Global Muckraking from The Center for Public Integrity

Best of 2012: International journalism

2012-12-31T06:00:01-05:00

The year in projects from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Suspect in fatal DUI case found in South Korea

South Korea — 2012-04-09T09:13:09-04:00

U.S. authorities have located international fugitive Kyung Ho Song in his native South Korea, more than a decade after he fled Illinois to avoid being tried for drunken driving and reckless homicide in an accident that killed a 43-year-old single mother.

The search for Song was reactivated last spring after the Chicago Tribune contacted prosecutors and police about the dormant case. Even though U.S. authorities discovered Song’s location in December, they have yet to formally request help from South Korean officials, and it is not clear when or if Song might be extradited back to Illinois.

His case provides another glimpse into the gaps and lack of coordination in the criminal justice system that allow border-crossing fugitives to avoid prosecution.

Law enforcement officials would not comment on why there was no progress in the case for so many years, but one official suggested that it languished because of a lack of communication among the police, county prosecutors, federal agents and Justice Department officials. All played some role in pursuing Song, but none seemed to take stewardship of the extradition effort and push the case.

The Tribune's “Fugitives From Justice” series, an examination of more than 200 international fugitives cases from northern Illinois and thousands more nationwide, spotlighted Song's case in November. Tribune reporters then teamed up with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to try to locate Song.

Independent of authorities, Tribune and ICIJ reporters in recent weeks found Song in a glass and concrete high-rise apartment in Yongin, a quiet residential suburb about an hour and half’s drive from the capital city of Seoul.

During four interviews, the once-prosperous shoe store owner, who is now 73, bemoaned how his life had unraveled since his flight.

“I am such an unlucky guy,” Song said.

Brenda Molina, the daughter of Song’s alleged victim, said she was stunned that Song could be found by reporters and outraged that authorities had waited so long to act.

“It’s sad that it’s taken all of 16 years to do something that should have been done years ago,” Molina said. “If you could do something now, something could have been done years ago. Oh my God, it’s been hard.”

As in many of the cases, the victim was an immigrant — in this case from Ecuador — whose family did not have the clout or the know-how to press for justice.

Remembered as a high-spirited woman who liked to play bingo and dance, Sonia Naranjo worked as manager of housekeepers at a suburban hotel. She was heading to a casino with three friends in October 1996 when their station wagon broke down just after midnight on a well-lit stretch of Lake Street just west of Route 59 in Bartlett.

Song’s white Oldsmobile plowed into them from behind as they tried to push their car to safety, according to police records. Police found Naranjo crumpled against Song’s front bumper, and she was dead on arrival at an Elgin hospital, while one of her friends was severely injured, records and interviews show.

Song had no significant injuries, just a slight discoloration and swelling on one lip. But he had red, bloodshot eyes and smelled of liquor, a police report said.

Song later presented himself to the court as a modest, $12,000-a-year shoe store manager and was released after putting down a $2,500 bail bond deposit.

In fact, Song co-owned a strip mall, a large Schaumburg home and Chicago commercial property worth a total of more than $1 million, the Tribune’s subsequent investigation found.

After Song was charged, he worked with his wife to liquidate those assets. Then, in 1998, he withdrew his guilty plea to reckless homicide and aggravated driving under the influence and absconded to South Korea, government records show.

“I was scared,” Song said in the recent interview. “I don’t understand the U.S. law. I didn’t understand what is going on.”

On the evening of the accident, Song said in the interview, he had “a couple of shots of Korean liquor” with friends before climbing in his car.

But Song denied being drunk, even though a Bartlett police breath alcohol test taken more than an hour after the accident showed his blood alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit, according to court records.

Recounting the crash, Song said he “didn’t even realize they were hit. Then the lady died. It was an accident. I blame my unfortunate fate.”

“My life changed upside down since then,” Song said.

Since fleeing to South Korea, Song has worked intermittently as a school janitor, earning roughly $700 a month, and lived in an apartment funded in part by a relative, according to interviews in South Korea.

After liquidating his assets, Song claimed he was able to give his wife about $80,000 and his son in Chicago $50,000 and used $70,000 to pay the Chicago lawyer who defended him in court and helped him execute the financial deals before he fled.

But Song also had ready cash when he landed in South Korea. In the interview, Song asserted that when he arrived, “I only had about $100,000 in my hand.”

Song said a wealthy nephew put him up in an apartment in Chungju, southeast of Seoul, for a year and a half. Then, Song said, he put down $70,000 and his nephew another $125,000 to buy him the apartment where he now lives in Yongin.

A reporter located Song in February, though at first he would speak only through the closed door, asking, “Why are you interested in the incident that happened 15 years ago?”

Song later called the reporter and agreed to meet, but he insisted on a cafe about two hours by subway from his home.

Wearing a black hat and thick down coat, Song looked anxious and frail as he sipped coffee and offered a guarded account of his life and the accident.

“It is the incident I don’t want to remember at all,” he said.

The night before that cafe interview, Song said, “I couldn’t sleep. I thought about jumping off my apartment balcony and killing myself.” But, Song said, “when I think about my children, I couldn’t. I have already disappointed them, and if I commit suicide, I am burdening them even more.”

Song said he is now retired and has not worked since last year. “I am an old guy; no one wants to hire me,” he said.

Song said no authorities have come to look for him in South Korea since he fled the United States.

In 2003, the U.S. Justice Department filed a warrant for Song, saying he had phoned U.S. authorities to tell them he was living permanently in the Sungdong-gu district of Seoul and to inquire about his immigration status.

Song said it must have been a relative who called on his behalf. He asserted he has “never called the U.S. immigration office, never applied for the green card, never thought about going back to the United States. I was and am still scared that they would find me and catch me.”

The South Korean immigration office’s records also show he has not left the country.

The FBI located Song in December, and Cook County prosecutors then asked the Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs to submit an arrest request to South Korea. It will ultimately be up to South Korean authorities to arrest Song.

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office said Justice officials have not yet sent the request to South Korean authorities but have indicated they intend to move forward.

“We want him, and the case is strong,” said Fabio Valentini, criminal division chief of the state’s attorney’s office.

Although Song and his wife divorced in Chicago before he fled, other Chicago business and court records indicate that they continued to live together, bought property and secured a business loan as husband and wife.

In his interview, Song said the divorce was genuine and that he and his wife had fought for years. “I used to drink a lot in Korea, and we used to argue over my drinking habit,” he said.

His wife “said she couldn’t stand me anymore” and left him, and Song said he does not know where she is or how she is doing. Song said he now lives with another woman who does not know of his past.

Song added that his daughter-in-law had divorced his son because she “couldn’t stand the fact that her father-in-law is a criminal.”

Song said that from time to time, he talks to his three adult children, who all live in the U.S., but they don’t visit him in South Korea. “Why would they? They are ashamed of me,” he said.

Song, who was a member of a Korean-American Presbyterian church in Elk Grove Village, had few words for those killed and injured the night of his car accident but said: “I know I committed a sin. I go to the cathedral and pray for the victims every day.”

Brenda Molina, who was 23 when she lost her mother, penned a two-page letter to Song’s judge that still sits in the Cook County criminal court file.

“Mr. JUDGE when I found out my mom had past (sic) away, I wanted to die,” Molina wrote. “When I saw my mom laying in the coffin, I felt so bad. I was going crazy, I was screaming, crying, yelling, saying to my mom to wake up.”

Molina continued: “We’ve lost the best thing we had in this world (OUR MOM). We all wanted to go with her, so she won’t be cold any more, because her hands were so cold.”

*David Jackson and Gary Marx are Tribune reporters. Nari Kim, a reporter for South Korea’s Channel A, is an associate of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity. Her work on this story in South Korea was funded by a grant to ICIJ from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

Colombia vows to clean up coltan mining

Colombia — 2013-01-23T13:01:05-05:00

After an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists expose about paramilitaries involvement in the coltan trade, Colombia is moving to curb illegal mining of the highly sought after mineral.

Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia, travelled to the lawless southeastern corner of the country last weekend and declared his intention to designate the coltan-rich region a “strategic reserve, for national security reasons.”

The mining industry there is currently controlled by what Mines and Energy Minister Mauricio Cárdenas called “shady interests” in a tweet on March 11. A ministry official said Monday that the government eventually hopes to auction off mining permits to legitimate companies, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The groups Cárdenas was alluding to are right-wing paramilitaries and rebels-turned-drug dealers in the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, the FARC. As ICIJ reported earlier this month, those armed groups have coerced the native Indians who live in the region to work the mines or bought their labor with free beer, food, and brand-name athletic shoes. He said that these groups are “a national security concern for us.”

The heavy, black, conductive mineral is used in everything from sophisticated personal electronics to precision weapons. It is used to improve the ability of microchip processors to function in extremely hot or cold temperatures.

Unlike diamonds, the origins of which can be determined via geo-fingerprinting, there is no accurate test to trace coltan. This has made it an attractive new source of revenue for narco-terrorist groups like the FARC.

Their illicit role in the trade may also become an economic concern for the Colombian government, which claims to control 5 percent of the world’s coltan reserves.

Experts think a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill could label Colombian coltan a “conflict mineral” because of the paramilitaries involvement in the industry. Then even legally mined coltan from Colombia would likely be banned from the U.S. market, where manufacturers annually import about 1.1 million pounds of the 3 million produced worldwide each year.

High quality coltan generally sells for around $50 a pound, but it has spiked to as high as $300 a pound in recent years. An estimated $150 million worth of the mineral is sold each year, analysts told ICIJ. The exact size of the global market is unknown because there is no public commodity price index for the mineral and most purchase contracts are confidential.

Fugitive Catholic priest sought for alleged sexual assault of minor

Hyderabad,Andhra Pradesh,India — 2012-03-14T09:35:51-04:00

Accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old Chicago girl, the Rev. Sleeva Raju Policetti fled Illinois nearly a decade ago to his native India, where the Roman Catholic archbishop of Hyderabad soon issued an order barring him from ministry.

In 2008, after a canonical trial, the Vatican took the rare and severe step of defrocking Policetti over the allegations, meaning he is no longer a priest.
But civil justice never caught up to the fugitive ex-priest, whose lawyers in India have fought efforts to extradite him to Chicago to face 20 felony counts of criminal sexual assault and aggravated criminal sexual abuse.
And now it's apparently too late.
In recent days, Policetti's case took a dramatic turn when an attorney for Policetti's alleged victim indicated to Cook County prosecutors that she was no longer willing to pursue charges — a decision that would effectively force prosecutors to dismiss the case and abandon the years-long extradition effort.
Prosecutors are now trying to set up a face-to-face meeting with the alleged victim, said Sally Daly, spokeswoman for the Cook County state's attorney's office. “Proving up this case would very much involve us having the victim willing to participate in the prosecution,” Daly said. “Obviously, things have changed; she's an adult now. We respect the wishes of the victim, same as you. At the end of the day, that's what matters most.”
The potential end to Policetti's prosecution offers yet another example of how an opaque and slow-moving international extradition system can derail justice, leaving suspects accused of murder, rape and crimes against children free when they find haven in foreign countries.
Policetti's alleged victim initially worked with authorities, setting in motion an international extradition that required the approval of top officials from the U.S. State and Justice departments and India's Ministry of External Affairs.
But years into the grinding legal process, her attorney said, she wants to put the matter behind her. Her contact with the state's attorney came after the woman and her attorney learned the Tribune was preparing an article about Policetti.
Similar years-long delays have undermined other international fugitive manhunts, the Tribune found in an examination of more than 100 cases from the Chicago area and thousands of others nationwide. In some instances, witnesses died or disappeared, making the cases impossible to prosecute.
Policetti is one of at least 32 Roman Catholic priests nationwide since 1985 who have absconded to foreign countries while facing criminal charges or investigations for allegedly sexually assaulting or abusing youths in the United States, according to a Tribune review of federal warrants, news reports and law enforcement sources. Only five have been returned to the U.S. to face trial.
More than two dozen other Catholic clergy went abroad while facing internal church inquiries or civil allegations of child sex misconduct, or were transferred to foreign countries by church authorities, the Tribune found.
Confidential ecclesiastic records on Policetti's case, which broke in 2002, provide a rare glimpse into the actions of top officials of the Catholic Church regarding an accused priest just as the Vatican was becoming engulfed in a burgeoning scandal over pedophile priests around the world.
Though reporters found that an initial two-day delay by the church in reporting the child sex assault allegation may have given Policetti time to plan his escape from Chicago, records also show that top church officials here and in India pressed hard for Policetti's return and expressed fury at his alleged crimes and his continued ability to evade justice.
Told of the recent developments in the case, Chicago Archdiocese legal services director John O'Malley said, “From the outset, the archdiocese has supported and cooperated with the state's efforts to bring this case to a just resolution. The archdiocese and those of us involved in dealing with these tragic matters would never presume to make a judgment about the feelings of someone who has been sexually abused.”
The archdiocese reached an out-of-court settlement with Policetti's alleged victim, a person with knowledge of the case confirmed. The church declined to disclose any details out of respect for the alleged victim's privacy. The alleged victim declined to comment for this article.
Her attorney, who spoke on condition that he not be identified, said the Chicago Tribune account of the case was “inaccurate and irresponsible,” although he would not identify specific errors.
St. Tarcissus, the vibrant Northwest Side parish where Policetti had worked, saw a sharp drop in attendance and donations when the assault allegations first made news.
“The lives of a lot of parishioners were turned upside down,” said the retired Rev. Daniel McCarthy, who was pastor when Policetti fled. “People were hurt and disillusioned and betrayed.”
Prosecutors say Policetti was 42 and the girl had just turned 16 when the alleged assaults began. Policetti gave the girl jewelry and other gifts “to further his abusive sexual relationship with her,” according to a Cook County prosecutor's court affidavit made public in New Delhi. The alleged victim “felt that she could not refuse the advances of Fr. Policetti because he was a priest.”
In the court records and a brief interview earlier this year in India, Policetti proclaimed his innocence and said he is the victim of a racist conspiracy.
“Because of the allegations and case against me, I lost my permanent job at the church in Hyderabad and get only temporary jobs, sometimes on weekends,” Policetti said from his lawyer's chamber in the stately Patiala House Courts Complex in New Delhi.
Despite being barred from public ministry, then defrocked, Policetti has continued to use the title of “Reverend.” As recently as 2010, he sent Chicago parishioners greeting cards soliciting donations, saying he ran an orphanage and school near Hyderabad.
Priests sometimes call him to fill in at church functions, Policetti said in the interview.
“Gradually people have ... forgotten the case, but the sense of frustration about what has happened with me has yet not left me,” Policetti said. “It is only God's blessings and the strength my family and lawyers have given that have kept me going.”
Like many other international fugitives traced by the Tribune, priests accused of sexual misconduct often returned to their hometowns and did little to conceal their identities or whereabouts, the newspaper found. Until the pedophile-priests scandal erupted a decade ago, many of them were given church housing and jobs after fleeing, and that still occurs in some cases.
Another priest who fled to his native India, the Rev. Joseph Jeyapaul, left the U.S. in 2005 just before he was charged in Minnesota with sexually assaulting 14-year-old Megan Peterson after she sought his advice about becoming a nun. Jeyapaul asserted his innocence and continued to work as a priest in India, where he was prohibited from direct contact with children.
Peterson, who is now 22, told the Tribune that authorities have advised her that Jeyapaul's extradition from India “could probably take 10 years, or maybe it won't even happen.”
It has been difficult to carry on with her life with the case unresolved, Peterson added, but she is determined to bring Jeyapaul to trial because she fears he could abuse others.
“To see a predator still on the loose, to have used every resource you've got to get him back and to know they're just untouchable — that feeling is gut-wrenching,” Peterson said.
A stocky and energetic associate pastor known at St. Tarcissus for his thundering homilies and attention to the sick, “Father Raju” Policetti came to Chicago in 1996 as an “extern” priest who would serve in America but remain accountable to church authorities in his home diocese in Hyderabad.
During the time of the alleged abuse, which started in 2001, a church secretary noticed Policetti with the girl in his private rectory bedroom “on numerous occasions with the door closed,” according to a Chicago police detective's affidavit. The secretary “counseled Sleeva that this was considered inappropriate behavior, but he dismissed her warning,” the detective wrote.
During this period, Policetti applied to remain in Chicago as a priest of the Chicago diocese. Chicago rejected his application early in 2002 because he had come under church investigation for allegedly improperly raising donations to support an orphanage and school in India, church records and interviews show. Church authorities questioned where the money was going.
On a Saturday morning in May 2002, two months before Policetti's scheduled July 14 departure, a parish member brought then-pastor McCarthy letters exchanged between Policetti's alleged victim and another girl that disclosed the priest's alleged misconduct, according to court records and interviews.
A stunned McCarthy immediately conveyed the letters to the Rev. Larry McBrady, then the Chicago vicar for priests. At some point over the weekend, McBrady spoke with Kathleen Leggdas, who headed the archdiocese office that investigated abuse allegations against priests.
Church officials say they kept their communications completely private. “I didn't want to scare him off,” McCarthy recalled.
Archdiocese policy required prompt reporting of child abuse allegations to the state Department of Children and Family Services hotline. Records show Leggdas' call came around noon Monday, May 6, just over two days after the letters surfaced.
During that 50-hour window, Policetti sold his car for $3,500, telling the buyer “he was ill and had to return to India,” according to a Chicago police detective's court affidavit.
Policetti caught a flight out of the U.S. on Tuesday, about two hours before police scrambled to O'Hare International Airport to catch him. Church authorities would not comment directly on the delay.
Police quickly contacted Policetti's brother, the Rev. Prasad Rao Policetti, who was then posted at nearby St. Monica Parish. But Prasad was “deceitful and evasive,” telling police that his brother flew to Amsterdam even though he knew Sleeva Policetti was headed to India, the detective's court affidavit states.
Prasad Policetti would not answer police questions about the brothers' various bank accounts. And he phoned a St. Tarcissus secretary and urged her to persuade the alleged victim to “change her story” and say she and Sleeva Policetti were “just kissing,” according to the affidavit.
The Tribune's efforts to locate Prasad Policetti, who left Chicago for Hyderabad four days after his brother, were unsuccessful.
After Sleeva Policetti arrived in India, he called the Chicago detective and admitted “kissing and touching” the “young girl” but denied sexual relations, according to court records.
Sleeva Policetti said “he was uncertain about when he would return to Chicago,” Detective Richard Lapinski wrote in a court affidavit. “He stated he could be contacted at the Bishop's House in Hyderabad and provided a phone number.”
Cardinal Francis George had immediately alerted then-Hyderabad Archbishop Marampudi Joji about the allegations against Policetti. “Father Policetti must meet with the police,” the cardinal wrote in a faxed letter. “Given the grave nature of this criminal allegation, I ask that ... you direct him to return to Chicago immediately.”
When Policetti arrived in Hyderabad at 10 a.m. Thursday, May 9, he went straight to Joji's house and strenuously maintained his innocence, church records show.
Four days later, George faxed Joji another letter warning him that Policetti had raised “considerable sums of money” by telling parishioners “he was opening a school in Hyderabad. He may suddenly disappear again and use such monies, including $30,000 in a Bank of South India account, for his personal support.”
Joji faxed George an “urgent” reply saying he had persuaded Policetti to return to Chicago. Policetti wrote separately to assure George he was heading back to Chicago “at the earliest” to “tell you my version of what had happened.”
More than a week passed. When Joji finally summoned Policetti, his brother Prasad appeared instead and told Joji “definitively” that Sleeva Policetti “will not be returning to Chicago,” church records show.
Joji then took the most drastic step in his power. He notified Sleeva Policetti in a letter that he was barred “from officiating or participating in public or private as a priest,” citing his “deceptive claims of innocence.”
Yet roughly a year later, Policetti wrote to a St. Tarcissus parishioner and encouraged her to support a child she had sponsored through him at an orphanage. As he would do in extradition court filings and fundraising appeals over the following years, Policetti described himself as a priest in good standing: “Regarding my ministry, I will be posted soon in the parish ... as a pastor,” he wrote.
Chicago archdiocese officials sent a copy of that fundraising appeal to Joji, asking in alarm whether Policetti was indeed about to be posted as a pastor.
A month later, in May 2003, India police arrested Policetti outside Hyderabad.
As India began the process of extraditing him to the U.S. to face trial, Policetti was held in judicial custody for about two weeks, then released on bail, court records show. He has been free since then.
*Jackson and Marx are Tribune reporters. Ritu Sarin, a reporter for the Indian Express, is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Her work on this story from India was funded by a grant to ICIJ from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

Colombia’s black-market coltan tied to drug traffickers, paramilitaries

Colombia — 2012-03-15T18:39:21-04:00

On a narrow trail muddied by rain, a slight man in a thin T-shirt emerges from the thick of a remote jungle, down where Colombia ends and Venezuela and Brazil begin. He’s striding quickly, despite nearly 50 pounds of rocks inside a woven basket, anchored to his back by a white cloth wrapped around his forehead.

“Yes, I’m coming from the mine,” the man says, the weight of the basket preventing him from looking up at strangers he’s encountered on the trail, inside Puinawai National Park. He’s part of a local Indian tribe and is moving precious ore in the same palm-frond baskets his ancestors once weaved to bring prey home from a hunt.

The miner has little time to talk; the drop-off point for his ore is still miles away, outside the park.

Closer to the mine, near a stream, men briskly shovel muddy mounds of small rocks onto screens, then pour water over them to expose what they hope are pebbles containing tungsten or coltan. And at the mine itself, men, women and small children dig holes and sift through mud in search of ore.

This is an illegal mine, on a plot of land stripped of trees and surrounded by pristine jungle.

The work here goes on well out of the view of Colombian police patrols looking for traffickers moving contraband ore containing valuable minerals like coltan and tungsten.

“We are seeing the emergence of illegal groups engaged in mining activities, especially in rare-earth [minerals] in the eastern part of Colombia, very distant and remote areas in which mining is illegal,” said Mauricio Cárdenas, chief of Colombia’s Mining Ministry. These groups are “a national security concern for us.”

It’s proof, he said, that a black market for valuable metals and rare-earth minerals is growing in territory the Colombian government has historically found difficult to police. Not only is this mine inside a national preserve, but it’s tucked in a corner of Colombia infamous for drug smugglers and armed paramilitaries.

Cárdenas had just seen a video, recorded by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in which miners scratch at the ground in search of what industry experts call “vitamins” for global high-tech manufacturers of microchips and controls that enhance growing numbers of smart phones and other consumer electronics.

These miners are collecting what can be considered “conflict minerals,” thus not just violating Colombian law, but potentially breaking international trade rules set by the United Nations.

What Cárdenas and others fear is that minerals smuggled from Colombia are making their way into the legitimate flow of minerals that feeds high-tech manufacturers. Illegal mining and smuggling have led to human-rights abuses against vulnerable tribal members, activists say. And police fear that it’s creating yet another illicit, profitable business for the region’s drug traffickers and well-armed paramilitaries.

Ultimately, the black market could also garner a label of “conflict minerals” for Colombian exports — a tattoo that has turned similar material from Central Africa into international contraband. For example, the U.S. government’s Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 prohibits American firms from buying natural resources obtained illegally or in areas controlled by criminals or terrorists.

Cocaine and coltan

In the late 19th century, Alexander Von Humboldt was the first outsider to map this part of the Amazon watershed. He found two rivers with reddish water, the Inírida and the Guaviare, where they empty into the dark waters of the Atabapo River and become the Rio Negro in Brazil. Today it’s the home for hundreds of fish species and South America’s largest sanctuary for endangered river dolphins.

The region is part of South America’s Guiana Shield which cuts across the continent’s northern arc. It’s a geologic sibling to the Sub-Saharan Shield in Africa. The local port town of Inírida takes its name from a native flower that has close relatives in Central Africa. Geologists say meteor strikes and strong river currents over millions of years have left rich mineral deposits near the surface.

This is where ICIJ and Colombia’s Noticias Uno television program got a rare glimpse of illicit mining in a part of Colombia’s Amazon jungle that’s hard for outsiders to penetrate.

Reporters found Puinawai Indians working the illegal mineral mine, a site first seen from the air as a bald, brown patch cut out of verdant jungle near the tribe’s sacred landmark, Mount Puinawai.

Mine workers told ICIJ that guerrillas control the mine, armed paramilitaries control the path they must take to the Guaviare River and narco-trafficking gangs transport the mineral. Guerrillas demand payment before a mine can be worked, paramilitaries want money before a load of sand and rock can be washed in the river, and then traffickers demand the ore be delivered to them miles away, outside of the park’s boundaries.

ICIJ interviewed police and soldiers in the area who are on the hunt for smugglers hauling illicit tungsten from local mines or coltan from across the border in Venezuela.

“The illegal minerals flow to and from Venezuela in pangas [motor boats] and upriver to Colombian side,” said Guainía state Police Commander William Ruiz. From Colombia, he added, coltan goes around the world.

Black-market coltan in the wilds of southeast Colombia has also captured the attention of U.S. law enforcement officials because of a connection to one of the world’s most powerful drug cartels.

Near Puinawai National Park, police said, an illicit operation mining coltan and other precious metals is run by members of the Cifuentes Villa family. In indictments filed in U.S. federal court, anti-drug authorities say fugitive members of the family supply cocaine to Mexico’s Joaquín Guzmán Loera — known as “El Chapo” (“Shortie”) — and his Sinaloa drug cartel.

In placing a myriad of Cifuentes Villa operations on its drug kingpin list, the U.S. Department of the Treasury made the clan’s mining business off-limits to Americans. U.S. officials called the mining company a money-laundering operation in support of a cocaine-smuggling enterprise.

Colombian authorities have also moved against the family, pulling its license to mine an area where 83 tons of coltan and tungsten ore have been seized since 2010.

“What we have found is that very sophisticated drug trafficking organizations are becoming more and more involved on minerals traffic from Puinawai Park and Venezuela, as it is documented on the judiciary files in an ongoing investigation,” Col. Alfredo de Vivero, the Colombian military commander in the area, told ICIJ.

Despite decades of interdiction operations by Colombian security forces and American military advisers, rules in this region are still often dictated either by right-wing paramilitaries or by rebels-turned-drug dealers in the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, the FARC.

De Videro said traffickers have coerced whole families from the Puinawai tribe to work the mines, or lured them with free beer, food and brand-name athletic shoes.

“Since [smugglers] invaded the territory of the indigenous community, the community denounced them, and since then we keep watch over the area to see to it that there is no illegal mining,” police commander Ruiz said as he gave a tour of his trophy — about four acres of barren land, bearing evidence of mining activity, confiscated in a recent raid.

Tracing minerals

Colombian police are also looking closely at a cache of tungsten ore captured last September in the middle of the Guaviare River in the Colombian state of Guainia, on the edge of Puinawai National Park.

“One of the problems we are having is that in these areas, there are some small titles, legally granted, that are being used as safe havens for the legalization of [illegal] activities,” Mining Minister Cárdenas said.

In 1995 Rafael Alberto Rodríguez Forero won the right to exploit a plot called El Caney de los Cristales, near the national park and the Guaviare River. Over the years, according to the licenses issued to him, he’s mined sand for building blocks, then “black sands,” a hint that he’d found veins of valuable minerals. In February 2006 Rodríguez started mining for iron and titanium.

In August 2010 he sought permits to move minerals via the river to the regional port Inírida, or to Bogotá. And in January 2011, Rodríguez Forero filled out Colombian tax forms to facilitate the export of tungsten to warehouses in Strassen, Luxembourg, belonging to Traxys Europe SA.

A middleman’s report said the tungsten that Traxys bought came from Rodríguez Forero’s mine near the Guaviare River and Puinawai Natural National Park. Ore from outside the national park is legal if a miner has a permit.

On Sept. 16, 2011 a Colombian military patrol seized 17 tons of tungsten ore in the middle of the river. Officials determined that the ore had been mined inside the park, at a site called El Zancudo.

According to a Colombian law enforcement source, an analysis of the seized ore indicates the tungsten from El Zancudo bears mineral concentrations similar to what Traxys purchased. Colombian officials said the government continues to investigate the origins of the two ore loads, but that Traxys is not suspected of any wrongdoing and Rodríguez Forero does not face any charges in the matter.

Rodríguez Forero holds the only mining permit in this area. In public statements he has denied responsibility for the seized ore, saying he was not responsible “for the improper use” of his licenses. He has urged authorities to step up patrols for the “rigorous monitoring of the ore that is brought to market in this criminal form.”

Rodríguez Forero, and Colombia-based Geocopper Company, which facilitated the Traxys purchase, declined repeated requests for comment from ICIJ. In a written response, Traxys said it had “no knowledge or involvement whatsoever in the confiscated material,” and that the minerals it purchased from Colombia came from entities that are “totally legitimate, properly licensed, and governmentally vetted.” The company also indicated that the ore it acquired came from an area some distance from Puinawai National Park.

Industry experts said questions over the origins of ore show how hard it is to keep conflict minerals out of high-tech industry supply lines.

“Unless big manufacturers or processors buy via long-term contracts, for example from Mozambique, Australia or Canada, they can never be entirely sure where their ore is coming from,” said coltan mining expert Michael Nest. “Global supply chains are complex and mix up ore from all over the place because processors and manufacturers have huge economies of scale — they need to mix up different batches of ore to improve efficiency.”

In 2009, Traxys, one of the world’s biggest processors of minerals for high-tech manufacturing, announced it was suspending purchases of coltan from war-torn Central Africa. Smuggling there is the target of human rights campaigns aimed at stopping armed groups from taking coltan to Rwanda, where it’s relabeled and sold to smelters worldwide.

Mining in a 'red zone'

Rodríguez Forero has no criminal record and there are no charges pending against him in the tungsten investigation.

But controversy has surrounded Rodríguez Forero’s operation because his mines are deep in a territory thick with armed FARC units and anti-communist paramilitaries.

According to the Colombian government, the area “has been designated a red zone or area with high risk of danger for persons from outside the region, who are subject to extortion, kidnapping, and murder by organizations operating outside the law.”

In 1992 a police headquarters in the area was attacked by insurgents who killed four officers. The police abandoned the area and the FARC became the law. In 1997, paramilitaries struck back with the infamous Mapiripán massacre, beheading 47 people and disrupting the FARC’s cocaine production.

After the raid, authorities said the drug trafficker Carlos Mario Jiménez Naranjo purchased control of the area from paramilitaries in order to protect his smuggling business. But Colombian authorities arrested Jiménez and in 2008 handed him over to U.S. officials who wanted him on drug-trafficking charges. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced last May to 33 years in federal prison.

Jiménez’s role in illicit minerals smuggling has emerged from Colombia’s ongoing “Parapolitics” scandal — an investigation into ties between politicans, mining officials and paramilitaries.

ICIJ found that on Rodríguez Forero’s mining license the name Mario Jiménez was on the first line listing the property’s owners. Officials of Colombia’s Geological Service said the listing was a mistake, part of inaccuracies in the federal mine registry that have prompted its overhaul.

Since last fall’s ore seizures, Rodríguez Forero has obtained a certificate from local military leaders saying the area he mines is partially free of guerrillas and criminal gangs. If the Dodd-Frank Act restrictions were applied to South American mineral mining, the FARC’s listing as a terrorist organization by U.S. officials might present a problem for legitimate miners in the region.

In June 2010, a certificate issued by the Colombian army’s Fourth Division said troops in the area “are carrying out in-depth offensive operations continuously in these sectors … keeping the narco-terrorist groups of the FARC and [other criminal bands] on the run.”

Because of the suspicious activities and mining practices that threaten Puinawai tribal land and national parks, it is clear that allowing some small-scale mining in the region was a mistake, said Colombia’s former Environment Minister Manuel Rodríguez.

From 2005 to 2009, before the government could even finish mapping the area, mining rights were auctioned off to people who were not required to prove that they knew how to mine. There were so many claims that an illegal market for processing of titles was created.

Amid the chaos, the market for mining equipment also took off. For example, X-ray spectrometers that read mineral compositions in ore have become so common in Colombia’s mining regions that police have mistaken them for weapons.

Puinawai Indians say the devices are indeed guns, pointed at the earth beneath their sacred mountain.

Venezuela emerges as new source of ‘conflict’ minerals

Venezuela — 2012-03-12T11:14:05-04:00

Crouched near a mound of rocks and dirt, Ramón swings a short-handled pick at a shallow hole, showing off the technique he uses to mine what he calls “black pebbles” — stones laced with minerals important to high-tech manufacturers worldwide.

Over the last couple of years Ramón has labored at small, out-of-the-way mines, walking up to a week to reach claims he’s staked out deep in southwest Venezuela’s Amazon jungle, near the country’s border with Colombia.

It’s worth the backaches and sweat, Ramón said, rolling a near-black rock in the palm of his hand. He said he earns good money supplying brokers with stones that hold coltan ore.

Applied to microchips, the metal enables electronic capacitors to perform superbly in an array of devices, like smart phones in the pockets of more and more consumers. Refined into a powder and applied to solar panels, coltan increases energy efficiency.

And as a strategic mineral, Coltan carries weight because it allows guidance controls in smart bombs to work in extreme climate conditions. Because of that, Venezuelan coltan has raised concerns in Washington, D.C., as the government of President Hugo Chávez has selected Iranian, Chinese and Russian firms to explore minerals and is looking to develop future supplies of different ores.

Today it is illegal to mine coltan in Venezuela. But thanks to the likes of Ramón, Venezuelan coltan is already coming on to the international minerals market — as black-market contraband.

In government documents in several countries, police and military reports and interviews with miners and residents in South America’s northern Amazon jungles, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found a robust, illicit trade in coltan and growing risk for small-scale miners chasing ore.

Children, women and vulnerable native Indians are exposed to dangerous work conditions, drug smugglers and armed gangs that have been smuggling ore. Illicit Venezuelan coltan, experts said, is likely being mixed with legitimate minerals in smelters around the world, and then sent to high-tech manufacturers.

Alarm bells in Washington

There is concern that while there’s a regulatory vacuum in Venezuela — there are no rules, even for miners who want to legitimately mine coltan — it will be difficult to keep illicit coltan out of the global minerals supply stream.

“Venezuela could emerge as a big problem because it represents another source of conflict coltan, coming from an area where there is no regulation, no transparency and no security for the people working in the mines,” said Aaron Hall, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Enough Project.

This means that consumer-driven demand for everyday electronics may be supporting criminal gangs and organized crime in an illicit market for valuable minerals in South America. In Colombia, for example, police recently confiscated 83 tons of coltan and other minerals from an operation reportedly run by smugglers who, according to U.S. law enforcement officials, also supply cocaine to Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.

Much of coltan territory in Venezuela hugs the border with Colombia — an area of inaccessible jungle and meandering rivers and streams — where armed paramilitaries and drug smugglers for years have been recognized as powerful forces. Cross-border violence is on the rise in the area, turning the zone into a flashpoint in an increasingly tense relationship between the anti-American Chávez and the pro-U.S. government of Colombia.

This is why American national security experts have noted the proliferation of black-market coltan, while Chávez plans the future coltan trade with the help of Iran.

The Iranian government is assisting in soil and mineral studies and the mapping of mining regions. Sadra, an Iranian-government-owned industrial company, operates a Latin American subsidiary and maintains an office in Caracas. In 2010 it participated in a conference in Venezuela to show Iran’s capabilities in the country and hosted a meeting of local and Iranian diplomats and government officials, including José Salamat Khan, Venezuela’s mining minister.

Later, Khan confirmed that Venezuela was working with Iranian mining experts.

“We decided to work with the Iranian brothers in the exploration of mines in Bolívar State,” Khan said.

Sadra’s parent company, Khatam al-Anbiya, is on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of entities subject to sanctions because of Iran’s nuclear programs.

China, which uses most of the world’s coltan supply, recently pledged mining-industry support to Chávez and to Brazil, one of the biggest exporters of processed coltan.

An instant black market

In the fall of 2009, President Hugo Chávez announced the “discovery” of huge coltan reserves in Venezuela’s Amazon jungle.

Chávez’s proclamation came despite coltan’s long existence on a list of valuable elements known to rest in abundance in Venezuela. For a time one company was even allowed to legally prospect for coltan.

Nonetheless, Chávez outlawed private mining and launched “Operation Blue Gold”: 15,000 troops deployed to pursue smugglers he said were sneaking ore into Colombia.

The action heightened tensions between the two countries in an area where cross-border violence was already on the rise.

Since Chávez’s announcement, however, Venezuela’s Amazon military patrols have failed to stop coltan smuggling and the government has been silent on new rules for prospectors.

“Colombia or Brazil get this big business because the exploitation of minerals is official there, or at least is not illegal,” Liborio Guarulla, governor of Venezuela’s Amazonas state, told ICIJ.

Venezuelan mining officials declined requests from ICIJ to talk about coltan.

Other factors have made it easy for black-market coltan to flourish: In the global coltan trade there is no public commodity price index. Most deals are shrouded in secrecy.

Coltan is a composite of metals — primarily columbite and tantalite — and moves through the supply chain as tantalum or niobium.

“Tantalum and niobium materials are not openly traded. Purchase contracts are confidential between buyer and seller,” notes a USGS advisory.

Still, some analysts have reviewed industry statistics and established that in the high-quality coltan sector, about a fifth of the $150 million-a-year global marketplace comes from black-market sources in conflict zones, mostly in Central Africa. Smugglers there sneak coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Rwanda, where it is relabeled and sold to the global market.

Central Africa, Brazil and Australia are the world’s leading suppliers of coltan. The metal’s pivotal role in high-tech manufacturing became clear in 2001, when Sony delayed the rollout of new video game players because of a shortage of coltan. Prices at the time reached an estimated $300 a pound.

Since 2007 the growing smart phone market has fueled more mining of high-quality coltan, at an estimated rate of 3 million pounds per year. About 1.1 million pounds each year are used by U.S. manufacturers who apply it to high-tech microchips and to an array of other products, from industrial turbines to synthetic hip replacements.

The coltan price has been on a rollercoaster since the 2001 shortage, due mainly to ramped up production in Central Africa, a decision by the U.S. in 2007 to unload its reserves on the open market, and the shuttering of one of the world’s biggest mines, in Australia. With more coltan on the market today, the overall price for high-quality material has hovered around $50 a pound of late.

Today coltan from Central Africa mostly feeds a global spot market that manufacturers tap when long-term contracts with legitimate suppliers are not enough.

The spot-market supply has grown in recent years. But because minerals and metals from different sources are routinely mixed in spot-market supply lines, analysts say it’s almost impossible to tell good coltan from the bad.

Today there is no accurate test of origin for coltan ore — geo-fingerprinting — like there is for diamonds.

One pilot study in Germany is exploring a geo-fingerprint for coltan, measuring mineral concentrations, soil type and radiation levels surrounding an ore sample, to identify the ground where it was pulled from.

And there’s talk of applying pressure on producers via the U.S. government’s Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which bars American manufacturers from buying natural resources extracted in territory controlled by organized crime or terrorists.

Artisanal mining

Experts believe the global spot market is where illicit coltan from Venezuela and Colombia may be destined. They’re concerned the illicit trade in South America will grow and mimic the business in Congo, where coltan profits have helped sustain factional violence.

Government research on smuggled minerals in the two countries is limited, but some police and military reports reviewed by ICIJ show that authorities have confiscated about 190,000 pounds of coltan since 2009 — some of it taken without proper permits even before Chávez outlawed all coltan private mining.

What is clear is that a lot of Venezuelan coltan is being dug up in a conflict zone, a bit at a time, in what the industry calls “artisanal mining.”

This scale of mining is essential to a black market.

“Artisanal mining tends to be hazardous for laborers, with tough and unsafe conditions, poor pay and likely environmental damage as waste is discarded into streams,” said coltan researcher Michael Nest. “When artisanal mining occurs where it is not supposed to, such as in national parks, or where there are bans on private mining like in Venezuela, a black market will inevitably develop if there is someone willing to buy the ore.”

In places like the town of Parguaza, on the banks of the Orinoco River in southern Venezuela, there’s a buzz about coltan — and plenty of buyers.

Residents said that in mid-2010, after Chávez outlawed private mining, a group of businessmen arrived and promised that jobs and houses would follow if they signed petitions to the federal government in support of legitimate coltan extraction.

The government ignored the petition and the businessmen never came back, said Flandes, a Parguaza miner who didn’t want his full name used, fearing reprisals from authorities and smugglers.

But buyers still arrive in search of coltan. Local land owners told ICIJ that mineral brokers have come from neighboring Colombia and far-off Australia and South Korea.

Despite the traffic, Amazon miners remain wary of outsiders. After several requests a group eventually met with ICIJ in Parguaza. They offered only single names like Flandes, Efraín, Ramón and Camilo.

They described a difficult but potentially rewarding life in coltan mines.

Their claims are far from roadways and roving military patrols. Walking is the only way in, so once they’re sure no one is watching, they pack their picks and take to hidden trails.

Because of coltan’s growing popularity, Venezuelan miners said they no longer have to tote heavy bags of ore along clandestine trails into Colombian territory. Now the Colombian buyers cross into Venezuelan territory and haul off the minerals.

“Colombians are the ones who move this stone here. They are the ones who are taking it and giving life to the business,” Flandes said. “As cars don´t enter in this region, [buyers] come with motorbikes and then go to the port of El Burro, where they take a motorboat that leaves them in Puerto Carreño,” just a 15-minute trip across the Orinoco River from Venezuela.

Like generations of small-scale miners in this region, Flandes once hunted for gold and diamonds. Now he’s interested in coltan because it’s easier to find and earns him good money.

Coltan in Venezuela’s Amazon jungle is often found in small rocks close to the surface. A coltan plot might yield other minerals like tin or titanium ore — also wanted by high-tech manufacturers — so a new mine attracts dozens of would-be prospectors.

One lucky miner said he found a coltan-filled rock, weighing almost seven pounds, which fetched $23. That’s good money in remote Venezuela, but prices can go up to about $55 a pound as coltan reaches manufacturers, according to the Venezuelan Ministry of Basic Industries and Mining.

Dealing with the military

Another miner, Camilo, remembered that soldiers recently arrested two women and some children who were working a claim.

“They took the minerals from them,” he said, adding that the women and kids didn’t know what experienced miners have learned: splitting coltan loads with soldiers is a good way to avoid being jailed.

Locals — including church leaders and area government officials — quietly complained of military involvement in smuggling. Few reports have been pursued, however, as people whisper that it’s unsafe to accuse an officer.

In 2009, the Foundation for Science and Technology Development in Amazonas State investigated rumors of Colombian smugglers moving Venezuelan coltan. This followed the government’s first acknowledgement that the ore had become cross-border contraband: coltan traces and mining equipment were found on an isolated farm in Bolívar state.

Court records show that 3,960 pounds of mined material containing coltan was seized by Venezuelan border guards between 2009 and 2011. The suspects — including a 30-year-old woman, four men, a Colombian citizen and a 16-year-old native Indian — were charged with illegal trafficking “of metals, precious stones, strategic materials and its products or derivatives.”

In September, 2009, another 54 tons of ore containing an unspecified amount of coltan were confiscated from a Colombian citizen.

Chávez’s announcement followed a month later: “A strategic mineral called coltan has appeared now, and we have militarized the zone because people have been taking coltan to Colombia and exploiting it illegally.”

A cross-border threat

Since then, local leaders said, children have been found working at family-run mines in Venezuela and Colombia, with little attention to safety.

Miners said they accept the risks because coltan is one of the few work options in this poor region. Venezuela’s Amazonas state, roughly three-quarters the size of the United Kingdom, is home to 144 thousand of the country’s almost 30 million people. In the region’s huge rural tracts, the only real private-sector work is subsistence farming or fishing.

The territory is hard to get to and difficult for outsiders to navigate; well-suited to multinational smuggling, especially along the 1,350-mile Orinoco River which marks part of the border between Venezuela and Colombia.

One suspected destination for coltan is Brazil, the second-largest exporter of the metal. It’s also home to a number of smelters that process ore imported from around the world.

Brazilian mining law experts have urged politicians and the country’s growing high-tech manufacturing business to tighten controls on mining. They said inadequate, outdated laws have allowed a black market to grow in the country’s northern Amazonian provinces.

“Legislation is the same as 40 years ago,” said Sergio Rocha Brito Marques, a lawyer who reviewed Brazil’s coltan trade for ICIJ. The result is mining chaos near Brazil’s borders with Colombia and Venezuela — where prospectors have no clues on global prices for ore and buyers don’t demand proof of origin for coltan.

Internet market

Despite Venezuela’s crackdown, willing coltan traders — some of them Colombian — have been found on Internet sites that offer buyers and sellers private space to negotiate deals.

Korea TPC Development de Venezuela, a subsidiary of a South Korea-based shipping and construction company, has boasted online of having offices in Venezuela and of its ability to move minerals, including coltan.

“Clients can interact directly with every major global exchange while maintaining control of their order flow in a conflict-free, anonymous environment,” the firm says on its pages at tradeboss.com. The company promised quick delivery.

Korea TPC was registered on July 29th, 2010, in Valencia, Venezuela’s leading industrial city, describing itself as involved in “construction of bioenergy and gas plants.”

But there’s little physical evidence of Korea TPC in Venezuela.

The company lists offices and phone numbers in an upscale hotel and apartment building in Caracas. Yet visits to the addresses yielded shrugs from residents who said they knew nothing about the company.

After ICIJ began inquiring about Korea TPC’s interest in Venezuelan mining, its website went silent.

Business registration documents list Moisés Gonzalez as Korea TPC’s Venezuelan partner, but ICIJ could not find him, although he is listed as the target of civil actions claiming he did not deliver on lease payments for office space.

In a drab office in an industrial park south of Seoul, Korea TPC President Ha-Young Yang told ICIJ he’d given up on the Venezuelan coltan business in 2010 because supply deals with his Caracas contact never materialized.

Yang said he was misled by Gonzalez.

Other Internet sites such as Alibaba.com and tradetag.com offer coltan for sale and list offices in Venezuela. But those offices do not appear in Venezuelan commercial registries.

One company, Florida-based Global Impact USA, lists Aribel Ojeda as its Venezuelan contact, with a contact phone number that’s also listed for another online coltan broker, Hawk Enterprises. A person who answered a call to that phone refused to talk about the Venezuelan coltan business. Global Impact did not return calls seeking comment.

The opaque marketplace for Venezuelan coltan is a symptom of a problem that the Chávez government must resolve, said researcher Raimund Bleischwitz, of Germany’s Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. The consequence of inaction is a black market that will grow more dangerous and unmanageable.

“Manufacturers don’t want to deal with bandits,” Bleischwitz said. “Central Africa is a problem because there is no strong government with whom we can negotiate a stable market and transparency. That’s where there’s potential for Venezuela’s strong central government to do it right and create market order for coltan, instead of a black market.”

Ignacio Gómez in Colombia, Marcelo Soares in Brazil and Nari Kim in South Korea contributed to this article.

SLIDESHOW: The illicit trade in coltan

2013-01-23T13:01:05-05:00

Coltan's picturesque beginnings

Five things you need to know about coltan:

2012-03-15T18:38:00-04:00

It's used by almost everybody — in mobile phones, electric cars and a wide array of consumer electronic devices; it is in optical and medical equipment. As new technologies emerge and produce new devices, demand will grow. There is no ready substitute.
Coltan’s ability to hold and move electrical signals, and its conductive ability in extreme temperatures, makes it ideal for smart bomb guidance controls. Security analysts say it is a strategic mineral.
War-torn Central Africa supplies about a fourth of the world market as production declines in Australia, the previous world leader. Most Central African coltan is considered conflict mineral because mining areas are controlled by armed factions and organized crime. It’s the same in the South American jungles where Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil meet and where officials say they’ve found vast coltan reserves.
There is no simple way to keep conflict coltan out of the stream of legitimate minerals used by manufacturers. It doesn’t have “geo-fingerprints” like conflict diamonds.
Controlling the flow of conflict coltan involves comprehensive action by governments, industry and activists. But that’s difficult: U.S. and European firms are looking at certification of coltan, but since manufacturers in China and India use the bulk of the world’s supply, certification efforts will fail if those countries do not participate.

About this story

Venezuela — 2012-03-04T02:00:01-05:00

That smart phone in your pocket contains a bit of coltan — a prized mineral that helps move electronic signals across ubiquitous microchips and controllers and allows devices to work well in extreme temperatures. And coltan is a strategic mineral because it's important for controls on smart bombs, for example.

But coltan is also a conflict mineral, with large supplies coming from parts of Central Africa controlled by warring factions and criminal organizations that employ small-scale miners in terrible conditions, or charge them taxes to operate their claims.

For several months, ICIJ reporters in six countries combed government and court records and interviewed mining experts and brokers. The reporters also followed miners as they prospected for coltan in South America’s Amazon, in the border between Venezuela and Colombia, where they face cross-border smugglers and must deal with violent drug traffickers and paramilitaries — conditions similar to those in Central Africa.

Lack of regulation, transparency and security make this area a new source of conflict minerals, experts say, and one in which an array of human rights abuses is already taking place.

The Team:

Reporters: Emilia Diaz-Struck and Joseph Polizsuk (Venezuela); Ignacio Gómez (Colombia); Marcelo Soares (Brazil); Nari Kim (South Korea)

Project manager: Ricardo Sandoval

Editors: Ricardo Sandoval and Gerard Ryle

Media Partners: El Universal (Venezuela), Arman-do.info (Venezuela), Noticias Uno (Colombia), El Espectador (Colombia)

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2012-01-19T02:00:48-05:00

The new oil industry is changing life in Ghana and there are significant environmental concerns related to Ghana's fast-track development of deep-water offshore drilling.