popular leadership. Nairobi, Peru and Switzerland, among others, already know the way in which the Vetan community coexists with ancestral mining and the ecosystem. This enormous task corresponded to Ivonne Consuelo Gonzlez, President of Asomineros Vetas, who suffered, along with her community, for more than 12 years, not having a delimitation of the pramo.
"I have focused the last 12 years on fighting for that territory of the Pramo de Santurbn, for being in our territory and for the ancestral activities that we carry out there," said Ivonne Consuelo Gonzlez, President of Asomineros Vetas, who said that she was "a woman who feels the adrenaline of representing a union and a community like the vetana, which has mining in its DNA, but also that love for the ecosystem with which we live”.
She is a professional in marketing and international business, with a specialization in environmental management, who, according to what she told us, is "fascinated by everything that is social, which is why I am a recognized social leader in Vetas and in the province of Soto Norte ”.
Yvonne likes the word DNA and repeats it. According to science, "it is deoxyribonucleic acid, material that contains hereditary information in humans and other organisms."
For this reason, Ivonne Consuelo affirms that “the most important thing is to maintain that balance between the DNA that we have as miners and also the DNA that we carry on how to coexist with the ecosystem of the Pramo de Santurbn, with our water sources. For us it is very important to recognize and that they recognize, that balance between water and gold. We live in harmony with water and gold in perfect condition. We want our territory, my work is focused on that, to always be highlighting the love we have for our ecosystem, but also for the identity of being miners”.
Today, the President of Asomineros Vetas is calm, with the satisfaction of having fulfilled her duty and not a one-day duty, but a duty carried out for more than a decade until the goal was achieved.
According to Ivonne herself, "vetanos have been in limbo for more than twelve years with this issue of the delimitation of the Pramo de Santurbn." Whoever suffers it is who knows it, back in Vetas it was a total uncertainty of not being able to continue. The delimitation left them with their hands tied, because according to the pramo line they could not do anything, much less their mining, which they had been doing for 467 years.
Ivonne explains it better, “as Vetanos we are the highest municipality in Colombia, therefore, due to biodiversity, diversity or biophysical aspects, which is the altitude and the climate, one could say that we are a pramo, but at the same time We have an ancestry of 467 years doing ancestral and legal mining. What have I been able to collaborate on or what have I been able to do? Our community has felt the tranquility of having been the first municipality to agree on the delimitation of the Pramo de Santurbn with the National Government, after so many struggles, suffering, and psychological problems in our community, a social fabric that was breaking down as a result of that uncertainty, to become even a little calmer, despite the fact that our companies, as president of Asomineros, managed to get them to join the Responsible Gold Swiss initiative, It means that we have a certification that we make clean gold, that our gold is responsible: No mercury, good mining practices, good legal practices. And that gives peace of mind because the entire community of Vetas, the 2,300 inhabitants, live from that mining”.
For Ivonne Consuelo, “the great victory has been to be able to carry the delimitation of Santurbn in my head, to be able to defend our ecosystem and our ancestral activity, to have achieved that balance. That was the participatory part for us.”
Another great victory was that, “as Asomineros, we were also able to be at the head of the Ponca Council - Planning and Management Plan for the Alto Lebrija River Basin. We have been able to demonstrate that we are interested in water more than all, that for us it is not an enemy, on the contrary, our ecosystem and our water sources are our home and, therefore, we are going to defend them without ignoring our community and its activities ”.
His other enormous achievement, the third among many others, is “getting recognition for the work we did with the World Bank. Because Asomineros, through me, had the opportunity to work with the World Bank, not only to mitigate the covid in the mining community, but also to have created the Grupo Mujeres Que Valen Oro. I have a group of 158 women from the Grupo Mujeres Que Valen Oro , where they have had training, productivity, another parallel alternative to mining, to diversify their economy. We were rewarded for this initiative, taking us to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, in December to share our experience. They highlighted us, I was able to bring a person from the community to meet us and the World Bank recognized us worldwide. So that's pretty nice for us."
After all this work and all these satisfactions, the President of Asomineros Vetas is allowed to dream and the country she dreams of is one where "I would like to continue working on the social side, I would like to have a country that is inclusive, that misses that There is polarization, because I think that this hurts us a lot, to be talking about sides. That we better be just one country, that we all dedicate ourselves to work, to move this beautiful country forward. Colombia is a paradise. I had the opportunity to go to Peru, also invited, as Asomineros and as Grupo Mujeres Que Valen Oro, and absolutely no one is envied, we live in a paradise, we cannot continue turning it into something else, rather the opposite, each woman , each child, each young person, each man, we must work together, so that our country is that prosperous country,