Au (Get Off Of My Cloud): Marmato Gold Part II

By Thom Calandra
ThomCalandra.com

MEDELLIN, Colombia (TC) -- El Campo Marmato, three hours' jeeping it from this emerald city toward the muddy Rio Cauca , is where our report continues.

When our story starts, when our search for answers to why Colombia no longer tops the heap as leading gold producer in Latin America begins, is open to interpretation. As is the rough-and-ready Spanish the artisan miners in El Campamento Marmato speak to negotiate their day's loot.

Perhaps this luscious country, 80 kilometers south of gorgeous Medellin, lost its oro mojo many decades ago, when the historically named La Violencia period of political killings began.

Or maybe Colombia lost the will to explore and exploit its thick veins of gold and silver, its disseminated mineralization, when drug processors and distributors turned coca and marijuana leaves into their own kind of gold.

This account of gold and one perfectly insane mountain just might have started a geologically recent 7 million years ago, when the Andean land mass and its mineral deposits began to bubble and boil. But who but a scientist wants to go back that far in time?

Jeffrey W. Brooks, Ph.D. geologist, tells me the lore of El Marmato as we drive out of wonderful Medellin, where once I taught English as a young man to the city's proud and dignified Antioqueños. Señor Jeff as he is known among the young geos working with him on the mountain, says EL Marmato's baggage includes the reality and myth of Señor Pablo. How the late Mr. Escobar of the Medellin Cartel once used El Marmato's barracks, half hidden beneath magnolia, Colombian pine and hibiscus, as both hiding place and meet-and-greet point for the campesinos who would come to pay their respects.

"That he came in by helicopter to play Godfather and shovel out the cash, the urban myth goes," says Brooks.

Jeff Brooks seems a considerate man. The 54-year-old American prefers to call the wildcat miners and millers scraping the mountain, the parched and sinewy Colombians heaving thick canvas sacks of rock from their shallow alluvial mines, Señor Jeff prefers the term "artisan" miners and millers to the more widely used banditos, or poachers. Or ladrones. Or even vaqueros -- buckaroos.

Brooks's nature resembles more than a few of the geologists I have met at mining sites over the years. He is friendly. Gregarious even. Casual. Possessing an easy way with his in-country comrades who report to him as senior geologist.

Still, after about a year watching events unfold on this mountain that stands some 2,000 meters in altitude, even someone as low key as this geologist, the gringo with the mustache who has worked for large Canadian mining companies his entire life, up until now, that is, Brooks lets slip a bit of his irritation.

Now that Señor Jeff is in charge of a team of 30 at a craggy outpost of some 800 very poor people, on a mountain three hours away from one of Latin America's most attractive and productive cities, he would like to see a few things besides geology click into place.

The camp chef, he says, might think about buying more local produce instead of trucking it in from Medellin. The kitchen staff, after making the lunchtime ensalada for the crew at 9 in the morning, really should refrigerate the salad until they serve it, he says. The young geos and a line-up inside the company barracks of a half-dozen 20-somethings mapping data points on computer screens "absolutely crave mentoring."

Yet this geologist, like most looking for world-class mineral deposits, does not even have time to map out surrounding parcels on his company's 5-by-15 kilometer patch of Marmato and the village of Enchandia, let alone act as teacher to a band of 30 or so young folk. Brooks is still scrambling on deadline, a badass corporate deadline, to render a clean database that then can merge with an existing database of drill holes and high-content mineral zones of Marmato and four adjacent properties.

He and his predecessors have drilled 27 holes into 8,000 meters of depth. His masters, his bosses, are probably muy smart. One is a geophysicist based in Medellin but hailing from, where else, Canada. Another, in charge of exploration, is based in Panama City, an up and coming city and meeting place du jour for deal makers with a foot in Latin America.

The company Brooks works for, Colombia Goldfields Ltd., is based in Toronto, with executives who have ties to properties in Nicaragua and elsewhere. Colombia Goldfields *, a public company, is at the mercy of shareholders and Geneva boutique banks when it comes to raising money for its diamond-bit drills, its salaries, its heavy equipment and the maintenance of the 30 employees living on the mountain.

Pretty soon, if what appears to be happening at El Marmato is real and not some logistic or political delirium, there will be a land grab, a scrum by even more peasants and silk-suited executives seeking their piece of these potently mineralized slopes and caves. And Colombia Goldfields will have to raise even more money, a lot more money, for mergers and property rights and relocations and mapping. For decent local fruit that is ripe but not rotten and ridden with worm carcasses, like some of the stuff from the Medellin produce wholesalers.

To raise that money efficiently, the company's execs need a share price that is high enough to keep current shareholders satisfied. Because if the stock's price is not high enough, those current shareholders will get diluted. Leached out like the rocks and dirt the mills around here process with cyanide solution. And then, they'll get MUY pissed off.

"There's real pressure here," he says, leading me and my photographer out the barracks door and onto what will become an impressive tour of Marmato. One of the first stops is what used to be the town square. To hear Brooks and his assistant, Santiago Jose Correa Ocambo, tell the story is to shudder and shake.

For decades, wildcat miners - the artisans -- have been running their own water sluices across the mountain. The disseminated mineral content of the mountain is high, and the gold dust seems sprinkled across the rocks and boulders. (Later visits to one of the independent mills (photo above), where the wildcatters take their rocks and dust to be crushed, sifted and separated with cyanide and other chemicals, confirmed for me that scores, if not hundreds, of families, have been feeding off the gold of this mountain for a long time.)

The water-flows across the mountain, which has the Rio Cauca running nearby, are degrading much of its structural integrity. "One night, I'm in bed," says Brooks, "and I hear what sounds like a sonic boom. Loud. Explosive. And then nothing." As it has done several times in the past three years, the steepest part of the mountain had let loose in a landslide. This one buried the town square, destroying City Hall and the Village Hospital in the process.

It's a wonder no one died in that slide. Or perhaps someone did and remains buried beneath the rubble. As far as the folks on the mountain know, everyone is still accounted for, even the banditos hauling their canvas sacks full of rock to the mills each day. Mongrels, as Sir Elton and Bernie Taupin phrase it, who ain't got a penny/sniffing for tidbits.

We stand now in the town square, buried by boulders and dirt not six months after the most recent major landslide. (This was just last week, my return to Colombia.) A lone donkey stands on one side of an adobe wall, pooping onto the chalky stone.

Oh yeh, and like some bats out of hell, there again are the "artisan" miners above us, splashing and running and funneling their water across and into the mountain, looking for their piece of the rock on this yellow-brick and manure road. Even as beneath them, there are people, their people, their paisan, living in homes, lean-tos, shacks. There are fellow Colombians working in the mills around them. Relatives. Cousins and cousins of cousins for sure. Even the company barracks with the cute little pool and the camp chef and the ping-pong tables that serve double duty as mapping desks, even that building is filled with their countrymen and countrywomen.

Except for senior geo Brooks, who hails from Pullman, Wash.

"The idiots," says Brooks. "They set up their sluice boxes, and they must be making money 'cause they keep coming back. But the landslides are weakening the road and burying their own homes. And they're still loading and dumping."

The largest legal owner of property in the state, or department, of Caldas, Colombia, is a so-called legacy company, an empresa that is domiciled in the country. Brooks estimates the legal haul from the mountain alone, Marmato that is, is about 25,000 ounces of gold a year, most of it from the mountain's lower half.

But oy, this is one beautiful piece of land here in western Colombia. Sitting near the equator, sprayed by sunshine and temperate climate and lots of water from the clouds, this mountain, in fact, most of Colombia, is a gardener's paradise. The first day I got here, I ate 14 separate fruits ... just for breakfast. The usual suspects and more: papaya, mango, starfruit, passion fruit, banana, melons, tomato (a fruit), kiwi, coffee beans and on and on. Es verdad, volditos mios.

The shade of a non-native eucalyptus, or a very native Colombian pine tree, or a magnolia, removes the sting from the sun's rays. And the orchids, they're everywhere.

So besides the water pressure in the company showers and the regular landslides that one day will kill people, aside from the kids working for a barely living wage and the mountain's registry of local poachers who swear by Dio that the mountain and its abundance of mineral belong to them by birthright, what other challenges could a middle-aged, toiling geologist who doctored in porphyrys possibly face in paradise?

"I've always worked for big companies, Barrack, Echo Bay, others," Brooks says," and I always have wanted to work for something small in search of something big. I think I have it; history, all of this rock and soil tell me I have it, something potentially world class in the way of a deposit, multiple deposits even at our surrounding sites."

What's to worry then? As the natives say, tranquillo, yes? "I guess you could say that, 'to relax,' but you get to leave here," Brooks says, not unkindly. "I am here, in 6 weeks and out 2, or in 8 and out 3. But we are under pressure. Local government requires convincing that this mountain requires serious attention if the roads are to maintain their structural integrity. There are relocation issues for the people who live here. The kitchen and the camp need better fruit. Local fruit. God knows these kids here need mentoring. I need a clean database. Our executives are ambitious. Gold is almost $1,000 an ounce, and they want numbers, resource numbers, mineralization numbers for a press release."

On top of all this, Brooks is concerned that one of the many labs cross-checking his assays and examining the gold content of his rock chips, a lab in the USA, somehow appears to have messed up a Quality Assurance Quality Control report, which is necessary if the company is to file its required Canadian 43-101 resource estimate for the mountain. The QAQC statement is delayed because of the lab snafu.

A quantifiable number of mineralized grade and size -- How much gold is in the mountan, hombres, and how easy is it to open-pit mine or drill out or both? -- a big number is what the financiers in Toronto and London and Switzerland and Vancouver need if they are to raise more dinero without watering down the stock price. Sadly, the delay in filing a 43-101 resource estimate is coinciding with a viscious drop in the stock prices of all junor exploration companies such as Colombia Goldfields.

Entonces, low stock price leads to less money for the company when it returns to the capital market for cash. That leads to lots more shares to raise that money, which leads to muy pissed-off current shareholders. Few execs, whether they run gold miners or semiconductor factories, want to mess with the good will they share with shareholders.

Brooks stops on this quite steep dirt path on the side of this mountain, halfway to heaven and halfway to hell (OK, so I like images attached to the word-flow once in a while ... but it all seems so true). We are both sweating like pigs, or is it donkeys that sweat like pigs? So is my photographer (and amigo), Jim Marx.

"Look, we have five active projects going here, we have nine core drill son site and another four or five on the way. We have very active rock chip sampling. This mountain and its property rights are sliced like a cake, a lower zone and an upper zone. If you have rights, and we've been buying them up as fast as we can, you can go lateral into the mountain hundreds of meters, but someone else owns the vertical rights above you and below you; first time I've ever seen that."

Next: Part III -- Alluvial dreams/hard rock facts en El Marmato

All photos but one by Jim Marx; Jeffrey W. Brooks profile snapped by Thom Calandra.
-- Thom Calandra is of service at ThomCalandra.com.


* Thom and his family own $45,000 worth of Colombia Goldfields shares at current prices. The Toronto company's stock trades in Canada, Germany and on Nasdaq in the USA. Thom and family have no intention of buying or selling any current or additional shares of the company until at least three months after this series on El Marmato is completed. Thom paid about $60,000 for the shares several months ago. He and his photograher have received no fee or compensation from Colombia Goldfields, unless you count some empanadas, some platanos and frijoles and three-hour jeep rides into the countryside.