gems, beryl, emerald, Colombia, emerald trade, politics, emerald mining

In 1991 the most prominent leaders of Colombia's emerald mining sector signed a peace agreement that brought a decades-long conflict to an end. Peace brought consolidation to the business. It gave mine owners the ability to control the supply of emeralds that would be let out onto the market. New efficiencies in the production process disrupted older social relations. Miners who had once let emeralds slip through their fingers, now exercised a much tighter control. In the time of the emerald wars, the owners of the mines had to sustain large followings. This meant that they had to be very generous and openhanded with their emeralds, diffusing them through networks of people joined together by kinship, affinity and personal loyalty. The end of the wars brought an end to the need for such followings. Miners could cut out many of the men and women who stood between themselves and the foreign buyers of Colombian stones. They could also restrict the scope of informal mining on their lands. Thus peace had the paradoxical effect of squeezing out the smaller players, disrupting the social networks formed in times of violence and threatening the livelihoods of thousands of miners and traders.