Good article on security. Thanks. Gran Colombia discussed at end of article as follows;
"Speaking from Bogotá, Gran Colombia COO Donald East waxes enthusiastic about his company’s Marmato Gold Project, now in prefeasibility and projected for 2015 production. If all goes to plan, it will be the company’s seventh operating mine in northern Colombia. Last October, however, the company shut down its Mazamorras Project in Nariño Department, in the southwest corner of the country, after a mob demolished the buildings.
“We knew that this was going to happen based on intelligence-gathering by our security people,” says East. “We advised the local police. The police were onsite at the time the outsiders came. And the police just stood by while they vandalized the place. We then complained to the government about that. In any country in the world you have to rely on some sort of legal protection for your assets. So I think that created a bit of a wake-up call for the government.”
There’s nothing remarkable about the security company’s presence, East maintains. “Obviously on any mine you have security because you have assets. It’s just a local security company; that happens on every mine.”
East says he still doesn’t know who’s responsible for the attack or what motivated them. But he believes they were from outside the region and the attack was somehow linked to the local and regional elections that were about to take place. The local population, he says, supports the project for the sake of jobs as well as the social work the company performs. “We’re just going to let the thing wait until we feel the risks aren’t too great for any of our people to go back there. So it’s probably going to be next year before we start to re-visit that project. Mazamorras is not really critical to our current planning.”
