An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal.
The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer.
Several gold deposits straddle the remote area.
Photo: AP
Agudo had initially reported six people killed, but revised the toll to five after firefighters finished recovering the bodies from under the rubble.
The dead included three men, a pregnant woman and an infant, he said.
Bolivian Deputy Minister of the Interior Jhonny Aguilera said that the suspected perpetrator of the attack was killed by the explosion, which was detonated by remote control.
Photo: AP
The predawn explosion at the mine struck a three-story house, and set cars and tractors alight. The fires wrecked several other structures and cut electricity.
Bolivia’s mining industry stands out for its huge sector of cooperatives — legal groups of artisanal miners — which drive 58 percent of mining production, the latest government data showed.
The thousands of groups also wield political clout in the resource-rich country, where they have representation in parliament.
Cooperatives emerged in Bolivia as more established mining operations dismissed legions of workers in the risky, boom-and-bust business, compelling miners to organize themselves when commodity prices slumped and lay-offs loomed.
Over the decades, cooperatives have increasingly fought over the chance to extract minerals — hurling rocks and dynamite sticks at each other and against unionized, salaried workers from Bolivia’s state-run mining company, Comibol.
Comibol came to dominate the crucial industry under former Bolivian president Evo Morales, who governed the landlocked Andean nation from 2006 to 2019 and barred foreign companies from having a controlling stake in mineral extraction.
In Thursday’s clash, the struggle for control of veins of the gold reserve between two rival cooperatives had simmered for years, said Jhony Silva, a legal adviser to one of the groups.
Gold remains one of Bolivia’s main mineral exports, with almost US$2.87 billion of the mineral shipped out of the country in 2023.
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