A grenade attack killing four people in the town of Pauna, in the western Boyacá department, has sparked concerns about a revival of the so-called ‘green war’ between rival emerald tycoons in the department in the 1980s.
Colonel Carlos Antonio Gutiérrez, the departmental police chief for Boyacá, (where the country’s largest emerald mines are located), told reporters on 10 November that the grenade lobbed the previous day into a crowd in the town centre was an assassination attempt on Pedro ‘Orejas’ Nel Rincón. A leading player in the local emerald mining business, Nel Rincón had been attending a local festival and, along with one of his sons, was injured in the attack.
Colombia is the world’s largest emerald producer and Boyacá and surrounding areas were at the centre of the ‘green war’ in the 1980s, as competition for control of the increasingly profitable emerald mines grew. The violent attacks took place between the Nel Rincón clan and that of Víctor Carranza (known as Colombia’s emerald tzar), both of which developed ties to the powerful local drug trafficking organisations of the time. This violence only appeared to subside after a truce agreed between the emerald tycoons in 1990 and the death of the drug lord Pablo Escobar two years later.
Concerns about a revival of the ‘green war’ have been building in recent months, following Carranza’s death from cancer in April 2013. Nel Rincón may have seen in this an opportunity to expand his control of local mines. According to the Colombian weekly Semana, 25 people have been killed in the first ten months of the year in this new ‘war’. These included some of Carranza’s close collaborators. His right hand man, Pedro Ortegón, was shot dead in July and one of his lawyers, Óscar Casas, was killed the previous month. The government has since deployed 250 soldiers and police deployed to the municipalities Pauna, Quípama, Muzo and Maripí, as well as Boyacá. But the prospect of renewed violence has provoked concerns from various sectors, including the Catholic Church.
- Church concerns
Monseñor Luis Felipe Sánchez, bishop of Chiquinquirá, described the situation in Boyacá as “worrying” and called on the Bogotá government to closely monitor the situation. He also called on the emerald tycoons to sit down at a “dialogue table” and talk “sincerely” about their commitment to peace, as agreed 23 years ago.
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