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The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival
mining groups dispute access to the gold mine near the mountain
town of Sorata, some 150 kilometers (about 90 miles) northwest
of the country's administrative capital of La Paz, said Col.
Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits
straddle the remote area.
Agudo had initially reported six people killed but revised the
toll to five after firefighters finished recovering the bodies
from under the rubble. The dead included three men, a pregnant
woman and an infant, he said.
Bolivia's deputy interior minister, Jhonny Aguilera, said the
suspected perpetrator of the attack was killed by the explosion,
which was detonated by remote control.
The predawn explosion at the mine struck a three-story house and
set cars and tractors alight. The fires wrecked several other
structures and cut electricity.
Bolivia’s mining industry stands out for its huge sector of
cooperatives — legal groups of artisanal miners — which drive
58% of mining production, according to the latest government
figures. The thousands of groups also wield political clout in
the resource-rich country where they have representation in
Parliament.
Cooperatives historically emerged in Bolivia as more established
mining operations dismissed legions of workers in the risky,
boom-and-bust business, compelling miners to organize themselves
when commodity prices slumped and lay-offs loomed.
Over the decades, cooperatives have increasingly fought over the
chance to extract minerals — hurling rocks and dynamite sticks
at each other and against unionized, salaried workers from
Bolivia’s state-run mining company, Comibol.
Comibol came to dominate the crucial industry under former
President Evo Morales, a socialist leader who governed the
landlocked Andean nation from 2006 to 2019 and barred foreign
companies from having a controlling stake in mineral extraction.
In Thursday’s clash, the struggle for control of certain veins
of the gold reserve between two rival cooperatives had simmered
for years, said Jhony Silva, a legal adviser to one of them.
Gold remains one of Bolivia's main mineral exports, with almost
$2.87 billion worth of the mineral shipped out of the country in
2023.
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