The Curse of King Midas

Midas, an ancient Greece monarch was granted a wish for having taken care well of a friend of the god Dionysus. The greedy king, despite warnings, asked to have the power to turn everything into gold just by touching it. He imagined a life full of joys and fortunes. But tragedy soon came, as he could not eat because all food turned into gold. There are several versions of the end of the myth, in one of them, the most optimistic, Midas was freed from the spell by bathing in a river; in another, the pessimist one, he died of hunger.

This myth has been used to teach people about the consequences of greed, but recently it is used to show the tragedies suffered by gold-producing countries, especially those of the so-called third world, and Colombia is no exception. The country is experiencing a gold bonanza, but at the same time it faces a serious problem of illegal exploitation that it has not been able to contain and that threatens to destroy ecosystems and the lives of entire communities. Amazon, its rivers, and the indigenous peoples who live there are on target, and although the mining sector does not want people to stigmatize this extractive activity, the truth is that the country produces more gold illegally with its respective environmental damages.

The gold bonanza in Colombia began in the past decade due to the high international prices of the precious metal and the increase in production in the country. Between 2005 and 2021, the ounce went from about USD 500 to USD 1800 and in 2022, it has had peaks above USD 2000. Meanwhile, according to data from the Colombian Mining Information System, the country has had two gold production booms: one between 2011 and 2016 when it went from producing 1.7 million troy ounces to 2 million troy ounces, and another which began last year with 2.5 million troy ounces extracted from Colombian soil and rivers.