05. Venom

Mat [00.00.03] It was after dinner, and Elizabeth was clearing up the plates in the house she shared with her husband, Andres Bedoya. Andres was a miner in Segovia, a mountainous town in the heartland of Colombia’s gold trade. 

As Elizabeth reached for a plate, a knock at the front door startled her. It was late, past nine, and they were not expecting company. 

“Who is it?” asked Andres, more tired than rattled. He’d worked a full shift that day. 

“It’s me!” Rang out a voice, confident and natural. 

The couple exchanged blank looks, and Andres walked to the door as Elizabeth ducked behind the fridge, embarrassed to be caught with her five-month pregnant belly protruding from her pajamas. 

Andres opened the door, and standing there was a boy, slender with shy, dark eyes. By then, the boy had developed a reputation. He was known as Veneno – or Venom.

Without saying a word, Venom raised a revolver to Andres’s head and fired. Andres crumpled to the floor, and the boy stood over him, firing repeatedly until his chamber was empty. 

Soon after, a threatening pamphlet started circulating in Segovia, warning that Andrés’ murder was just the start, that more would soon die. Unless, that is, Segovia’s most successful gold entrepreneur would come to terms.

“Señor Julio Erazo knows how our business works because he once belonged to it,” it read. “Or, are we lying, Señor Erazo? Or should we say Ramiro, or AK21 as we call you.”

From InSight Crime, this is The Shadow of El Dorado, a series about the intricate web of corruption, violence, and complicity behind the gold trade in Segovia. And the story of how this once-thriving Colombian mining town became a mafia stronghold. 

I’m Mat Charles. 

James [00.02.07 And I’m James Bargent. In this episode, we look at the next round of Segovia’s gold wars. This is Episode 5: Venom.

Andrés Bedoya was the first to die in a terror campaign that in 2015 emptied Segovia’s streets and shut down its biggest mining operations – the operations run by Julio Erazo.

As we chronicled in Episode 3, Julio was a demobilized paramilitary and former aide to the warlord Macaco, who had begun a new life as a contractor for Frontino Gold Mines, the company that had practically built Segovia.

Julio got his break in mining at a time when Frontino contracts had become chips of power and wealth in a game of mafia poker. But, seven years later, not only had he ended up with the biggest stack, he also appeared to have done so while leaving behind his criminal past – at least until Venom was unleashed.

Julio had risen to the top by being the last man standing after the mining world in Segovia had been overturned by two new arrivals to town: one corporate and the other criminal. 

The first of those arrivals was the Canadian multinational, Gran Colombia Gold, which, in 2010 bought the Frontino Gold Mines assets. As we detailed in previous episodes, Gran Colombia was owned and run by international investors and local business and political elites connected to former President Alvaro Uribe.

The arrival of Gran Colombia was an anxious moment for Julio, he told me in an interview years later. The type of mining they were doing at the time did not seem like the sort of operation a multinational company registered on the Toronto Stock Exchange would want to be associated with.

It was a basic, rustic way of working. And his miners were former machuqueros – mine robbers who snuck into the company mines to steal ore.

Julio [00.04.23] Arrancamos, un grupo de mineros muy informales. Muy, muy informales en esa época.

James [00.04.28] They were a very – very – informal group of miners, he said. And there was little control over what they were doing.

They also paid off armed groups. Julio had to pay a tax to the local paramilitaries, who had switched from his old outfit, the Central Bolivar Bloc, to a group calling themselves the Rastrojos. 

Julio [00.04.48] Cuota fija. Ellos eran conscientes, ellos mandaban razones, no, nos enrede con bultos, no nos enrede con eso y páguenos una cuota mensual. Punto.

James [00.04.58] It was a fixed price, he said. A messenger would appear to collect the money in the first five days of every month. And in return, he could work in peace.

Julio left it there, at least as far as we could tell. But many of the other Frontino contractors had grown close to this new generation of paramilitaries. They had invested their Frontino earnings in new mining ventures – both legal and illegal – and they paid the Rastrojos a healthy cut. Then they used their paramilitary connections to murder anyone who stood in their way. Those contractors had formed Segovia’s own mining mafia. 

The murder and mayhem that resulted was bringing a Colombian twist to a concept born in the conflict zones of Africa: blood gold.   

Julio [00.05.49A partir del año 2010 ya pues el ruido de que llegaba Zandor a coger esto, pues la multinacional y todos pues siempre vamos con el susto, con el miedo de que nos sacaran. 

James [00.06.02] Julio thought Gran Colombia would see all this and bring a swift end to it. They had this fear, he said, that the company would remove them. But instead, Gran Colombia took a look at their operations and said they could stay.

In fact, Gran Colombia not only continued using contractors, it doubled down on the contracting model, laying off hundreds of direct employees and relying on third-party operators like Julio to work their mines. 

Many of the laid off miners – experienced and now unemployed and angry – went to work in new illegal mines that were springing up all over the company’s concession, starting the process of remapping Segovia into the wrecked shape it is today. 

And many of those mines were bankrolled by the mining mafia. 

In other words, Gran Colombia’s business model of outsourcing everything was essentially providing the mining mafia with both the capital, through their contracts, and the labor force, from the unemployed miners, to build their gold empires.

It was a boom time for the mining mafia and for their partners in the Rastrojos. But then… the second new actor arrived: the Gaitanista Self-Defence Forces of Colombia – the AGC. And the slaughter began.

Newscast [00.07.29] Anoche cayeron otros dos jovenes asesinados en Segovia. Con muertos lado a lado, las bandas criminales pelean por las rentables explotaciones, pero los que mas sufren son los habitantes y trabajadores que por años han sido dueños y han subsistido del oro.

The AGC were part of a long line of paramilitary groups who had come to Segovia seeking to milk the region of its riches. They were also the Rastrojos’ main rivals in Colombia.

The conflict that followed marked the bloodiest period in Segovia’s history. And miners like Julio were stuck in the middle.

Julio [00.08.04] Entonces ya empezaron los nuevos. Si nos damos cuenta que le sigues pagando al otro, te matamos y los otros, si nos damos cuenta que le pagas al nuevo, te matamos

James [00.08.13] Everything changed. The AGC said, ‘If we find out you’re still paying the others we’ll kill you’ – and the Rastrojos said – ‘if we find out you’re paying the new ones, we’ll kill you,’” Julio said. 

Julio, the other contractors, the informal miners, and the mining mafia that moved between both worlds all had three options: pay both sides, pick a side, or tell them all to go to hell.

Jairo Hugo Escobar, the mobster known as the Gold Tzar, whose story we told in Episode 3, for instance, firmly planted his flag with the Rastrojos. So the AGC put a bullet in his neck. Others paid the AGC. 

Julio Erazo, though, took option three: Tell them all to go to hell. 

Julio [00.09.02] Entonces ya fue una posición, el negocio mío no es la guerra, el negocio mío es la minería. 

James [00.09.06] His business was not war, his business was mining, so he took a decision, he said.

Julio [00.09.12] Entonces hermanito, ni pal uno ni pal otro.

James [00.09.15] No more payments –not for one side nor the other.

This was obviously a dangerous play. But it worked, at least at first. The AGC soon drove Julio’s old comrades in the Rastrojos out of Segovia, but Julio remained, still working and not paying.  

And he was catching the eye of the Gran Colombia management. By this time, the company had ended its contracts with most of the mining mafia, but it had a problem with its main contractor: he refused to take action against the machuqueros, who were pillaging the mines under the protection of the AGC. 

They severed ties and told Julio if he would clean out the mines, the contract was his. 

So he did. He flooded the mine with armed security guards who prowled through miles of dark tunnels, hunting down the machuqueros. They destroyed informal mills that helped the robbers grind the ore up and extract the gold, and they blocked off the tunnels used to enter the mines. They detained machuqueros at gunpoint and turned them over to the police.

Gran Colombia was pleased, and by 2015, Julio was working more of Gran Colombia’s mines than the company itself. He was one of the most powerful men in Segovia, and he was doing it all, he claimed, without paying extortion or turning a blind eye to the machuqueros. 

That was when the AGC came calling.

It started with the arrival of a new AGC commander after police had arrested the previous leader of the Segovia faction.

Julio [00.10.57] Entonces de ahí viene alguien nuevo empezó, el que no estaba pagando, tiene que pagar.

James [00.11.03] The new commander’s order, Julio said, was that anyone who had not been paying, now had to pay. 

Julio [00.11.10] Solicitamos al Estado nuestro propio esquema de seguridad y controlamos y empezamos a controlar la seguridad física de las minas.

James [00.11.18] Julio refused, and instead beefed up his security. When the AGC realized they couldn’t get to Julio personally, they dispatched Venom to target the thing they knew Julio could not – or would not – protect: his workforce. 

Mat [00.11.36] The AGC had a sophisticated structure with a clear line of command, and specialist divisions. They committed assassinations, extortion, kidnapping, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, displacements. They were disciplined with rules and regulations, kept meticulous books, and maintained a fearsome arsenal – assault rifles and grenades as well as handguns.

But for all this might, all it took to shut down Segovia was one 18 year-old with a phone, a revolver, and a motorbike.

Court official [00.12.08] Buenos dias. Hoy es martes 17 de mayo de 2016. Son las 9 y 6 minutos de la mañana y se encuentra en la sala de audiencia. El indiceado tan amabale me do nombre completo y numero de documento de indentifacion. 

John Jairo [00.12.21] John Jairo Chavarriaga González

Mat [00.12.25] That, confirming his identity to a trial judge, was John Jairo Chavarriaga – Venom. 

He was just 14-years-old when the AGC recruited and trained him as an assassin. It was a longstanding tactic of the paramilitaries to recruit teens and even young boys to do these types of jobs. Venom was a classic case: he came from desperate circumstances, and he would become a fearless killer. 

Venom’s first attempt to murder one of Julio’s miners failed – his gun jammed, and his target got away. 

Then came a message on his phone about his next target, which came with a photo of Andres Bedoya. Soon after, he was standing over Bedoya, while his pregnant wife looked on in horror. 

The next target was not a person but a place – Julio’s gold processing mill. First, Venom hurled a grenade at the mill. Then he scattered leaflets behind him as he fled the scene. No one was killed, but the pamphlets warned that everyone who worked for Erazo was a “military target” of the AGC. Either Erazo would pay, or they would keep shooting his workers.

The same threat flashed through social media networks. Fear buzzed around town, a throbbing electric crackle of rumors, whispers, and terror. Some workers stayed home. Others covered up their uniforms, and approached the mine gates with stealth, slipping in when they thought no eyes were watching. Or they traveled in motorbike convoys, seven, eight of them at a time, seeking safety in numbers. 

Everyone wondering who would be next.

Then another photo arrived to Venom’s phone. A 45-year-old man in blue overalls and a white miners’ helmet. It was one of Julio’s top lieutenants, a man everyone who works there knows, respects, loves even.

Venom approached him in the street as he was walking to work and shot him in the back and the head. Then he stood over the man, who was sprawled out on the ground, and put two more bullets in his head.

After the second murder, Julio gathered his workers at the mine. He told them he was stepping down to protect them and their families. He was suspending all his contracts with Gran Colombia Gold – and, by extension, he was suspending all of their jobs.

The day after Julio shut down his operations, over 1,000 people – decked out in white – took to the streets, calling for an end to the violence. 

At the march, Julio took center stage. Wearing a white mining hat and a black bulletproof vest, he marched alongside the people.

Later, encircled by microphones, Julio railed to the press about a clash between good and evil. This conflict, he said, was a simple one: It was the criminal world vs the legal world.  

Julio [00.15.40]  Es sencillamente porque aquí en cabecilla los dos.. hemos sido los más.. que hemos combatido la minería criminal.

Mat [00.15.47] They were being targeted, he told the cameras, because they were doing more than anyone else to combat criminal mining.

Julio [00.15.55] No están interesados en el pago de extorsión.

Mat [00.15.58] This goes far beyond extortion, he told them. The criminal miners – the world of and paramilitaries – are coming for it all.

Julio [00.16.07] Sino lo que quieren es de desarticular las empresas.

Mat [00.16.09] They want to dismantle my business, he said, so they can take over the mines themselves. 

James [00.16.20] Julio’s was a noble story, one that pitted good miners versus bad, and paramilitaries versus civilians. But, if we had learned anything in our time in Segovia, things were rarely – in fact never – so black and white. 

As we looked at in previous episodes, Julio himself emerged from the other side of this equation, and there remain questions about his relationship to Macaco, and whether he leveraged his paramilitary ties to get his start in mining. 

During our reporting on his conflict with the AGC, we talked to several miners who worked for Julio at one time or another, and they were clear, for them Julio’s conflict with the AGC was also murkier and more complicated than he was making out.

Most of them did not want to talk on the record.

One who would though was Carlos Durango, aka, Pelo Mula, or Donkey Hair. We met Pelo Mula in previous episodes working at the Las Brisas mine. As one of Julio’s miners, he lived through Venom’s terror campaign. He remembers the fear, the uncertainty. His life shrinking down to the mine and cowering behind a locked door in his house. Joining a nervous parade of motorbike convoys to get between one and the other.

But unlike the others we talked to about that time period, he wanted everyone to know what he had to say. And he wanted Julio Erazo to know he was the one who was saying it.

When we talked, it was a year after the AGC’s terror campaign, and Pelo Mula sat outside las Brisas, blinking in the afternoon sun after his morning shift. During our conversation, he summoned up his residual anger, the grudge that won’t let him be. 

The Julio Erazo of Pelo Mulas’ story is not the one shouting into the microphones about paramilitary repression. No. Pelo Mula’s Julio Erazo didn’t try to protect his workers, he abandoned them. 

Pelo Mula [00.18.32 A nosotros nos mataron más de un compañero. Nos mataron un jefe de la mina y nos mataron otro compañero y a otro lo hirieron y a Julio no le importó nada de eso. No le importa sino la plata que le entregan a él.

James [00.18.44] They killed two compañeros, and they injured another, but Julio Erazo didn’t care about any of that, he told us. Julio Erazo doesn’t care about anything except the money that comes to him.

Pelo Mula [00.18.54] Porque Julio Erazo no anda solo. Julio anda con escoltas, anda con la policía.

James [00.18.59] Julio Erazo was never alone, he always had police and army escorts, two in front and two behind, while the only thing they had to protect themselves was a vial of holy water, Pelo Mula said.

Scared for their lives and worried for their jobs, Pelo Mula and some of the other miners decided that if Julio wasn’t going to do anything, they would take care of it themselves.

Pelo Mula [00.19.21] Entonces un grupo de compañeros y que nos queríamos buscamos los medios de hablar con estas personas que están intimidando para hacer lo que Julio no estaba haciendo, dar la vacuna nosotros trabajadores. 

James [00.19.35] He told us how they used a family connection to reach out to the paramilitaries and do what Julio Erazo would not – pay the paramilitary tax.

Pelo Mula [00.19.45] Si a él no le importábamos nosotros, no tenemos quien le importabamos. 

James [00.19.51] “If Julio didn’t care about anyone but himself, then we didn’t have anyone but ourselves to look out for us,” he said. 

They first negotiated a payment of about $400 dollars a month per crew. It still stings. Not so much the money, but the fact that it was the miners who were paying and not the bosses like Julio, or the shareholders in Toronto and New York. 

But, this was only partly true. Leaked documents we obtained from the Attorney General’s Office show Julio did eventually pay the AGC. According to the document, the AGC told him they would contract a powerful mafia in Medellín, where Julio lived, to kill him and his family. Julio relented, and, the document said, paid around $65,000 to get them to call off the hit.

It’s not clear if he paid any more thereafter, but soon, the AGC doubled the price on the miners. If the crew had a bad month, or a string of bad months, life got even harder. Pelo Mula wanted no more part of it, and he left to join his brother Jorge at Las Brisas, the informal mine where we first found him. 

Pelo Mula [00.21.07] Pues ya no es rentable. No, ya no era rentable tampoco trabajar con él. 

James [00.21.15] It’s not profitable to work with Julio Erazo anymore, Pelo told us. 

But it is dangerous. He said that his friends still working with Julio often face an impossible choice: keep the little money they made for food and risk reprisal from the AGC, or pay the extortion and sleep with an empty stomach.

As we mentioned previously, we tried to contact Julio many times since our first interview with him and have sent him a detailed list of questions on all this, but we’ve had no response. 

But Julio was also just a cog in a machine. The machine itself was Gran Colombia Gold. The company that had been cast as Segovia’s ticket to modernity had done little to change the core dynamics of the gold trade since it had purchased Frontino in 2010. In fact, it may have made it worse. 

And in 2016, I had a chance to sit down with Gran Colombia CEO Lombardo Paredes, to ask him about these criminal dynamics underpinning his business. I was a print-journalist then, so the audio isn’t great. 

So um, from, from what I’ve heard from talking to people in say we are in the end what resolved that conflict was the, the combos the mine crews reached out to, to the armed group, and they negotiated their own extortion.

From the beginning, Paredes had little interest in talking about the Faustian bargain Gran Colombia makes in places like Segovia.

Not satisfied, I pressed him on the point. 

And that that continues today.  So the combos that work in your mines continue to pay extortion. Are you aware of that?
Lombardo Paredes [00.23.10] I’m aware that there is some kind of extortion around there, but I cannot prove that. I have no proof of that, and I can I can do nothing for that. 

James [00.23.20] Gran Colombia has always drawn this neat line between their legal mining and the illegal operations of Segovia’s small-scale, informal miners. 

But they seemed to want it both ways: vilify small-scale, informal miners who pay armed groups like the AGC – often at the point of a gun; yet distance the company when it is their contactors like Julio and his workers who are paying the criminal groups, and who, incidentally, were former members of these armed groups. 

By definition, Gran Colombia’s gold was as much blood gold as the gold produced by most of the informal miners. But Paredes would not budge.

Lombardo Paredes [00.24.03] That kind of extortion. We cannot deal with that. The underworld, you know, the organized crime, we cannot deal with that. It’s not our problem. It’s a governmental problem. They have to deal with that.

James [00.24.16] Still, the hypocrisy was catching up to him and Gran Colombia. The battle lines between Gran Colombia and the small-scale miners were coming into focus. The conflict over who has the right to claim Segovia’s blood gold was coming to a head, and we were about to get caught right in the middle of it. 

That’s next time on the Shadow of El Dorado