At least five killed in explosion during clash between gold miners in Bolivia

An explosion has killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a 1-year-old baby, during a dispute between rival groups of gold miners in Bolivia, according to police.

The fatal incident took place before dawn on Thursday at the Yani mining camp near the mountain town of Sorata, which is around 90 miles northwest of the capital La Paz.

Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer, said three men were also among the dead.

The initial death toll was put at six, but this number was revised to five after firefighters had recovered bodies from under the rubble.

The suspected perpetrator of the attack was killed by the blast, which was detonated by remote control, according to Jhonny Aguilera, Bolivia's deputy interior minister.

The explosion hit a three-storey house. It also wrecked several other structures, set cars and tractors on fire and cut electricity supplies.

Thursday’s clash was part of a dispute between two rival mining groups who have argued for years about access to certain veins of gold, said Jhony Silva, a legal adviser to one of them.

The gold miners involved in the row are part of Bolivia’s large sector of cooperatives.

These groups of artisanal workers are legally allowed to mine in Bolivia, with the latest government figures showing that the cooperative industry is responsible for 58% of the country’s overall mining production.

The cooperatives grew in scale as a result of economic crises, which led mining companies to slash their number of employees.

Disputes between different mining cooperatives are not uncommon, nor are rows between them and salaried workers from the state mining company Comibol, which came to dominate the mining industry under former President Evo Morales, who was in power from 2006 to 2019.

Almost $2.87 billion (€2.6bn) worth of gold was exported from the Latin American country in 2023.