Colombia's Other Problem

A health crisis is looming in Colombia, where the gold industry's growth has led to dangerous levels of mercury in the atmosphere.

The mayor of Nechí – a gold-mining town in the Colombian state of Antioquia – was in no mood to listen. Twice he tried to interrupt the attorney general. But aided by a microphone, she outstumped him easily, crying, "Comply with the law!"

Packing some papers into a shoulder bag, the mayor grabbed his coat and exited the hall, followed by a handful of municipal leaders. Even as they departed, the attorney general jabbed the air, repeating: “Get the entables out of your cities, or I will throw you in prison!”

Entables are factories where miners bring their gold-bearing ore to be crushed, ground, and processed with mercury and cyanide. Gold mining is Colombia's fastest growing industry, its expansion mirroring the decade's ascent of gold prices. Higher prices brought more miners – perhaps 200,000 – to the curious small-scale economy, a sector once thought extinct, now flourishing as never before.

But this growth has also made Colombia a leading emitter of mercury pollution, with concentrations of toxic gases so intense in northeast Antioquia that experts fear the outbreak of a health crisis worse than any caused by mercury since the one in Minamata, Japan, in the 1950s, which left 1,784 people dead and affected thousands of others.

"There is no other case in the world where an urban population of 150,000 people is exposed to mercury vapour," says Marcello Veiga, a metallurgical engineer and geochemist from the University of British Columbia and emeritus director of the United Nations Global Mercury Project. "The entables must move from the cities."