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This research shows the relationship between the exploitation of gold, the armed conflict in Colombia, the structural racism and the impact on the environment, based on the case of the black communities that live in Río Quito, Quibdó, Chocó. The Structural Ethnosemiotics of Greimás was implemented to analyze the interviews made to social and community leaders in the region. Three semiotic levels were identified: First, semiotics of action, mining extraction by black communities; second, cognitive semiotics, state of anomie and antinomy in the regulation of the exploitation of gold; and third, semiotics of passions, which corresponds to fear as a belief and ethnic identity as ancestral knowledge about the territory and the river. The thesis is framed in the autonomy and self-determination of the identity that black communities have assumed and resisted; the antithesis is recorded in the insecurity that presupposes fear regarding the dynamics between the various actors in the armed conflict in the context of mining exploitation; and the synthesis is the discourse of peace as an expectation. Finally, the river is outlined as the structural relationship of all the study variables.