contact, with a contact phone number that’s also listed for another online coltan broker, Hawk Enterprises. A person who answered a call to that phone refused to talk about the Venezuelan coltan business. Global Impact did not return calls seeking comment.

The opaque marketplace for Venezuelan coltan is a symptom of a problem that the Chávez government must resolve, said researcher Raimund Bleischwitz, of Germany’s Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. The consequence of inaction is a black market that will grow more dangerous and unmanageable.

“Manufacturers don’t want to deal with bandits,” Bleischwitz said. “Central Africa is a problem because there is no strong government with whom we can negotiate a stable market and transparency. That’s where there’s potential for Venezuela’s strong central government to do it right and create market order for coltan, instead of a black market.”

Key findings
- A black market for coltan — a strategically important mineral used in an array of electronic devices — has emerged in the Amazon jungles that cover the border area between Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil.

- In Venezuela and most of Colombia coltan mining is illegal, yet small-scale miners and buyers are plentiful. Venezuelan coltan is even hawked worldwide via the Internet.
Colombian authorities and human rights activists say illicit coltan mining is feeding smuggling networks run by armed paramilitaries and drug smugglers.

- Children, women and members of native Indian tribes have been found working at illegal claims. In Colombia, miners complain that armed thugs demand mining taxes or fees to access jungle trails.

- Coltan is a source of global controversy. A big part of the world’s supply already comes from conflict zones in Central Africa, where armed factions control many mines, extort miners and profit from the sale of illegal ore.

- As in Central Africa, illicit South American coltan is relabeled and sent to legitimate smelters who feed high-tech manufacturers around the world. Unlike conflict diamonds, there is currently no accurate way to identify contraband coltan once it’s in the supply stream.

Colombia’s black-market coltan tied to drug traffickers, paramilitaries
On a narrow trail muddied by rain, a slight man in a thin T-shirt emerges from the thick of a remote jungle, down where Colombia ends and Venezuela and Brazil begin. He’s striding quickly, despite nearly 50 pounds of rocks inside a woven basket, anchored to his back by a white cloth wrapped around his forehead.

“Yes, I’m coming from the mine,” the man says, the weight of the basket preventing him from looking up at strangers he’s encountered on the trail, inside Puinawai National Park. He’s part of a local Indian tribe and is moving precious ore in the same palm-frond baskets his ancestors once weaved to bring prey home from a hunt.

The miner has little time to talk; the drop-off point for his ore is still miles away, outside the park.

Closer to the mine, near a stream, men briskly shovel muddy mounds of small rocks onto screens, then pour water over them to expose what they hope are pebbles containing tungsten or coltan. And at the mine itself, men, women and small children dig holes and sift through mud in search of ore.

This is an illegal mine, on a plot of land stripped of trees and surrounded by pristine jungle. The work here goes on well out of the view of Colombian police patrols looking for traffickers moving contraband ore containing valuable minerals like coltan and tungsten.

“We are seeing the emergence of illegal groups engaged in mining activities, especially in rare-earth [minerals] in the eastern part of Colombia, very distant and remote areas in which mining is illegal,” said Mauricio Cárdenas, chief of Colombia’s Mining Ministry. These groups are “a national security concern for us.”

It’s proof, he said, that a black market for valuable metals and rare-earth minerals is growing in territory the Colombian government has historically found difficult to police. Not only is this mine inside a national preserve, but it’s tucked in a corner of Colombia infamous for drug smugglers and armed paramilitaries.

Cárdenas had just seen a video, recorded by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in which miners scratch at the ground in search of what industry experts call “vitamins” for global high-tech manufacturers of microchips and controls that enhance growing numbers of smart phones and other consumer electronics.

These miners are collecting what can be considered “conflict minerals,” thus not just violating Colombian law, but potentially breaking international trade rules set by the United Nations.

What Cárdenas and others fear is that minerals smuggled from Colombia are making their way into the legitimate flow of minerals that feeds high-tech manufacturers. Illegal mining and smuggling have led to human-rights abuses against vulnerable tribal members, activists say. And police fear that it’s creating yet another illicit, profitable business for the region’s drug traffickers and well-armed paramilitaries.

Ultimately, the black market could also garner a label of “conflict minerals” for Colombian exports — a tattoo that has turned similar material from Central Africa into international contraband. For example, the U.S. government’s Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 prohibits American firms from buying natural resources obtained illegally or in areas controlled by criminals or terrorists.

Cocaine and coltan
In the late 19th century, Alexander Von Humboldt was the first outsider to map this part of the Amazon watershed. He found two rivers with reddish water, the Inírida and the Guaviare, where they empty into the dark waters of the Atabapo River and become the Rio Negro in Brazil. Today it’s the home for hundreds of fish species and South America’s largest sanctuary for endangered river dolphins.

The region is part of South America’s Guiana Shield which cuts across the continent’s northern arc. It’s a geologic sibling to the Sub-Saharan Shield in Africa. The local port town of Inírida takes its name from a native flower that has close relatives in Central Africa. Geologists say meteor strikes and strong river currents over millions of years have left rich mineral deposits near the surface.

This is where ICIJ and Colombia’s Noticias Uno television program got a rare glimpse of illicit mining in a part of Colombia’s Amazon jungle that’s hard for outsiders to penetrate.

Reporters found Puinawai Indians working the illegal mineral mine, a site first seen from the air as a bald, brown patch cut out of verdant jungle near the tribe’s sacred landmark, Mount Puinawai.

Mine workers told ICIJ that guerrillas control the mine, armed paramilitaries control the path they must take to the Guaviare River and narco-trafficking gangs transport the mineral. Guerrillas demand payment before a mine can be worked, paramilitaries want money before a load of sand and rock can be washed in the river, and then traffickers demand the ore be delivered to them miles away, outside of the park’s boundaries.

ICIJ interviewed police and soldiers in the area who are on the hunt for smugglers hauling illicit tungsten from local mines or coltan from across the border in Venezuela.

“The illegal minerals flow to and from Venezuela in pangas [motor boats] and upriver to Colombian side,” said Guainía state Police Commander William Ruiz. From Colombia, he added, coltan goes around the world.

Black-market coltan in the wilds of southeast Colombia has also captured the attention of U.S. law enforcement officials because of a connection to one of the world’s most powerful drug cartels.

Near Puinawai National Park, police said, an illicit operation mining coltan and other precious metals is run by members of the Cifuentes Villa family. In indictments filed in U.S. federal court, anti-drug authorities say fugitive members of the family supply cocaine to Mexico’s Joaquín Guzmán Loera — known as “El Chapo” (“Shortie”) — and his Sinaloa drug cartel.

In placing a myriad of Cifuentes Villa operations on its drug kingpin list, the U.S. Department of the Treasury made the clan’s mining business off-limits to Americans. U.S. officials called the mining company a money-laundering operation in support of a cocaine-smuggling enterprise.

Colombian authorities have also moved against the family, pulling its license to mine an area where 83 tons of coltan and tungsten ore have been seized since 2010.

“What we have found is that very sophisticated drug trafficking organizations are becoming more and more involved on minerals traffic from Puinawai Park and Venezuela, as it is documented on the judiciary files in an ongoing investigation,” Col. Alfredo de Vivero, the Colombian military commander in the area, told ICIJ.

Despite decades of interdiction operations by Colombian security forces and American military advisers, rules in this region are still often dictated either by right-wing paramilitaries or by rebels-turned-drug dealers in the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, the FARC.

De Videro said traffickers have coerced whole families from the Puinawai tribe to work the mines, or lured them with free beer, food and brand-name athletic shoes.

“Since [smugglers] invaded the territory of the indigenous community, the community denounced them, and since then we keep watch over the area to see to it that there is no illegal mining,” police commander Ruiz said as he gave a tour of his trophy — about four acres of barren land, bearing evidence of mining activity, confiscated in a recent raid.

Tracing minerals
Colombian police are also looking closely at a cache of tungsten ore captured last September in the middle of the Guaviare River in the Colombian state of Guainia, on the edge of Puinawai National Park.

“One of the problems we are having is that in these areas, there are some small titles, legally granted, that are being used as safe havens for the legalization of [illegal] activities,” Mining Minister Cárdenas said.

In 1995 Rafael Alberto Rodríguez Forero won the right to exploit a plot called El Caney de los Cristales, near the national park and the Guaviare River. Over the years, according to the licenses issued to him, he’s mined sand for building blocks, then “black sands,” a hint that he’d found veins of valuable minerals. In February 2006 Rodríguez started mining for iron and titanium.

In August 2010 he sought permits to move minerals via the river to the regional port Inírida, or to Bogotá. And in January 2011, Rodríguez Forero filled out Colombian tax forms to facilitate the export of tungsten to warehouses in Strassen, Luxembourg, belonging to Traxys Europe SA.

A middleman’s report said the tungsten that Traxys bought came from Rodríguez Forero’s mine near the Guaviare River and Puinawai Natural National Park. Ore from outside the national park is legal if a miner has a permit.

On Sept. 16, 2011 a Colombian military patrol seized 17 tons of tungsten ore in the middle of the river. Officials determined that the ore had been mined inside the park, at a site called El Zancudo.

According to a Colombian law enforcement source, an analysis of the seized ore indicates the tungsten from El Zancudo bears mineral concentrations similar to what Traxys purchased. Colombian officials said the government continues to investigate the origins of the two ore loads, but that Traxys is not suspected of any wrongdoing and Rodríguez Forero does not face any charges in the matter.

Rodríguez Forero holds the only mining permit in this area. In public statements he has denied responsibility for the seized ore, saying he was not responsible “for the improper use” of his licenses. He has urged authorities to step up patrols for the “rigorous monitoring of the ore that is brought to market in this criminal form.”

Rodríguez Forero, and Colombia-based Geocopper Company, which facilitated the Traxys purchase, declined repeated requests for comment from ICIJ. In a written response, Traxys said it had “no knowledge or involvement whatsoever in the confiscated material,” and that the minerals it purchased from Colombia came from entities that are “totally legitimate, properly licensed, and governmentally vetted.” The company also indicated that the ore it acquired came from an area some distance from Puinawai National Park. 

Industry experts said questions over the origins of ore show how hard it is to keep conflict minerals out of high-tech industry supply lines.

“Unless big manufacturers or processors buy via long-term contracts, for example from Mozambique, Australia or Canada, they can never be entirely sure where their ore is coming from,” said coltan mining expert Michael Nest. “Global supply chains are complex and mix up ore from all over the place because processors and manufacturers have huge economies of scale — they need to mix up different batches of ore to improve efficiency.”

In 2009, Traxys, one of the world’s biggest processors of minerals for high-tech manufacturing, announced it was suspending purchases of coltan from war-torn Central Africa. Smuggling there is the target of human rights campaigns aimed at stopping armed groups from taking coltan to Rwanda, where it’s relabeled and sold to smelters worldwide.

Mining in a "red zone"
Rodríguez Forero has no criminal record and there are no charges pending against him in the tungsten investigation. But controversy has surrounded Rodríguez Forero’s operation because his mines are deep in a territory thick with armed FARC units and anti-communist paramilitaries.

According to the Colombian government, the area “has been designated a red zone or area with high risk of danger for persons from outside the region, who are subject to extortion, kidnapping, and murder by organizations operating outside the law.”

In 1992 a police headquarters in the area was attacked by insurgents who killed four officers. The police abandoned the area and the FARC became the law. In 1997, paramilitaries struck back with the infamous Mapiripán massacre, beheading 47 people and disrupting the FARC’s cocaine production.

After the raid, authorities said the drug trafficker Carlos Mario Jiménez Naranjo purchased control of the area from paramilitaries in order to protect his smuggling business. But Colombian authorities arrested Jiménez and in 2008 handed him over to U.S. officials who wanted him on drug-trafficking charges. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced last May to 33 years in federal prison.

Jiménez’s role in illicit minerals smuggling has emerged from Colombia’s ongoing “Parapolitics” scandal — an investigation into ties between politicans, mining officials and paramilitaries.

ICIJ found that on Rodríguez Forero’s mining license the name Mario Jiménez was on the first line listing the property’s owners. Officials of Colombia’s Geological Service said the listing was a mistake, part of inaccuracies in the federal mine registry that have prompted its overhaul.

Since last fall’s ore seizures, Rodríguez Forero has obtained a certificate from local military leaders saying the area he mines is partially free of guerrillas and criminal gangs. If the Dodd-Frank Act restrictions were applied to South American mineral mining, the FARC’s listing as a terrorist organization by U.S. officials might present a problem for legitimate miners in the region.

In June 2010, a certificate issued by the Colombian army’s Fourth Division said troops in the area “are carrying out in-depth offensive operations continuously in these sectors … keeping the narco-terrorist groups of the FARC and [other criminal bands] on the run.”

Because of the suspicious activities and mining practices that threaten Puinawai tribal land and national parks, it is clear that allowing some small-scale mining in the region was a mistake, said Colombia’s former Environment Minister Manuel Rodríguez.

From 2005 to 2009, before the government could even finish mapping the area, mining rights were auctioned off to people who were not required to prove that they knew how to mine. There were so many claims that an illegal market for processing of titles was created.

Amid the chaos, the market for mining equipment also took off. For example, X-ray spectrometers that read mineral compositions in ore have become so common in Colombia’s mining regions that police have mistaken them for weapons.

Puinawai Indians say the devices are indeed guns, pointed at the earth beneath their sacred mountain.

(By Emilia Diaz-Struck, Joseph Poliszuk and Ignacio Gómez*, iWatch News, 04/03/2012)

* Marcelo Soares in Brazil and Nari Kim in South Korea contributed to this article.