The political alliance with Saharawi nationalism does not go beyond words and other gestures, such as the construction of a school in this desert territory rich in phosphates, which until 1975 was a Spanish colony. "Greetings to the Polisario Front delegation!" said President Nicolás Maduro during the inaugural session of the III Congress of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), in the Ríos Reina hall of the Teresa Carreño Theater on July 26th. Two men - the ambassador of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in Caracas, Mohamed Salem Daha, and his advisory minister, Hadi Laroussi - stood up from the audience and bowed in return. Then, the official speaker of the event read a brief document of the pro-independence movement in salutation to the Chavismo's event. "The Saharawi are brothers of Venezuela and we bring the gratitude of the Saharawi civil resistance in the occupied areas of our country, which suffer the excesses and abuses of the Moroccan occupiers in a daily basis", the text said.

Almost at the same moment, the Chinese vessel Shi Long Ling reached the main port of Venezuela. Saharawi phosphate, essential for the agrochemical industry, is being imported regularly by companies of the Venezuelan State, which pays for it to Moroccan suppliers.

The last ship arrived two weeks ago, but this is not an isolated case. Marine Traffic, ExactEarth and other databases of maritime transit around the world place Venezuela among the destinations of vessels departing from Laayoune, the capital of Western Sahara, controlled by Morocco -the occupant- and from whose port bulk carriers loaded with phosphate ship.

On August 1st 2012, 22,000 tons of phosphate rock from Western Sahara were unloaded in Venezuela; on November 9 of that same year another shipment of 24,200 tons was received and last year 59,560 tons came in, on two ships that arrived on January 17 and then on May 12, 2013 in the docks that the National Armed Forces reserve in Puerto Cabello, through the Coordinating Office of Maritime Support of the Navy (Ocamar).

The bill of landings states that Pequiven, Bariven and other companies of the petrochemical consortium of the state import phosphate from Western Sahara. Thus it is reflected in the port registers with place of origin in "Laayoune, Morocco", despite the fact that the United Nations (UN) has been condemning in various declarations the extraction of natural resources from this territory, and that the national government stands for the independence of Western Sahara. So much that President Hugo Chávez always declared himself defender of the Saharawi cause.

Chávez took a stand

In silence, far from the news outbreaks in Gaza, Syria or Ukraine, a war of varying intensity has been waged in Western Sahara for almost 40 years. When Spain left that colony in 1975, neighboring Morocco annexed the territory, which it claimed as a province of the former Great Morocco. Their expansionist ambitions overshadowed the desire for freedom and self-determination of the native population, the Saharawi people.  The so-called Frente Polisario (acronym in Spanish of Popular Liberation of Saguía el Hamra and Río de Oro) took up arms against the Moroccan occupier, to whom neither the United Nations nor the international community has recognized any sovereignty over Western Sahara.

The UN has repeatedly condemned both the occupation and the extraction of resources from the Saharawi people in a series of resolutions and pronouncements. In 2002, the Corell Report - named by the then UN undersecretary general for Legal Affairs, Hans Corell - warned about the "exploitation and looting" of the territory.

At the heart of the conflict is the struggle for control of the rich phosphate deposits of the territory. The Spanish prospection made the first discoveries of the mineral in 1947. In 1963, the Bou Craa mine was developed, one of the largest in the world. Morocco is by itself, the largest exporter of phosphates on the planet. From their exports, estimates of El Economista calculate that about 1.75 billion dollars a year originate from deposits that are located in occupied Saharawi territory.

Also since 1975 the Saharawi struggle became a famous cause of the international left. There is no progressive event without a declaration, such as the recent PSUV Congress.

In 2004, Hugo Chávez himself received Mohamed Abdelaziz, president of the proclaimed Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), and five years later, in 2009, he sent the ambassador of Venezuela in Algeria, Hector Michel Mujica, to fulfill the formalities of presenting his credentials in the Saharawi refugee camps that remain in Tindouf and other areas of southwestern Algeria.

Mujica reiterated Venezuela's support "to the right of self-determination of the Saharawi people and the constitution of an independent state", which a week later triggered the closure of the Moroccan embassy in Caracas.

Like China with Tibet or Taiwan, or, at the time, Indonesia with East Timor, the Kingdom of Morocco does not recognize the Polisario or any other group as representative of the Saharawi people, and sees with apprehension any nation that does so.

Morocco lamented that Venezuela did not take a more neutral stance on the matter of the Sahara and accused it of hostility. "The Caracas authorities have actively participated in the belligerent campaigns of the adversaries of the national unity and have compromised, in that absurd escalation, the highest Venezuelan spheres", concluded the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of that country in a statement released by the official MAP agency on January 15, 2009, the date on which it closed its representation in Caracas and moved it to the Dominican Republic.

"The opening and presence of a representation in a country reflects the will to strengthen relations with that country in different areas, but this presence is useless when major considerations hinder the development of those relations", the Moroccan Foreign Ministry added.

Chávez did not speak on the matter, nor did the now President Nicolás Maduro, who then served as chancellor. Reinaldo Bolívar, vice-minister of foreign affairs for Africa, was in charge of the reply. He expressed surprise because, according to his testimony, he had not received any call to anticipate any inconvenience in Rabat. While noting that the kingdom of Morocco had the right to shut down its embassies anywhere in the world, he judged "the Moroccan speculations as tendentious and disrespectful, about Venezuela financing and participating in war campaigns against that country".

Solidary, but not so much

There was no more of that impasse. But even in the midst of the dispute, and even later, several ships left their wake in the Atlantic while transporting phosphate expelled from Western Sahara to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the spirited ally of the Saharawi insurgency.

The Saharawi ambassador in Caracas, Mohamed Salem Daha, warns that "any exploitation of the resources of the Sahara without the authorization of the Saharawi is illegal". He is unaware of phosphate imports for this part of the Caribbean. He assures that he has never heard about the subject but does not fail to point out, if that were the case, that those who trade in phosphate, fishing, oil and sand extracted from Western Sahara fuel an endless conflict with disappeared persons, antipersonnel mines and the construction of a 2,700-kilometer wall that divided the population.

However, Daha highlights the support Venezuela has given to the Saharawi liberation since 1982, when Caracas recognized the SADR as a sovereign country. The Bolivarian diplomacy has gone further: on September 17, 2011 inaugurated, in partnership with Cuba, the Simón Bolívar School for more than 350 students of 4 wilayas, as they know the refugee settlements that were established in a region of Algeria.

That of Western Sahara is a forgotten conflict, not longer quite bloody but with complex implications. The internationalist Julio César Pineda, who approached the case when he served as Venezuela's ambassador to Libya, believes that Maduro's government should be prudent. "The issue is delicate in the commercial scope because it is a strategic mineral, but in the diplomatic sphere it is regrettable that Venezuela has broken the balance that it had always maintained and that ended with the closure of the Moroccan embassy".

For Pineda, the conflict has been prolonged in a kind of cold war between Morocco and Algeria, around which the Diaspora of the Saharawi people has taken place. Not counting the dispersed population in exile, the Saharawi total more than half a million people spread across the occupied territories and a series of camps located in almost unknown areas of the Sahara desert. 

The rock of discord

The quality of Saharawi phosphatic rock is recognized all over the world. It is "a yellow to light brownish-colored mineral with scarce fossils - some remains of fish and coprolites - and without organic matter, consolidated only by a clayey-loamy cement that allows its disintegration with ease and, consequently, its subsequent treatment", describes the magazine of Industrial Technique of Spain in its edition of June, 2004.

Despite the international provisions calling into question the extraction and commercialization of products from Western Sahara under Moroccan control, the Moroccan government company "Office Cherifien des Phosphates (OCP) " exploits the phosphate mine in Bou Craa, occupied territory, through its subsidiary Phosphates de Boucraa S.A. (Phosboucraa).
 
Morocco is one of the main exporters of the mineral, which arrives in Puerto Cabello through its state-owned companies Phosboucraa and OCP, as can be read in the reports of the Puerto Cabello Chamber of Commerce. At least five ships, between 2012 and July 2014, have unloaded 137,260 tons for Venezuelan state-owned companies Pequiven and Bariven - the latter, in charge of Pdvsa's international acquisitions. In the rest of the world, Saharawi phosphate customers are usually private companies. In Venezuela, Pequiven and some of its subsidiaries, such as Tripoliven, process Saharawi phosphate in their plants for the production of different chemical products, such as fertilizers and detergents.

The country imports phosphate from Africa because it does not exploit most of the mines it has in the states Falcón and Táchira. "Venezuela, despite possessing deposits that could cover the national demand, has the need to import phosphatic rocks, with the consequent loss of foreign currency", explains the geologist Francisco Raúl García. "If the known deposits of phosphatic rocks are put into production, we could shortly cover the national demand and even export surpluses to neighboring countries".

Tripoliven, which has among its shareholders Pequiven, Valquímica and the Spanish private company FMC Foret, admits that it purchases the mineral from Western Sahara to Morocco. Nicolás Marín, president of its board of directors, maintains that it is a transparent operation. "The rock that is more in line with the requirements of Tripoliven is that of Bou Craa, imported from Morocco", he explains. The Saharawi mine, according to figures from the OCP, on average produces and exports between 2.3 and 2.5 million tons per year, a little less than ten percent of the whole Moroccan phosphate production. Marín notes that the projects for the exploitation of phosphate "made in Venezuela” are under development: "Logically, when the product is available on the market, we will look for it here".

The Spanish company FMC Foret, one of Tripoliven's shareholders, was criticized in the past for purchasing phosphatic rock from Western Sahara to Morocco. A report from the Ethics Council of the government of Norway in 2010 he called attention to this firm, which recognized without embarrassment the purchase of the mineral and its willingness to maintain imports from Layounne, on the understanding that, in its opinion, Morocco was legally and de facto the administrator of the territory: "The company's plant in Huelva, Spain, is heavily dependent on access to the quality phosphate found in Bou Craa".

But the Huelva plant closed in 2010. FMC Foret reported that the closure had nothing to do with the exports from Western Sahara, which, in any case and since then, were stopped.

Regarding its investments in Venezuela, where Saharawi phosphate shipments continue to arrive, the Spanish FMC Foret indicated, in a report delivered to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, the U.S. stock-exchange supervisor), that it maintains an uncontrolled investment in Tripoliven's business valued at nine million dollars by September 30, 2012.

According to the Council of Ethics of the Norwegian government, "Morocco's exploitation of the phosphate resources of Western Sahara constitutes a major violation of the rules.  This is not only due to the fact that the local population is not receiving the benefits; but the current form of exploitation also contributes to maintaining an unresolved situation and, consequently, the presence of Morocco in a territory over which it does not have sovereignty".

Technicians against politicians

Tripoliven was created in 1972 and began operations in 1977. Since then, according to Nicolás Marín, president of the board of directors, the company buys phosphate rock from Morocco for its production. For Marín, the resolutions of the United Nations (UN) are a matter of another level that would not correspond to his company to define.
 
"These issues are unrelated to the normal operation of Tripoliven. I don't know how it's being handled, but we prefer to stay out of that", he says. In the meantime, no government agency has shed any light on the matter: Pequiven and Bariven, both state companies, did not respond to the request for an interview to address this issue until the date of this publication.

Tripoliven processes around 100,000 tons of phosphatic rock in Venezuela every year, most of which is bought from Morocco - including that of Saharawi origin - and its products serve as supplies for the country's detergent industry.

Marín notes that they have never received a complaint from the UN, but remembers that they were once contacted by a non-governmental organization. It was Western Sahara Resource Watch (WSRW) which, from its headquarters in Norway, points out that the response offered did not mention Western Sahara: "Regarding your request for information, we comply in informing you that Tripoliven is not importing rock from the company OCP. FMC Foret is one of Tripoliven's partners, holding 33.33% of the total shares", informed the Venezuelan company to its Norwegian interlocutors.

The organization, with representation in 38 countries, defends the preservation of the resources of the occupied territory for the use of the Saharawi people. "Half of the population of Western Sahara has fled the territory following the brutal Moroccan occupation", says Erik Hagen, president of WSRW. "They live in deep poverty in refugee camps and do not earn a single penny from this trade. The income that Moroccans obtain from it is used to finance and entrench the costly occupation".

The trail continues to Colombia

The phosphate from Western Sahara also arrives in Colombian port, but under the name of a company with state capital from Venezuela. It is "Monómeros", "the only subsidiary company in which Pequiven participates, with headquarters outside the Venezuelan territory, created to promote basic and intermediate chemical products to the manufacturing industry and fertilizers for agriculture", according to Pequiven on its website.
 
In Barranquilla - the Colombian Atlantic port to which the cargo is destined - is its main headquarters. Last year, at least five ships arrived with 107,000 tons of phosphate purchased from Morocco worth approximately 17 million dollars, according to a report by the WSRW organization.

In previous years, shipments of phosphatic rock had already arrived at the port of Barranquilla, sometimes making a stop in Puerto Cabello. The vessel DD Vigor, for example, made a stop in the Venezuelan port before unloading on July 23, 2008 in Colombia nearly 15,000 tons of phosphate from Layounne. Like this case, at least five other ships did the same during that year.

Of the countries that recognize the Saharawi Republic, several have established, as part of their support, the prohibition to import products from the occupied territory. In Latin America, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, have not pronounced themselves in favor of the Saharawi cause. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is precisely in two of these countries (Argentina and Brazil), where the Moroccan OCP maintains offices in the region.

For Hagen, president of Western Sahara Resource Watch, stopping this commercial exchange of Saharawi phosphate between Morocco and Venezuela would be the best sign of support from Caracas. And perhaps, of consistency.

"The Venezuelan government has had excellent words of solidarity for the oppressed people of Western Sahara. For that reason, it is sad to see that it is the only government in the world whose state companies are involved in these imports", he declares. "To end this trade would be the best example of solidarity, and support for international legislation, that could be done".

This article is the product of a team effort published simultaneously by El Universal and the investigative journalism website www.armando.info

What merchandise has given rise to this convoluted semi-covered trade route? It is the coltan, the blue gold of the 21st century, required for various strategic industries due to the conductivity and heat resistance properties of its components, columbite and tantalite.

For Venezuelans, coltan went from being an unknown famous or a science fiction denomination, to a nearby reality thanks to an announcement by President Hugo Chávez. "Now a strategic mineral called coltan has appeared and we have taken the area militarily because they were smuggling it to Colombia," the president said on October 15, 2009. His order reached all the media but it seems that it did not have a determining effect, based on the following journalistic investigation jointly developed throughout a year by reporters of El Universal newspaper of Caracas, the site Armando.info, also of Venezuela, Noticias Uno of Bogotá, with the support of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) of Washington DC.

Exposed on the web, on sites such as Tradeboss.com, is the offer of the Venezuelan mineral —coltan mostly, but also gold and aluminum, among others— by Korea TPC Development of Venezuela. It guarantees dispatches to any part of the world and confidentiality. "Through our fully automated trade platform, customers can directly interact per each shipment while maintaining control of their order in an anonymous and conflict-free environment."

Korea TPC Development of Venezuela was registered in the First Mercantile Register of the city of Valencia, state of Carabobo, on July 29, 2010, nine months after President Chávez ordered the military control of coltan deposits in the Orinoquia. According to the register, the company, with a capital of 23 million dollars, would be engaged in the "construction of bioenergy and gas plants, as well as the manufacture of diesel-based facilities".

Today, however, its principal offices with declared address in hotels like Gran Meliá Caracas and Caracas Palace, simply do not exist. Its trail is also lost in other addresses in the areas of Altamira and Los Cortijos, in Caracas.

However, from Seoul, capital of South Korea, Yang Ha Young recognizes that his name and his company correspond to the same company in Valencia that offers minerals on the Internet. After several attempts to contact him, he declared that he was scammed by Venezuelan partner Moisés González in a series of businesses that, he assumes, now involves him with the purchase and sale of coltan.

"The warning has nothing to do with me," he says. "I was the victim of my partner and I have not been able to communicate with him since he deceived me." Although an attempt was made to contact González, he never answered the telephone calls to the number he published on the Internet adds; not even the neighbors of the addresses he declared under his name know anything about him.

In the opinion of the Korean businessman, everything is part of a misunderstanding. On the other side of the world, from an office in the Garak-Dong neighborhood, he admits that he spent a season in Venezuela waiting for contracts that PDVSA and other state companies never awarded to him. The misunderstanding, if any, anyway illustrates the dark side of a barely known trade with origins in the foothills of the Guayana Shield, in the north of the state of Amazonas and southeast of the state of Bolívar, where the improvised gold and diamond mines begin to share the land with a new mineral in the neighborhood, the black stones, the so-called blue gold or coltan, as it is best known.

The Other El Dorado

Coltan is a combination of columbite and tantalite. Columbite contains Niobium, and tantalite contains Tantalum, numbers 41 and 73 of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table. Although both elements belong to the so-called rare-earth minerals, their use has become increasingly common and indispensable for the miniaturization of electronic equipment ranging from cell phones to missiles.

Despite their rarity, already in the late 70s, the Ministry of Energy and Mines of Venezuela (the then Ministry of Mines and Hydrocarbons) financed research regarding these and other minerals of the Guiana massif, the peculiar geological formation containing inside elements as valuable as they are scarce. But more than 30 years later, when those pioneering experiments were just references filed in the libraries of Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG), a new wave of miners appeared in search of raw material for new technologies. And they arrive with voracity.

Right in Parguaza, in the state of Bolívar, at the foothills of the Guiana massif, the first signs of coltan fever are evident.

In the area of Los Gallitos, from one of the deposits made out in the middle of the savannas, the miners confirm that foreigners are the ones looking for the booty as if it were a home service. " Colombians are the ones who move this stone here," Flandes says plainly, without a last name or formal name, suggesting that it is a nickname.

"They come by motorcycle and travel again to the port of El Burro, then, they take a boat that leaves them in less than 15 minutes in Puerto Carreño, the capital of the department of Vichada," adds Flandes, who is the son of another miner who accompanies him in the search for the so-called black stones. They have learned to distinguish the difference between these mineral from other rocks that are also found in the lands of the area; it is almost black and weighs more than a traditional stone.

Father and son have history extracting gold and diamonds in the region. Now, leaning over a pile of reddish earth, they are seen with a pick and a shovel extracting coltan around Parguaza, a corner of the state of Bolívar that begins to appear on the radar of large companies in the technology sector. In that area, and at least in other four points more known by the locals, when the military lower their guard, they go in waves of up to 30 miners to find the blue gold.

There, where the stone mountains rise above the until-recently virgin jungle, a new activity sprang up. "People are in this because they are in need and there is no work," explains Camilo, another of the many miners in the area.

Everyone remembers well that a group of foreign businessmen appeared more than a year ago in the place with offers of growth. They spoke of new times, of benefits for those who backed with their signatures a request to the government to legalize the extraction of coltan. Everything was in words to the wind. They did not even give printed business cards. "They told the people that there were going to be houses and work sources, but they did not come back," says Flanders.

Several of the landowners in the area add that Colombians, Australians and even Koreans came knocking at their doors with a coltan project under their arms. They offered millions in cash in exchange for their property deeds. In Venezuela, anyway, extracting coltan is a crime.

Any mining activity has been banned in Amazonas since 1989. Only in Bolívar the mining development company of the Amazon (Demina) obtained a concession in 2001 to explore and exploit coltan, among other minerals, but now faces the case in courts, after the Government rescinded in 2010 the only license that the State had granted

Extracting, storing or transporting black stones became a crime thereafter. The judicial records reveal that the National Guard seized almost two tons (1800 kilos) of coltan between 2009 and 2011 to seven people, including women and men, indigenous people, Colombian citizens and minors.

Although several of the accused have been released, most of the cases remain open. The National Guard has confiscated the ore inside wrappings, bags of fique and white stockings, along with picks, surucas (screen), shovels, machetes and some pairs of boots.

A local organization, the Foundation for the Development of Science and Technology in the state of Amazonas (Fundacite Amazonas) revealed in a 2009 report that the National Guard had 46,800 kilograms of columbite-tantalite confiscated from a Colombian citizen and that in the checkpoint of Pozón de Babilla were machines seized by the military near the area where the illegal extraction occurred. Fundacite, attached to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, found evidence that the miners had the advice of specialists with knowledge on methods of studying soils.

Black Route to Blue Gold

The confidentiality assurance that Korea TPC Development of Venezuela offers on the web is neither excessive nor rare in this business. In fact, coltan is handled outside the law, without invoices or customs records, and virtually in the anonymity of shell companies, e.g. Global Impact USA and Hawk Enterprises. Only the first one has legal registration in the state of Florida, USA, but both refer to the same telephone numbers of a contact in Venezuela, in this case it is Aribel Ojeda, who prefers not to mention the ore business.

That shadow marketing is also transnational. If the ore is extracted in Venezuela, it soon crosses the borders that in this area usually correspond to geographical features. Between Venezuela and Colombia that feature is the course of the Orinoco River. In its basin, in the middle of the jungle, there are more streams than roads. Coltan peddlers only need 15 minutes by boat to take the goods to a safe harbor. Through El Burro and Puerto Páez, merchants cross the Orinoco to reach Puerto Carreño, in Colombia. Further south, but in the same state of Amazonas, another favorite route connects San Fernando de Atabapo in Venezuela with Puerto Inírida in Colombia.

Coltan is an open secret in the south of the country. But like everything informal that develops in secrecy, it is open to scams and business control by de facto powers that already handle other illicit traffics. There are many cases of intermediaries who have received cassiterite for coltan. There are also versions that, under the protection of discretion, grant a share in the business to anonymous military officials. Meanwhile, the local church of Puerto Ayacucho,  has not been inhibited from pointing out in the September-December 2010 edition of its magazine La Iglesia en Amazonas that "the Armed Forces do not exercise proper control and the miners evade those controls in various ways, being accomplices in multiple cases of the damage caused to the environment, which is mostly irreparable."

However, on the other side of the border, in Colombia, there is evidence that a black market of valuable metals and rare-earth minerals is growing in areas where historically the Government has exercised weak control. Since 2010, its security entities have seized over 83 tons (166 thousand pounds) of tantalum and tungsten in an area of the department of Guainía.

 The scenario is favorable to the intervention of drug cartels in the business. An illegal mining operation was developed by the Villa Cifuentes brothers, linked to drug trafficking. The Colombian government suspended their concession to exploit niobium, tantalum, vanadium and zirconium in Puinawai National Park, while the United States of America accused one of them, Jorge Milton Cifuentes Villa, as one of the main suppliers of cocaine for the Mexican Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as 'El Chapo Guzmán' and his Sinaloa Cartel.

"What we have found are sophisticated drug trafficking organizations that are increasingly involved with the trafficking of minerals from Puinawai Park and Venezuela," says the military commander of the area in Colombia, Marine Colonel Alfredo de Videro

Further south, the temptation of coltan also permeates the Brazilian border. Not in vain, most mineral refiners in the hemisphere are in that country. They have to go through there almost by obligation to become an input fit for industrial use.

"I would say that Colombia and Brazil have a great deal of business," concludes the governor of the state of Amazonas, Liborio Guarulla, who believes that the national government is an accomplice of the black market for not establishing mechanisms to legalize the exploitation of the mineral. "In those countries, this activity is formalized or at least it is not illegal.”

In Brazil, experts in mining laws, like lawyer Sergio Rocha Brito Marques, have urged politicians and manufacturing companies in the country to strengthen controls on mining. To them, inadequate and obsolete laws have allowed the growth of a black market north of the country's Amazonian provinces. They warn that the result is a chaos in the mining of their country in the border area with Colombia and Venezuela, where there are no clues about the global prices of the mineral and the buyers do not ask for coltan certificates of origin (a practice that a good part of the international industry has been adopting as a standard, under strong pressure from NGOs and multilateral organizations).

The Alarms Triggered

There is good reason for it. "Venezuela could emerge as a big problem because it represents another source of conflicting coltan, coming from an area where there is no regulation, no transparency and no security for the people working in the mines," warns Aaron Hall from Washington, on behalf of the NGO Enough Project.

The ghosts of Africa haunt any analysis on the subject. Although the conflicts already existed, coltan propped up the tribal struggles of Congo, Uganda and Rwanda. Blood-stained coltan (like diamonds) became a phrase made from humanitarian campaigns and film scripts. But in the Venezuelan case, that trailer and the flirtations of the national government with China and, above all, Iran, announce a horror film of geopolitical dimensions.

"We have decided to work with the Iranian brothers in the exploration of mines," the then Minister of Basic Industries and Mining, José Salamat Khan, said in 2011. Apart from the announcement, since 2009, Iran has been cooperating with Venezuela in conducting studies of mineral soils to prepare the Venezuelan mining map, according to the page of the National Geoscience Database of Iran.

The matter is not indifferent to the US authorities. Venezuelan officials, like former Minister Khan, in 2010, maintained relationships with Iranian shipping company Sadra Shipping, which claims on its website to have a branch in Caracas. Sadra is a subsidiary of company Khatam al-Anbiya, subject to sanctions by the US Department of the Treasury for its participation in the Iranian nuclear program.

The Venezuelan case, however, is far from the examples of Central Africa, a vein from which a fifth of the global supply of coltan is extracted, and a region plagued by endemic political instability.

Another Venezuelan advantage that experts celebrate is that although reaching one of the most intricate mines in the south of the country can take up to a week by boat and on foot, many of the black stones are loose in the form of nuggets.

As in a large part of the commodities world trade, extractors have a small part of the business. The most fortunate Venezuelan miners have found rocks of 15 kilos. On average, up to 200 bolivars (around 46 dollars at the official rate) are paid per kilo; this, after a negotiation process to fix the price. In the formal market, the payment is higher. The price went from 45 dollars per kilo in 1990 to a record high of 700 dollars in 2000, when the multinational Sony had to postpone the launch of the second version of PlayStation because of the scarce offer of coltan back then in the market.

There is not yet a public index of prices. The secret that involves the purchase and sale of the mineral generates price variations that produce spikes and drops in supplies. Everything depends on a negotiation process. "Niobium and tantalum materials are not openly traded," warns the US Geological Institute (USGS). "Purchase contracts are confidential between buyer and seller."

The cloudiness in the Venezuelan coltan market is a symptom of a problem that —according to researcher Raimund Bleischwitz of the Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy of Wuppertal in Germany— Chávez’s government must face. The black market will grow and increase its danger as the government delays the generation of mining laws and transparency.

"Manufacturers do not want to deal with bandits," says Bleischwitz. "Central Africa is a problem because there are no strong governments with which to negotiate a stable market and transparency. That is where Venezuela's strong central government has the potential to do it right and establish order in the coltan market, instead of a black market."

With reports from Ricardo Sandoval Palos in the United States of America, Ignacio Gómez in Colombia, Marcelo Soares in Brazil, and Nari Kim in South Korea

Related contents

Also read on the website of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ):

"Venezuela emerges as a new source of 'conflict' minerals"

"Colombia's black-market coltan tied to drug traffickers, paramilitaries"

Also read on the website of El Espectador:
"Amenaza en el Puinawai" (Threat in Puinawai)