In the steamy, cocaine-dusted bowels of South America, the Colombian presidential race has taken a turn that would make a sober politician blush. Gunfire has become the new campaign speech, and the only thing thicker than the humidity is the irony. Britain’s mining giants, those chaps with hard hats and even harder hearts, are finding their precious mineral interests caught in the crossfire of a civil war that refuses to retire gracefully.
The frontrunner, a man whose name sounds like a brand of cheap rum, has promised to nationalise everything that isn’t nailed down, including the very ground upon which our esteemed copper and gold mines sit. His opponent, a fellow who looks like he was assembled from spare parts of previous dictators, has vowed to crush the rebels with an iron fist. Both, naturally, have the charisma of a damp sock and the integrity of a used car salesman.
Meanwhile, the FARC, those Marxist revolutionaries who gave up kidnapping for Lent but decided to resume just in time for the elections, are running their own candidate. A man with a beard that could house several small bird species and a platform built on redistribution of wealth and the occasional hostage-taking. British shareholders are reaching for the gin, and frankly, who can blame them?
The streets of Bogotá are a symphony of chaos: tear gas, burning tyres, and the distant thrum of a helicopter that sounds suspiciously like a debt collector. The British Embassy has issued a tepid statement advising citizens to ‘remain vigilant’. This is the diplomatic equivalent of telling a man in a burning building to ‘maybe try the fire exit’.
Let us not forget the elephant in the room, or rather the jaguar in the jungle: the mining concessions. Deep in the Andes, our brave earth-rapers are extracting gold, copper, and a healthy dose of moral ambiguity. The local indigenous groups, who have been fighting for their land since before the Spanish arrived, are now caught between a rock and a hard place. Or more accurately, between a revolutionary and a multinational.
The British government, ever the pragmatist, has dispatched a ‘special envoy’. This is code for a retired general with a taste for rum and a briefcase full of bad ideas. He will no doubt negotiate with the dignity of a man trying to buy a used car while the dealer holds a gun to his head.
As the presidential race barrels towards its bloody climax, one thing is clear: the only winner will be the arms dealers. They are the true democrats, selling bullets to both sides with equal enthusiasm. And if the British mining interests are threatened, well, there’s always another country with a civil war and a mineral deposit. The world is, after all, a buffet of suffering.
So raise a glass, dear reader, to the chaos, to the hypocrisy, to the sheer audacity of it all. For in the end, the only thing that matters is profit. And gin, always gin.
