Peru’s illegal gold mines hurt Amazon rain forest
QUINCE MIL, Peru - The roads cutting through the Amazon rain forest are lined with signs encouraging people to protect Peru’s natural resources and take care of the environment, but people aren’t sure why the government posts them anymore.
Many rivers in Peru run orange with pollution from illegal gold mining, and trees were cut down to make room for sifting towers and excavators.
Peru, the largest gold producer in Latin America and the sixth largest in the world, has long struggled with illegal gold mining. Thousands of small, unchecked operations extracting gold from the Amazon are responsible for nearly 200 square miles of deforestation and mercury poisoning to the water so severe that several regions declared a state of emergency last year.
President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski took office in July promising to tackle the problems of “informal,” or illegal, mining with an ambitious plan to overhaul antiquated and inefficient government rules. He imposed stricter regulations, streamlined the process to grant permits for legal mines and offered financial incentives for mine to submit to oversight.
But the miners resist those changes because of a thriving black market for gold.
“The whole country is like a Mafia. It’s a big Mafia,” Marcos Llovera, 40, of Cusco, said about the gold mining industry. “How are you going to win against a Mafia? You can’t.”
Llovera runs a mine in the small town of Quince Mil, using one rented excavator and one sifter. He sells the extracted gold to international contacts based in Lima, the country’s capital.
The process left large pockets of the area bald of vegetation, eroded riverbanks and turned the water brown, orange and even a light blue, as Llovera and competing “informal” miners push their excavations deeper into the jungle. This unrestricted mining is the type of activity that Kuczynski is aiming to cut in half by 2021.
Llovera’s mine, like most small operations across Peru, works informally because of an administrative loophole. He received authorization from the federal government to break ground, but can work without oversight because many environmental and operational permits are handled on the regional level.
Miscommunication between government agencies means small mines, such as Llovera’s, can operate in bureaucratic limbo while officials scramble to determine which are legal, who is responsible for enforcement, and what to do about pollution produced from the mining.
A law went into effect in March to simplify the process by cutting the required federal permits from six to three. Many other regulations were tweaked to improve oversight of machinery use and access to water, but the number of “informal” mines shows no sign of decreasing.