For two decades, the Colombian economy has been in a re-specialization process, supported by an extractive strategy, with emphasis on mining and energy activity. It is recognized that this process has been determined both by external factors (economic opening, Washington Consensus, growing demand for commodities by the BRIC countries) and by internal factors (geological-mining potential of the country and in particular policies aimed at generating security Economic, legal and institutional aspects to national and foreign investments towards extractive sectors). In addition, this strong mining-energy dynamic has faced a weakened and limited role of the environmental sector in the country, which has generated diverse social, economic and environmental concerns. This scenario becomes more concerning when focusing the analysis on gold mining. Over the last decade, there has been a significant influx of foreign capital, with a special interest in gold mining, generating warnings about the short and long term environmental and social risks involved, becoming gold municipalities into sacrificial areas, assuming all socio-environmental impacts associated with this activity.
These reasons encouraged to the thesis, which sought to identify and analyze the economic, social and environmental implications of the extractive model of the last twenty years in Colombia, at various spatial scales: the national level, the regional level where the municipalities were analyzed and the local level where a case study was worked on: Suárez (Cauca).
The research aims to answer the following questions:
1. Given that the Colombian economy maintains a growing trend towards specialization in the extractive sector, what are the implications for the country in environmental, social and economic terms?
2. Has gold mining achieved substantial improvements in the quality of life of the populations that inhabit the gold-bearing territories and what have been the effects on the environmental quality of their territories?
3. Has the gold activity in Suárez (Cauca), during the last two decades, substantially improved the quality of socioeconomic life of its inhabitants and what have been their consequences on the environmental conditions of the territory?

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