July 2007. A bus was taking me for the first time from Cuzco, in the South of Peru to Puerto Maldonado, the capital of Madre de Dios (in English: the Mother of God), some 230 kilometers from the border with the Brazilian state of Acre. After hours travelling on a curvy and steep dirt road that connects the Andes with the Amazon Rainforest, I notice that passengers are getting up to leave. I go up to the driver and ask: Why are they getting off the bus if we haven’t yet arrived at Puerto? “It’s Km 98, the Guacamayo bend, there’s a great deal of gold here”. Three years later, the road is paved, the journey is shorter and the rivulets become an example of prospecting in its most uncontrolled and devastating face. 

Today, it is thought that some 300 people arrive every day to Madre de Dios. The majority come from the poor regions of the Andean mountain range in search of work in the mining areas. They are encouraged by the easy access afforded by the construction of the southern Interoceanic highway that connects Acre to ports in the Pacific tearing into Peruvian mountains. They also come due to an increase in the price of gold that has beaten records lately thanks to the world economic crisis.

In three years, at least 10 thousand people have already passed by Guacamayo, which has extended some 15 km more of road. By the roadside, the small encampment has changed into a chaotic village of sheds built with blue tarpaulin and cheap wood. Within these, flourishes the commercialization of fuels and mining input materials, aside from hotels, canteens, bars and brothels.

Like a kind of present century Serra Pelada (Brazil’s former notorious and major pit-like gold mine, located south of the Amazon River in the state of Pará), Peruvian prospectors repeat the Brazilian tragedy of the 80s: feverishly uprooting the forest to find the valuable metal, quickly converting it into a vast desert that can be seen from the sky.

In the old west




The exploitation of gold in Madre de Dios began more than 50 years ago, when the road was just mud and dust. “Before, we had to travel two or three weeks to reach Puerto Maldonado. Today we make the trip in less than a day”, recounts Dante Oliveira, a young fellow from the Andes and a 15-year veteran prospector that I met in one of my ‘incursions’ into the several mining centers in the region.

Going into the zones of Guacamayo, Huepetuhe and Delta 1 is like invading enemy territory. In those places, the presence of the government is nonexistent and one feels like a character in a far west movie. These are lands with their own laws, where a journalist is almost always a persona non grata.

“You’re only to take pictures when I say so”, counseled Dante, watching over my own life in Guacamayo. After gaining his confidence, I asked him if he was aware of destroying the environment. “O’course I do, but there’s no work in my country. Professionals and learned people also come here and simply find no jobs at all in the city. It’s quite dangerous here, Maria. Someday I may end up dead”, he replied in all sincerity.

Work is in fact heavy and with no caution whatsoever with regard to the jungle, the water or for a worker’s safety. Prospectors remove the vegetation with the aid of chainsaw and axe and open pits in the ground with jets of water from a giant hose. There has to be a great deal of pressure to make the earth slide and widen the hole. The slightest mishap can cause a loss of control over the hose. The jet tip is several kilos in weight and could hit someone’s head. If that should happen, it is certain death.

Another hose that controls the suction pump —or maraca as they call it—, sucks up the mixture of water and dirt from the hole and dumps it onto a kind of wooden slide ramp covered with a gray carpet. This is where sand and gold are caught, later to be separated with mercury. This liquid metal is extremely toxic and is simply burned and dispersed into the atmosphere, into the ground itself and into rivers, contaminating animals, plant life and men alike. A study from the Caritas of Peru estimates that more than 50 tons of mercury is used in Madre de Dios every year.

Nightclubs

Even so, for some, the effort is worth it. If he works hard and is lucky, a prospector can earn in a day what he would not earn in a month of public service, for instance. But there is a downturn: “In the jungle you can make good, but you also spend a lot. The routine here is to work hard, grab some gold and be off to drink a few rounds with some naughty girls”, jokes Dante, actually touching on a very serious subject: child prostitution and human trafficking.

Adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 coming from other parts of Peru, but especially from the range, are fooled by “good” work offers as baby sitters, saleswomen or waitresses. When they arrive at Madre de Dios, they discover that their work is actually in nightclubs next to the gold digging areas, usually a path of no return.

These bars ore open round-the-clock and bear suggestive names such as Las garotitas (The little girls) and Tu lugar de placer (Your pleasure place). “Girls end up raped and in debt, having to repay back the money invested by their bosses. Without money they cannot ever get out of such a life”, explains Oscar Guadalupe, who runs the shelter of the Huarayo Association, the only one that protects underage girls living in a situation of risk in these gold digging areas. From October 2008 to today, more than 70 adolescents have already been care for there.

The numbers of the gold digging activity

The mining production at Madre de Dios is completely informal but profitable in the house of millions. In Heupetuhe, where the first men from the range arrived more than 30 years ago with their golden dreams, human carriers were replaced by backhoes in a mining activity that should not be considered anymore as being artisanal or small. In the place that today serves as an example of ecological devastation on the planet, at least 70% of the auriferous activity is partially or fully mechanized.

According to the Ministry of Mines and Energy, in 2008 16 tons of gold were produced in the department, estimated at 500 million dollars. In the same year, the State received only 47,800 soles (less than 18 thousand dollars) in taxes from miners. It is obvious that almost all of the production did not pay the corresponding taxes. This gold represents 9.5% of Peru’s production, the fifth country in the world in the market for that metal.

The numbers of the environmental damages caused in the region, according to Minister Antonio Brack, of Peru’s recently formed Ministry of the Environment, reach 18 thousand hectares. Up to March 2009, the Geologic, Mining and Metallurgy Institute had handed over 1,592 mining concessions and only 19 had approved environmental impact studies.

Action and reaction

The sheer size of the problem demands each time greater action from the government of Peru. In February this year, an urgent ordinance was issued that suspends mining petitions in Madre de Dios and forbids the use of dredging machinery on vessels to prospect gold in riverbeds. “We will allow the activity only in 9% of the territory”, declared the minister.

Settlings forge ahead into parks and national reserves, as well as into the territories of communities of indigenous people that hold one of the world’s main biodiversity reservoirs. The National Service of Protected Natural Areas conducted throughout the entire year of 2010, specific patrols to control mining activities in all the Tambopara National Reserve, already invaded by prospectors from Guacamayo.

The emergency measures produced by the government have not pleased mining associations all over Peru. Upset, they began manifestations and blocked roads in several parts of the country in the month of April. They demanded the resignation of minister Brack and the abrogation of his decree. Six people ended up losing their lives in the region of Arequipa in a confrontation between protesters and the police.

Gold diggers say they have not received to date, any State delegation with a mission to guide their formalizing processes and to seek a solution for the place’s environmental and social problems. For Ernesto Raéz, biologist and one of the people fighting for the conservation of the Madre de Dios forest, a humanitarian message to the miners can be a great step towards generating a condition for governance in the region. “Here, as anywhere else, people are thirsty for knowledge and to live a better life”.

* Maria Emília Coelho is a Brazilian journalist that has lived almost three years in Puerto Maldonado, in Peru.