This rather old article showed up in a newspaper called the Daily Times out of Lahore, Pakistan!

Prospectors lured by ‘cursed’ Venezuela gold mine

Four centuries after the lure of Venezuelan gold brought ruin to English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, the riches at one giant mine some say is cursed still haunt treasure hunters from across the globe.

Located south of the Orinoco river and near a town bearing the name of the mythical golden city of El Dorado, the Las Cristinas deposit captivates miners and prospectors even though no ore has been legally dug there in two decades.

Studies show it may be Latin America’s top gold deposit. But the Las Cristinas saga, involving a ghost town, environmental devastation and fist-sized nuggets, underlines the risks of business in Venezuela, where the draw of natural wealth has been dulled by rule changes and economic turmoil.

A web of legal cases and red tape has so far stopped any big company from extracting the estimated 20 million ounces of gold that lie in Las Cristinas and its sister property Brisas - together known as Kilometro 88.

The view that Venezuela, South America’s top oil exporter, offers an unstable business climate has grown under socialist President Hugo Chavez, who has nationalized large chunks of the economy. Game investors and poor local miners at Las Cristinas hope their luck will change after Chavez, with an eye on record gold prices and falling oil income, vowed to open the mine this year with the help of Russian tycoon Vladimir Agapov.

That promise will be hard to keep, but it has caught the eyes of locals who hope the project will bring order to chaotic camps and villages of wildcat miners where drunken machete fights take lives and mercury run-off pollutes water supplies. Even Agapov’s Vancouver-based company, Rusoro, which Chavez wants to develop Las Cristinas, says the timeline is too short.

Pessimism about the property has reached stock investors, who typically assign big discounts to shares of companies associated with Kilometro 88.

Grossi’s curse: Thick forest around Las Cristinas has been torn by wildcat miners, who stand waist deep in yellow water gathering ore from the cratered landscape with mercury droplets and strong hoses, part of a 30-year rush that ebbs and flows with gold prices.

Guards on horseback patrol a high fence around the property, trying to keep out locals, who a decade ago found a gold nugget weighing one kilogram laying in the mud there.

Investors from Europe, North America and now Russia have all set their sights on the mine but no company has extracted its ore since the government expelled an Italian adventurer called Amalfi Grossi who operated the mine in the 1980s.

Old-timers such as Jorge Cordoba who use pans to squeeze grains of gold from the reddish earth say Las Cristinas was cursed by Grossi 20 years ago when the government consolidated the area’s mining operations and forced him and thousands of miners working for him out of the town he built there. Grossi died a broken man soon after and the ghost town rotted into the jungle.

Frustrated with the lack of progress, Chavez kicked out Placer Dome’s successor in 2002 and handed the rights to Canadian firm Crystallex, but has never given it an environmental permit to develop the property in the Belgium-sized Imateca forest reserve.

Crystallex did not respond to requests for comment, but has said it still expects the government to issue the permit. First concessioned in 1963, Las Cristinas ore grade is low and experts say it will cost about $500 an ounce to extract. Gold now sells for close to $1,000 an ounce. reuters