Colombia's president wants to remove the wreck of the Spanish ship San Jose from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea as soon as possible. Much of the treasure aboard the San Jose is believed to have been mined through forced labor by Bolivia's indigenous peoples.
The communities of Caranga, Chicha and Kilca in Bolivia claim that the ship and its contents belong to them. The San Jose was carrying a vast abundance of gold, silver and emeralds from Latin America back to Spain in 1708, when it was sunk by a British naval ship off the coast of Cartagena. The discovery has been "immersed" in international legal disputes, including an ongoing case in The Hague, according to a lawsuit filed against the government of Colombia and an American salvage company. The government hopes to begin recovering the artefacts from the wreck in the coming months, but the communities say Colombia has no right at all to explore San Jose without including the descendants of those who rented the precious metals found in the ship's treasures.