Social stigmatization is perhaps one of the main problems of the miners of Segovia and Remedios in the Northeast of Antioquia Department, populations bathed in gold, but whose wealth has been affected by violence for several years, the administrative disgrace and the lack of policies clear and concise for small and medium mining.
Of the municipalities of Segovia and Remedios have been extracted to around five million ounces of gold in the last 170 years, about 142 tons of metal from the mountains of these municipalities. For the inhabitants of these municipalities of Antioquia the arrival of the Canadian multinational to mean the beginning of the end of the small and medium-scale mining that has been carried out for more than two centuries in an artisanal way, which has created not only a productive chain of the what depends more than 65 thousand people, but also a whole mining culture that makes the natives of both towns proud. Since 2010, eight mining strikes have been carried out in these municipalities in response to the new labor conditions imposed by the multinational and the new rules of the game that the national government has issued in the last three years in terms of mining. For ancestral and traditional miners, paralyzing all kinds of activities, including commerce and transportation, has become the only way for their concerns to be heard.
The weakest part of the production chain in the case of Segovian mining, the "Chatarreras" are the most affected. "Well, if the only proposal of the company is to take the material to its benefit plants, because there is simply no job for us the 'chaparrals'. And what do we do in this town if we all live from mining? "Says Consuelo, leader of the scrap yards in the mine the breezes in Segovia, who for more than 20 years lives to dig among the remains of mine that the miners discard . Mining in this area of Colombia is in a process of cultural and social change, but avoiding the stigmatization of the miner is important for the development and progress of the region, SI Miners, Criminals do not all affirm in the northeast of Antioquia.
