In a tropical Eden, children at the coal-face of hell

Even for six-year-olds at this Colombian mine, life is reduced to danger, darkness and drugs

WASHED and scrubbed, the Oliver Twists, six-year-olds alongside teenagers, line up beside the cauldron bubbling on the gas stove for the hot soup of potatoes and plantains. Beside the Christmas tree and crib and under their own childish drawings pinned to the wall alongside the washing-up rota, the boys take their places at the neat plastic tables for four.

After a brief grace, they tuck into their dinner in a freshly painted shed in Angelopolis, a village in central Colombia. But the shed is not some happy orphanage; this is the Don Bosco miners' social club. The boys have just come off shift down coal-mines where conditions are more horrific than any the Rhondda Valley has seen since the Middle Ages.

The tropical valley in which Angelopolis lies looks like the Garden of Eden. Under the hot December sun, flowers bloomand the dark green of the coffee bushes blends with the lighter emerald of the sugar cane.

In fenced paddocks cattle chew the cud, watched over by statues of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin in this strongly Catholic country. The occasional cross bearing a name commemorates a wayfarer killed in an accident on the twisting mountain road.

But Angelopolis is not the Garden of Eden. For the boys, it is a scene from Dante's Inferno. From early morning they work in holes in the ground bereft of pit-props or the most rudimentary safety equipment, the ventilation precarious in the extreme, electricity dependent on bare wires roughly hammered into the tunnel walls. They squeeze through gaps in the rock no adult could negotiate and hack away with picks at seams a foot thick or less.

They heap it into tin trays and drag it back to porters, who take it up to the surface. Where the electricity does not reach or when the current fails, they work by the glimmer of candles they carry in polished sardine- tins stuck on their helmets.

The only mechanisation visible is an ancient Chevrolet mounted on blocks at the mouth of one mine. A cable on a drum mounted on its rear wheel hauls a little truck on rails which brings the coal to the surface.

At least the mine serves to take the minds of some youngsters off their home lives. All come from homes of great poverty where violence, drink, drugs and prostitution are commonplace.

Jaime Zuloaga, the superintendent, pointed to one quiet 12-year-old, Francisco. "He's given up his family. After all, he's the son of his father and his sister and home was just too much."

There are others who cannot or will not take a place at the table. Perhaps they are still sulking in the blackness down the drift, taking what comfort they can from marijuana or bazuco, the crack cocaine that they sometimes receive as wages. Angelopolis lies less than an hour's drive from Medellin, one of the world's cocaine capitals, but few of the city's narco-dollars reach the village. Still, cocaine in all its forms is readily available, and narcotics are the only thing that keeps many boys coming to the pits every day.

Some have no choice: they have effectively been sold as slaves to mine- owners who want to recoup the investment made in their nimble young limbs before respiratory diseases and back trouble overtake them.

Many six-year-olds do not have to hack at the seams of coal. They do the lighter work of bringing food and drink to the older ones. Some content themselves with earning 70p a day filling woven plastic sacks with coal.

Others under 10 look after the ponies, helping to strap sacks to their backs. Sometimes the boys follow them across the hills on slippery tracks which the beasts tread like robots, squelching in thin coffee-coloured mud under the loads they take to a road where lorries pick up the coal.

One complained that the few pence he got for carrying the sacks of coal hardly allowed him to buy new horseshoes.

At the coffee harvest some young miners go off to pick berries. It is open-air work and the money is better.

In his office in Medellin, Jose Gabriel Restrepo, a lawyer who works for the Defensor del Pueblo, or official ombudsman, agreed little had changed in the mines since 1992. "There's no other work for people to do," he said. "Colombian law says that children under 16 shouldn't work, and never in industries like coal mining. But what can we do? We write reports and send them to Bogota. An interdepartmental committee has been set up."

It is clear the weak Colombian government has neither the means nor the will to stop the child labour, and even if it did the closure of so many pits, most of them illegally operated, would be politically impossible. Back at the Don Bosco club, Zuloaga said the boys' emerging machismo kept them at the coal- face as a matter of pride.

The government is keen to keep the situation at Angelopolis quiet. If the sale of coal dug by child miners and exported through the port of Buenaventura became widely known abroad, it could lead to trouble - possibly a boycott of Esso's massive Cerrejon mine, the world's biggest, which regularly sends shiploads of coal from the other end of Colombia through Immingham and Liverpool to British power stations and to other European countries.

Meanwhile, the social workers try to solve the insoluble with the tiny subsidy they get from the Colombian government's family welfare department.

"We're trying to find the money to open the centre at weekends," Zuloaga said. "That way we could keep the boys from boozing so much on their days off."