Up to 300,000 people in Colombia are suffering shortages of food and medicine after informal and illegal gold miners blocked roads in protest of the destruction of their machinery by authorities, ministers said on Thursday.
Small, medium and large-scale gold miners in 12 largely rural municipalities across Antioquia and Cordoba provinces protested the destruction earlier this month of nine so-called "dragons" - floating machines that suck up silt and mud from rivers in search of alluvial gold.
The machines were causing "a highly sensitive disaster to the environment and endangering the lives of the inhabitants and future inhabitants in the area, as well as the environmental sustainability of the region," Interior Minister Alfonso Prada said in a televised address.
