The Holy Grail of Shipwrecks: Colombia’s $20 Billion Treasure Salvage Project Faces Indigenous Opposition

by time news

2024-04-16 05:03:55

The Colombia“>Colombian government launched a project earlier this year to salvage a 300-year-old shipwreck, which is estimated to hold $20 billion worth of treasure. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has ordered his government to remove what he has dubbed the “holy grail of shipwrecks” – the Spanish ship San Jose – from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea as soon as possible, the country’s culture minister told Bloomberg.

Petro wants to raise the wreckage of the ship with 3 masts and 62 guns to the surface before the end of his term in 2026 – and asked to create a public-private partnership to realize the project. Mystery surrounds the ownership of the ship’s vast cache of gold, silver and emeralds (barakat) valued between $4 billion and $20 billion, according to a lawsuit.

Now indigenous communities in Bolivia, the descendants of miners who dug for gold, are opposing the Colombian government’s plans to salvage the remains of the 18th-century ship – and have called on Spain and UNESCO to step in and stop the project. Colombia hopes to begin recovering the artefacts from the wreck of the San Jose in the coming months, but the communities of Caranga, Chicha and Kilca in Bolivia claim that the ship and its contents belong to them.

Much of the treasure aboard the San Jose is believed to have been mined through forced labor by Bolivia’s indigenous peoples, so Colombia’s plans to extract the remains without consulting their descendants would violate international law, the communities said in a letter to UNESCO last week.

#battle #ship #sank #treasure #billion #dollars

You may also like

Leave a Comment

Statcounter code invalid. Insert a fresh copy.