What then are the human costs of this fetish? What has this latest round of our endless gold rush meant? Taussig speaks of gold as a fundamentally transgressive substance. In the Chocó region of Colombia, where he worked, gold is seen as the devil’s substance, and it is the devil you must deal with if a mining operation is to be successful.
Today, multi-nationals such as Barrick Gold and Newmont are the primary producers, who through advances in amalgamation and truck tire design (of all things) are able to mine ores previously not considered commercially viable, and on a massive scale. Open pit mining and cyanide leaching are the primary methods. Pits over 250 square kilometres large are carved into the earth. Ore is excavated, crushed, and mixed with cyanide to extract the gold. In their wake is left tens of millions of tonnes of waste rock; 95 per cent to 99.9995 per cent of mined and processed ore ends up as waste product.
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