Marmato Gold: El Finale!

By Thom Calandra
thomcalandra.com

MEDELLIN, Colombia -- In this final chapter of our quest for Marmato gold, we learn that every story sells a picture. I was lucky. I had several of 'em, thanks to a photographer who snapped up a storm on that old mountain in the Colombian Andes.

I think Jim Marx's shots of our visit to EL Marmato, some three hours' humpy drive from the vivid city of Medellin, are remarkable. His photos show the mountain, the miners and the villagers just as anyone sees them day to day. (Photos by Jim Marx except where noted.)

There are no enhanced images, no staged shots. Not even the signature shot of the battered boots just below. The wildcat mills and the rock-hauling vaqueros and the careful mujer weighing the gold dust that scores of families sift and water-sluice off the mountain each and every day, these photos testify to the potency of El Marmato and the surrounding properties that a tinny (and tiny) Canadian/Panamian/Nicaraguan company and its Medellin affiliate are steadily acquiring in their quest for 10 million-plus ounces of gold.

Colombia Goldfields and its chief geologist, Jeffrey Brooks, are cobbling together a resource that just might ignite, once again and after decades of violence and poverty and apathy and narcotics, a run on the mountains and valleys of inland Colombia.

Our first three parts of this "Au Get Off Of My Mountain" series are available here at thomcalandra.blogspot.com and http://www.thomcalandra.com/. They describe the joys and pains of searching for gold in a dusty, renegade yet lovely spot just off the equator. (The mangoes, by the way, are to die for. Ditto the platanos y frijoles with sour cream.)

I need not describe in this finale the landslides that buried the town square. Or the resource estimates and geology this upstart company, resurrected from failed predecessors, is presenting in its appeal to investors for support. But please do read the earlier sections of this story for the details.

As many of you might know from my years and years of reporting for MarketWatch (the news pioneer I helped to start and where I dedicated 8 years of my working life as chief editor, chief commentator and chief gold nut) and The Calandra Report and even Bloomberg, The San Francisco Examiner and more than a few Gannett newspapers, I'm a color guy. I'm a teller of tales, all of them true, with the exception of my just completed novel, PABLO BY NUMBERS. (See www.thomcalandra.com for more on that baby.)

Numbers, even the numbers in that solitary work of fiction, while relevant to all of us, especially investors who work their bums off each day just to make it to tomorrow, the numbers hold my interest for moments, not hours or days.

The stories and colors and the food, the people and the flowers (orchids in the case of beautiful Colombia) and the fresh air, these are the essences that hold me and touch me and move me.

Colombia moves me.

The city of Medellin, a place of about 3 million, not counting the squatters from the countryside, is where once I taught English many years ago. The billboards proclaim: "Medellin el tiene todo," and it's true. Medellin does have it all. The orchids and the beautiful men and women. The luscious fruit and the sidestreets abundant with oak and pine and eucalyptus and ... well, cosmetic surgery clinics. Medellin has it all: the Antioquian
restaurants, clappy with courtyards and wicker, and the Botero swollen art; the dawn-to-dusk work ethic that sets this city apart from many of its sister cities across Latin America and the wide and spotless boulevards that resemble those in Madrid or Buenos Aires.

Medellin has it all. It has the traffic, for sure. The Poblado and other lush neighborhoods. The lore of that other Pablo, Señor Escobar the narco who for all of the myths out there deserves supreme credit for giving the world one of the great and years-long chase scenes in the annals of crime and commerce.

Medellin also has plenty of fresh air these days. The air is well scrubbed, a lot fresher than I remember it from the early 1980s. Cleansed I suppose by the afternoon thundershowers. Being up in the mountains helps, for sure. So do the cleaner fuels Latin America is using these days as compared with 20 years ago.

As for cowboys on motorbikes, well, this city has ALWAYS been safe. Unless you're a narco or the son/daughter of a narco. Or a politician. Next time someone says, when you're headed down to Medellin or Cartagena or Bogota via Miami way, next time someone says, "Well, be safe down there, Thommy boy," and I hear this all the time, you go ahead and tell 'em, "Well, and you be safe next time yer head to Rio D. (current murder capital of the galaxy), or to East Oakland or Detroit. Or to certain sections of Mumbai."

So enough with zee words. This final part, this ringing endorsement of Colombia and the small company hoping to make it big on EL Marmato, is about images. For those, I give thanks to Mr. Marx. He came. He saw. He didn't snore at night. He drank the water. We sucked on passion fruit. What a guy, verdad?

-- Oy! That's Jim (photo just above and right) in Marmato's ruined town square: one of the few photos I snapped with my own little picture box. You can see in the background a documentary shoot of the square, buried by various landslides in the past two years as wildcat miners water-sluiced the hill, then cherry-picked what looks (to me) like abundant ore on Marmato.

-- C3PO (here at left ) never worked this hard. Marmato miners and villagers fashioned him from bronze 20 or more years ago, and he still looks current there in the lonely town square.

-- OK I confess, for someone who says he is in no way superstitious (writing on the wall), I have this thing about snapping license plates. I dunno what it means. So
the buseta with the Marmato peak behind it is my shot. It's pretty country, even after three hours of humping and bumping behind big-rigs and waiting at public works traffic stops along the (very) busy road to the mountain.

-- Santiago J. Correa Ocampo is one of the environmental engineers in Jeff Brooks' concentrated camp of Colombian kids looking for a paycheck as mineral data processors and Indiana Jones wanna-be's. That's Santiago standing next to me (photo left below/the punk in red tee is me) at one of the Marmato mills that process rock and boulder with cyanide. The result: grams of Au dust that pay the rent, and put mangos, papaya and fresh apples on the table for the villagers who either have rights to parts of the mountain or those who don't but still heave rocks and claw at the dirt.

One day, after marching across the mountain, Santiago, protege of the senior geo, Mr. Brooks, told me something along the lines of, "You know, in the end, it's up to local government. If they don't care about what happens here (800 or so folks on the mountain), none of this will ever get developed. But if they care, and do something about relocating the village, then this is maybe the beginning of something very big." (Santiago, whose entire five word and 20-syllable name is available on request, didn't really say it like that. He said it like dees: "Joo no, in dee end, eez up to los hombres politicos ...")

Santiago told me the other day -- here in July as I add to this posting -- that the company is awaiting decisions from local government about how to handle the folks living on Marmato. He feels pretty good about the situation, he says, acknowledging this is his first experience on a property where land owners and villagers hold so much sway they can harvest their own gold dust legally and illegally - as they have for decades.

So that's about it, volditos mios. Hope you don't think I'm a mule-headed pinhead for following my dream back to a country that most Norte Americanos don't even consider for a beach vacation these days, let alone a mountain hike. If I'm right about this region's glaze of ore, I'll be able to buy my own Escobar-style finca in the Andes, girded by coffee bean trees and banana leaf. Dang that traffic, though.

-- Thom Calandra
Thom Calandra is of service at ThomCalandra.com.

Photos by Jim Marx, except where noted.

Do not use our images without our permission, por favor!

* 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. (Umm, that would be today, May 19, 2008.) Thom (that's me) paid about $60,000 for the shares several months ago. He and his photograher (that would be Jim) 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.