by Pat Werner
When Nicaragua and I were much younger, I worked for a time in the old customs building at the Las Mercedes International Airport (now Managua International) on the north highway. I knew an old National Guard colonel and made some extra money working with him getting items out of customs. During the days of Somoza Debayle in the early 1970s, Nicaragua’s economy was red hot and the customs office was quite busy.
One day, I noticed a wooden box sitting in a corner and one of the customs workers asked me to lift it up. It was only about was one foot high, one foot wide, and about two feet long. Try as I might, I could not budge that box off the cement floor. For a moment, I thought someone was trying to fool me and had bolted it to the floor. The old colonel, I supposed, had played a trick on me by having one of the workers ask me to move the box. Laughing, he came up to me and with a hammer, opened up the wooden box. It was full of gold ingots, not shiny bright like brass, but more the color of butter, radiating out the warmth of the metal in a gentle yellow. That was my introduction to Nicaraguan gold.
Gold has been mined in Nicaragua since well before the Spanish conquest, and is presently being extracted from several large mines in the Departments of Chontales and León and the Atlantic autonomous regions. A lot of gold –30,000 to 60,000 troy ounces (no one knows for sure)– is produced by local gold miners, both hard rock miners and gold panners or güiriseros in several areas, most notably along the Coco River from Wiwilí to Raití and the large cataracts just downstream. Of all the towns in Nicaragua, it is probably easiest to buy gold in Murra, Nueva Segovia and in the town of Santa Rosa del Peñon in the León province.
Santa Rosa, located on the southern slope of the mountain called Tisey, is hard rock mining country. There is a geological anomaly there in the form of a large vein of dog-toothed quartz that runs for several kilometers along the mountainside and is quite visible. What is interesting about the vein is that it contains a lot of powdered iron oxide, and where the vein touches the living rock, little drips and dots of gold can be seen in the translucent quartz. The inhabitants of Santa Rosa discovered the vein in 1771 and there was a sort of gold rush. The Spanish Crown brought in mining engineers who examined the vein and pronounced it valuable to exploit. They cautioned that the vein should be exploited in a scientific manner; if not the area would cease to be productive.
Nothing more is found in the archives about Santa Rosa and it is doubtful much was done to set up a system of tunnels with proper shoring. Gold production diminished. Today the vein is still visible and indicated as one follows along it by tunnel after tunnel burrowing into the vein, which is about 18 inches wide.
Rather than there being the remains of one old mine, there are the remains of many modern day tunnels as well as many rock grinders in the shape of outhouses in backyards throughout Santa Rosa. During the Contra War, it was an area where several diplomats went to buy gold. During those war years, it was a serious crime to traffic in contraband gold but diplomats paid little heed and the inhabitants of Santa Rosa were able to supplement their meager incomes by pounding and grinding rock to get the gold out.
Both in Santa Rosa and much of the north country along the Coco River, gold mining continued during and after the Contra War with artisanal production open to all comers. One of the more interesting elements of this informal gold trade was the mildly archaic way gold was weighed and purchased. The ancient Hispanic apothecary units for weighing medicines were the grano, based upon the weight of a grain of wheat, and the tomín, which was one-twelfth of a grano. Somewhere between Ocotal and Wiwilí, as if in a time warp, the unit for weighing gold changes from the gram, or gramo, to the tomín, one twelfth of a grano. It can be a bit confusing.
As usual, campesinos resolved the finer elements of weighing gold by finding out that a fired .22 shell is equal in weight to five tomines. Put another way, one and a half tomines equal one gram. That is what must be kept in the back of one’s mind when dealing with supposedly unsophisticated campesinos.
A large mine in León at El Limón, to the east of Santa Rosa, and the mines around La Libertad in Chontales are the largest commercial operations in Nicaragua. But for anyone who wants a bit of romance and dabble in a little gold buying, there are two other areas that bear mention other than Santa Rosa.
The first area is near the town of Murra in the El Rosario mining district higher up in the sierra and the second is the Coco River. Murra is located past El Jícaro, close to the end of the road near the Honduran border. It is a modern town, and like San Juan del Rio Coco, it just stretches along the main street, with none of the colonial flavor of a central plaza. There, the inhabitants pan and sluice for gold in the Murra River and up above at Rosario and sell their product to all comers. It is a long drive from Managua, taking at least six hours over uncertain roads to reach the mountain town.
Another place to visit is Wiwilí on the Coco River. Best reached from the Jinotega side, Wiwilí was the site of Augusto Sandino’s attempted mini-state until Somoza destroyed it in 1934. There are more artisanal miners here than perhaps any place else and gold is a common commodity for trade or sale. Many merchants have scales to weigh gold dust poured out of small bags by successful gold panners in order to get the equivalent value in gold for the price of goods they are selling.
For the more adventurous, a leisurely trip down the Coco River, the largest and longest river in Central America to Raití, the last large Miskito village before the river drops into its impressive cataracts, will yield many opportunities to buy gold and see sights unseen by most tourists. There are several villages and hamlets along the way and one perilous set of rapids, El Callejón, where the river, at least 100 yards wide, narrows into a chute only 50 feet across with jagged rocks. More importantly, gold is for sale all along the river, particularly at the mouth of the Bocay River.
The gold along the Coco River has the interesting characteristic in that its purity increases as one goes east. The gold around Ocotal and Maquilizo is about 12 carats while the gold around Wiwilí and points east is 18-carat.
Nicaragua’s ancient gold districts are in turn Nicaragua’s modern gold districts, and an interesting, offbeat view of rural Nicaragua can be had by visiting some of these places and these trips can be spiced up with a little gold purchasing. Just keep your wits about you as the measuring units and their real value may require a bit of mental gymnastics.
Staff addition
Back in the “golden days” of the Somoza dynasty (as some people still refer to them), mining companies had pretty much a free hand to exploit the resource. Gold ingots, like those described in this story, were shipped out regularly by Canadian and US companies, a portion remaining in the country as a kind of tithe to government officials and National Guard officers. When he fled the country on July 17, 1979, Anastasio Somoza did not just take his clothes and a carry-on bag. Gold bullion from his private stash and the national reserves was part of his luggage.
One of the first acts by the new authorities after the 1979 insurrection against the dictatorship that brought the Sandinistas to power was a decree to nationalize the mines. It was projected as a profoundly “anti-imperialist” move, with a poster showing an imperial eagle in agony letting go of gold bricks that it had been clutching in its talons.
Mining companies had taken full advantage of flexible labor laws. A poster-boy case was highlighted, in which benefits for a worker who had died on the job were denied by merely having paperwork made up to say he had been fired from the job a few days before the industrial accident. There also had been the case in the 1960s of the poisoning of rivers in the mining district, resulting in an abnormally high infant mortality rate in Sumo Indian communities downstream from the mining operations. In the process to leach actual gold from ore, heavy metals like mercury and cyanide are used, which if not contained and treated results in deadly pollution.
Most mines fell into disrepair and abandon during the 1980s due to a lack of investment and the outbreak of the civil war. The area around the mining towns in north-central Nicaragua (the so-called Mining Triangle of Bonanza, Siuna, and Rosita) was one of the principal theaters for skirmishes between contras and the army. The mine at El Limón in León, however, benefited from investment for upgrading provided by Swedish international assistance and continued to produce.
With the end of the civil war and the taking office by a new government with a free market outlook, the mines were de-nationalized and industrial mining activity saw a mini-boom. Fresh concessions were granted to mining firms, once again mostly Canadian or US-based. Gold and some other minerals figure into Nicaragua’s list of export earnings and exploration activities are underway in several areas of the country for both tunnel mining and open pit operations.
Meanwhile, small-scale mining by güiriseros continues apace, using a variety of techniques to extract the gold from the rock, including leaching with mercury. Some industrial mining operations have taken steps to minimize the contamination of water resources by building containment ponds for the wastewater from their operations. Yet there have been reports of insufficient controls in different areas, resulting in further poisoning of waterways, and of some companies bringing down equipment for mining that uses technology banned in their home countries due to environmental considerations.
Some municipalities in mineral-rich zones of Nicaragua have declared their opposition to concessions being granted in their territory. They believe that gold exploitation leaves little economic benefit for their zones. Mining companies do their work and earn their profits, federal authorities receive royalties, and the municipality is left with the environmental problems and some workers with a variety of ailments.
