Colombia, Then and Now
The Carranzas, the Molina brothers, the road from Bogotá to the canyon, and why my family stopped going back then, and why I like to go back now.
The opening scene of Narcos, when Pablo Escobar and his men are stopped at a roadblock in the mountains and you realise within thirty seconds that the men running the roadblock are not the police, is stylised for television. Drone shots. Slow-motion dust. A soundtrack. What the show gets right, and what people watching it as entertainment may not absorb, is that the underlying scenario was not invented. The Andean roads of the 1980s were exactly that contested. The men running roadblocks were sometimes police, sometimes army, sometimes paramilitary, sometimes cartel, and sometimes, this is the part the show didn’t quite have time for, emerald people.
The emerald wars were not the cocaine wars. They overlapped. They bled into each other. They shared geography, personnel, and bodies. But they were a separate thing, with their own history and their own logic. To understand why the Cavalier family business pulled out of Colombia for a generation, you have to understand the difference.
Don Víctor and the Brothers Molina
The dominant figure in the Colombian emerald trade for the second half of the 20th century was Víctor Carranza Niño. He was born poor in Boyacá, started working in the mines as a child, and by his thirties had assembled, through some combination of skill, ruthlessness, and political connections, an almost supernatural instinct for the stone; a control over the western emerald belt that no single individual has matched before or since. They called him El Patrón de las Esmeraldas, the Patron of the Emeralds, or sometimes El Zar Verde, the Green Czar. He survived multiple assassination attempts, including one in 1996, when he was wounded badly enough that the trade thought he was finished. He was not finished. He died in 2013, of cancer, in a hospital bed, of natural causes, which, given his life, may have been the most surprising thing about him.
Carranza’s principal rivals through the 1980s and into the 1990s were the Molina brothers, los hermanos Molina, who controlled the Eastern part of the belt around Coscuez, and fought Carranza for primacy over the emerald region in what came to be called the Guerras Verdes, the Green Wars. The wars killed thousands of people across the 1980s, depending on whose count you trust. Whole villages were displaced. The roads in and out of the canyon were lethal at night and not always safe by day. There were periods when no foreign buyer in his right mind would have been on those roads at all.
Then it got worse.
What happened in the late 1980s is that Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel began trying to launder cocaine money through the emerald trade, which was traditionally made up of people from Boyaca and Bogota - not people from Medellin (paisas) - and acquire the mines themselves as a parallel revenue stream. The emerald industry at that point was more profitable per kilo of product than cocaine, and the margin on a top Muzo stone globally was extraordinary. Escobar wanted in. Carranza did not want him in. Carranza, whatever else he was, was not going to share his canyon with the Medellín cartel, and what followed was a third war on top of the existing two. Not just Carranza versus the Molinas, but Carranza and the Molinas, jointly, versus Escobar’s people.
This is the period, the late 80s into the early 90s, when the family stopped going. Life in Thailand for us, the massages, the food, the genuine warmth of the people, and the weather, significantly outweighed the stress of being caught up in what was going down in Colombia.
Brazil, Before
Cavalier’s roots in coloured stones go back to my grandfather’s generation. We were in Brazil in the early 1970s, working primarily in tourmaline, aquamarine, and the various beryls and topazes that the Minas Gerais belt produced in volume and that became the foundation of an entire generation of North American coloured-stone retail. Brazilian trade in that era was relatively open. You flew into Rio or São Paulo, took a domestic flight or a long drive into Minas, visited cutters in Teófilo Otoni and Governador Valadares, and came home with parcels. There were the usual hazards: bad roads, occasional police shakedowns, the standard hassles of doing business in a country with a military government. But by the standards of the trade, it was civilised work. You stayed at hotels with windows. You ate in restaurants. You did not, generally, get shot at.
By the late 1970s, the family had started moving the business east into Colombia, primarily for emeralds, because the Brazilian emerald deposits were limited and the Colombian material was the gold standard of the market. The first trips into Bogotá were exploratory. The dealers on Avenida Jiménez were welcoming. The stones were extraordinary. The relationships, slowly, formed.
And then the wars started. Wfithin a few years, the calculus of the trip had changed completely. My grandfather, and the generation running the business at that time, made the call everyone in the trade was making in those years: “We are not flying to Bogotá this season.” And then the next season. And then the next. By the time it would have been safe to go back, in the late 1990s, after Escobar was dead and the worst of the inter-cartel violence had subsided, the relationships had cooled, the contacts had aged out, and the business had moved on to other things.
So we lost a generation in Colombia. We were not unusual. Many North American coloured-stone houses pulled out in the same period and never quite came back. The Colombian trade in those decades was sustained primarily by a smaller circle of buyers who either had the relationships and resources to keep going through the worst of it, or were Colombian themselves, or frankly did not have a choice. The rest of us watched from a distance.
The Road, When It Was Bad
I want to give you a sense of what those years actually looked like on the ground, because the abstraction “the wars” doesn’t quite capture it.
The drive from Bogotá to Muzo, the one I described in the previous piece, with the helicopter alternative, is roughly 170 kilometres on the map and four to five hours by road in good conditions. In the late 80s, in bad conditions, that drive was a series of decisions. Where do you stop for fuel? Which towns do you go through and which do you go around? Which checkpoints are real police and which are improvised? Do you travel in a single vehicle or in a convoy? Do you carry cash for the buy itself, or wire it after the fact, knowing the wire may alert the wrong people that a buy has happened? Do you bring a security detail, knowing the security detail itself may mark you as a target? Do you drive during the day, when you can see who’s stopping you, or at night, when you can’t see them but they can’t easily see you either?
There were buyers in those years who solved the problem by chartering small planes or helicopters and flying over the dangerous stretches. There were buyers who solved it by hiring the right people, meaning, often, people connected to the parties they were paying for protection from, in the kind of arrangement that is stable until it isn’t. There were buyers who solved it by partnering with established Colombian houses and never leaving Bogotá at all, doing the canyon work through an intermediary and accepting the markup as the cost of staying alive. And there were buyers, including most of my family in those years, who solved it by not going.
The specific incident I’ve heard about more than any other, and the one I think shaped the family decision more than any single event, was a convoy ambush on the road back from the canyon in, I believe, 1989 or 1990. A group of buyers and their security were stopped at a blockade by men who turned out to be Medellín-affiliated, and the situation was resolved without fatalities only because one of the Colombian dealers in the convoy happened to recognise one of the men at the blockade and spent forty minutes in a roadside negotiation I would have given a lot to overhear. They were let through. The stones in the convoy were not taken. Money may or may not have changed hands. The family story has always been ambiguous on that point. What is not ambiguous is that the men in that convoy got back to Bogotá that night and several of them, including a relative of mine who I will not name out of respect, said that was the last time, and meant it.
Don Víctor’s Last Act, and What Came After
Carranza, having survived everything else, eventually outlasted Escobar, killed in 1993, outlasted the worst of the inter-cartel violence, and emerged in the 2000s as the senior figure of an industry that was slowly normalising. He was not a clean figure. He had been credibly linked, by Colombian prosecutors and international human rights organisations, to paramilitary groups operating in the emerald region, and his hands were not clean. He was the figure the Colombian state chose to deal with, though, because the alternative was no figure at all, and he held the centre of the trade together through the long convalescence of the country in the 2000s.
When he died in 2013, the question gripping the trade was “what now?” There were factions. There were rival families. There was a real possibility the wars would restart, with a new generation fighting over the same canyon for the same stones. What actually happened, partly because of Carranza’s own succession planning, and partly because of the broader peace process unfolding in Colombia at the time, was a kind of corporate normalisation. Muzo International, an investor-backed mining company with American and Colombian capital, took over the principal Muzo concession. The artisanal sector, the guaqueros, freelance miners working the tailings, continued around the edges of the formal industry. The wars did not restart. Not all of the violence ended, and the region is still not Switzerland, but the emerald belt of the 2010s and 2020s has been, by historical standards, peaceful.
This is when we started going back.
Colombia Now
The Colombia I fly into now is not the Colombia my grandfather pulled out of. The country is open, the violence has receded substantially from the worst years, the formal mining sector is largely legitimate, and a North American buyer can land in Bogotá, take a meeting on Avenida Jiménez, helicopter into Muzo for a site visit, and fly home in a week without the levels of risk-management gymnastics the previous generations had to do.
That said …
You still travel with a security detail to certain locations. You still pre-arrange your routes. You still move in armoured vehicles for some inter-city work. You still carry cash in ways that would alarm a North American banker. You still have phone numbers for specific people you call before you go, after you arrive, and when you leave. The infrastructure of trust and protection that the old families built during the wars has not been dismantled. It has been refined. It is quieter now. Mostly invisible to the casual visitor. But it is there, and the people we work with in Colombia, who lived through the worst of it, are not naïve about how thin the peace is.
The other thing that has changed is the relationship between the formal sector and the informal sector. In the 80s and 90s, the formal sector barely existed. The canyon was effectively run by private actors of various kinds. Today there is Muzo International, Coscuez under different management, official documentation regimes, ICA standards, CIBJO standards, and the various certifications that move stones legally through the international market. There is also still a robust informal sector: the guaqueros, the small village dealers, the men with folded papers at checkpoints. The modern Colombian trade is the marriage of those two layers. The formal sector produces the stones that go on the auction circuit with paperwork. The informal sector produces the texture. A serious buyer needs access to both, and access to both requires relationships that take years to build, relationships the previous generation of the trade had to abandon mid-construction.
Which is part of what makes being back interesting. We are, in a sense, rebuilding. The relationships my grandfather started, paused for a generation, are being restarted by Keith and me, sometimes with descendants of the same families, sometimes with new ones. The country has certainly improved, and we have changed. The trade has changed, but the canyon is still the canyon. The stones it produces are still the stones it has produced for five hundred years, and the patience Colombia has always required is the same patience the work has always demanded.
