Amazon’s billion dollar gold rush leaves trail of toxins
which sucks sediment from the bottom of the Madeira River. Miners on the boat then sift through the rocks and dirt for tiny pieces of gold.
Magrao started off in the business wading into small rivers with a hand-held tube and is now a senior operator on a boat worth 3 million reais ($900,000).
“I earned 23,000 reais last month ($7,000),” a huge salary for a working-class man in the Amazon, 62-yearold Magrao told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He spoke while maneuvering levers to direct the boat’s suction tube with a cigarette dangling in his mouth.
The two story-barge with humming motors looks like something out of a science fiction movie like Mad Max or Water World. It has several sleeping rooms with bunk beds and a fulltime cook.
Workers say it is formally registered with Brazilian authorities, meaning they have to pay tax on their earnings.
“We are paid in gold,” said 60-year-old Valda Mendes, the boat’s cook, as she prepared a lunch of rice and steak on open flames.
LAUNDERING PROFITS While some boats obey the law, much of the Amazon’s gold is extracted from jungle land where mining is prohibited, said a local professor who studies the illicit trade.
In other cases gold is taken from lands or waters where mining is permitted but then smuggled from Brazil into Bolivia to avoid taxes, said Aurelio Herraiz from the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Amazonas State.
“Many buyers go on boats to buy gold... This is invisible,” Herraiz told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “There is no record of it anywhere.”
Mercury contamination is one of the biggest environmental threats from the trade, Herraiz said, and the toxic chemical is cheap and easy to obtain in neighbouring Bolivia.
Police officials say tracking the movement of illicit gold and chemicals between different Amazon countries is difficult.
“Like all frontiers, there are problems and issues here to be solved,” said Heliel Martins, a police chief in Rondonia.
Back on the illegal mining boat, the 22-year-old worker opens a plastic bottle of mercury before pouring it onto a nugget of gold.
The boat’s captain started as a cook in the industry 18 years ago, saved her money and then bought the vessel.
“It’s bureaucratic and expensive to get registered,” she said, adding that she had been fined heavily for operating illegally. To pay the fines for breaking the rules, she had just one source of revenue - gold.
Travel support for this reporting was provided by the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ).