Last summer, our colleague Juan Ferreiro left his home base in Bogota, Columbia,

to visit a small town in the Andes Mountains.

You know, you're on a highway, and then you turn off, and you're very soon on a very narrow road that is a winding

road that starts to drop you know toward a valley beautiful scenery you know you see this tapestry of

different shades of green where farmers are are producing their crops and down several miles down, is the town of Buritika.

Burritika sits nestled within the mountains.

And in those mountains is a resource that people have been fighting over

since the arrival of Spanish conquistadors.

Shining, glimmering, valuable, gold.

Nowadays, it's not the Spanish who are looking for gold. Instead, it's a multinational giant out of China, the Zijin Mining Group.

Zijin's mine in Buritika is the richest gold mine in Colombia.

When Juan visited, he found a mine under siege.

When we got deep into the mine, you know, there's a point where Zijin is just not in control anymore.

And so what you see are sandbags everywhere.

And behind those sandbags are guards and they're outfitted, you know,

in bulletproof vests and so forth, and they're toting shotguns. On the other side of the sandbags

is a rival group of miners who are invading Zijin's tunnels to steal the company's gold.

In 2023, the miners stole tons of it, worth about $200 million, according to the company's gold. In 2023, the miners stole tons of it worth about $200 million,

according to the company's estimates. And they're stealing it with the help of a powerful

militia group, meaning the conflict often turns violent. The way they put it is this is

underground trench warfare. I mean, it is 600, 700 yards underground.

I don't know of another place in the world where you have two sides that are going at it that far underground.

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