Some notes on the exploitation of gold and human beings in Colombia. Catalina Lozano. Indeed, it has been argued –notably by Sigmund Freud- that gold is shit, especially with reference to the gold offered by the devil that turns out in many stories, Colombian as well as European, to be monumentally self-destructive. The world delights in opposites. Anthropologist and ex-bank teller Saba Waheed informed me that the commonest substances found on bank notes in the United States are shit and cocaine. Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2004. p. 6 . The Southwest was one of the areas of Colombia where, in colonial times, the economy was most based on the slavery of human beings who were brutally “hunted” in the West Coast of Africa and transported on English, French and Portuguese ships to be traded in the Americas. In the Spanish colonies, the arrival port was Cartagena, a city in the Atlantic Coast of what is known today as Colombia. (What is known today as Colombia is the result of an independence war led by the Creole elites who built a fragile nation-State where the basic social structure, inherited from colonial times and completely…