The rival gold miners in Bolivia fight with the dynamite, leaving at least 6 deaths
At least six people were killed at the beginning of Thursday in a clash between rival groups of gold miners who bring dynamite in the north-western Bolivia, said the police, a rare example of territorial disputes among the mining cooperatives of the nation that become fatal.
A powerful explosion thundered through the Yani mining field while the two groups of rival minerals collided on the access to the golden mine near the mountain city of Soraata, about 150 kilometers (about 90 miles) in the north -west of the administrative capital of the town of La PazColonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer said. Several gold deposits are at the turn of the remote area.
“We are continuing to rescue efforts,” said Agudo.
The public ministries arrived on Thursday on the scene, where the explosion before dawn had torn the mining community, destroying different houses and cutting the electricity, the authorities said.
The Bolivia mining industry stands out for its enormous sector of legal cooperative-legal cooperatives of artisan miners-they include most of the mining workforce and brandishing political weight in the country rich in resources in which they have a representation Parliament.
The cooperatives emerged historically in Bolivia while more consolidated mineral operations rejected legions of workers in the risky, boom-and-bust sector, compelling to organize when the prices of the raw materials collapsed and loomed.
Over the decades, the cooperatives have increasingly fought on the possibility of extracting minerals: by launching rocks and sticks of dynamite with each other and against unionized and salary workers of the state mining company of Bolivia, Comibol.
Comibol has come to dominate the crucial industry under the former president Evo MoralesA socialist leader who ruled the Andean nation without outfit on the sea from 2006 to 2019 and prevented foreign companies from having a control of control in mineral extraction.
In Thursday’s clash, the struggle for the control of some veins of the gold reserve between two rival cooperatives had been cleared for years, said Jhony Silva, legal consultant of one of them.
Silva told Bolivian State TV that the corpses were recovered from under the rubble. He said there were reports of people who are still missing, without offering further details.
