GOLD FEVER Rapacious Mining to Satisfy Worldwide Lust for the Precious Metal Is Destroying Pristine Rainforest in the Amazon
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GOLD FEVER Rapacious mining to satisfy worldwide lust for the precious metal is destroying pristine rainforest in the Amazon BY DONOVAN WEBSTER PHOTOGRAPHS BY RON HAVIV 38 SMITHSONIAN.COM • FEBRUARY 2012 To find flecks of gold, workers devour the rainforest floor with water cannons. “There are a lot of accidents,” says one. “The sides of the hole can fall away, can crush you.” It’s a few hours before dawn in the Peruvian rainforest, and five bare light bulbs hang from a wire above a 40-foot-deep pit. Gold miners, operat- ing illegally, have worked in this chasm since 11 a.m. yesterday. Standing waist-deep in muddy water, they chew coca leaves to stave off exhaustion and hunger. In the pit a minivan-size gasoline engine, set on a wooden cargo pallet, powers a pump, which siphons water from a nearby river. A man holding a flexible ribbed-plastic hose aims the water jet at the walls, tearing away chunks of earth and enlarging the pit every minute until it’s now about the size of six football fields laid side by luxury goods made from the precious metal. “Who is going to side. The engine also drives an industrial vacuum pump. An- stop a poor man from Cuzco or Juliaca or Puno who earns $30 other hose suctions the gold-fleck-laced soil torn loose by a month from going to Madre de Dios and starting to dig?” the water cannon. asks Antonio Brack Egg, formerly Peru’s minister of the envi- At first light, workers hefting huge Stihl chain saws roar ronment. “Because if he gets two grams a day”—Brack Egg into action, cutting down trees that may be 1,200 years old. pauses and shrugs. “That’s the theme here.” Red macaws and brilliant-feathered toucans take off, head- The new Peruvian gold-mining operations are expanding. ing deeper into the rainforest. The chain saw crews also set The most recent data show that the rate of deforestation has fires, making way for more pits. increased sixfold from 2003 to 2009. “It’s relatively easy to get a This gaping cavity is one of thousands being gouged permit to explore for gold,” says the Peruvian biologist Enrique today in the state of Madre de Dios at the base of the Ortiz, an authority on rainforest management. “But once you Andes—a region that is among the most biodiverse and, find a suitable site for mining gold, then you have to get the ac- until recently,pristine environments in the world. All told, tual permits. These require engineering specs, statements of en- the Amazon River basin holds perhaps a quarter of the vironmental protection programs, plans for protection of in- digenous people and for environmental remediation.” Miners circumvent this, he adds, by claiming they’re in the permitting process. Because of this evasion, Ortiz says, “They have a claim to the land but not much responsibility to it. Most of the mines here—estimates are between 90 or 98 percent of them in Madre de Dios state—are illegal.” The Peruvian government has taken initial steps to shut down mining, targeting more than 100 relatively accessible operations along the region’s riverbanks. “There are strong signals from the government that they are serious about this,” says Ortiz. But the task is enormous: There may be as many world’s terrestrial species; its trees are the engine of per- as 30,000 illegal gold miners in Madre de Dios. haps 15 percent of photosynthesis occurring on landmasses; The pit that we visited that day is not far from Puerto Mal- and countless species, including plants and insects, have yet donado (pop. 25,000), capital of Madre de Dios, a center of to be identified. Peru’s gold mining because of its proximity to the rainforest. In Peru alone, while no one knows for certain the total In a supreme irony, the city has also become a locus of Peru’s acreage that has been ravaged, at least 64,000 acres—possibly thriving ecotourism industry, with inviting hotels, restaurants much more—have been razed. The destruction is more ab- and guesthouses in the forest, at the threshold of a paradise solute than that caused by ranching or logging, which accounts, where howler monkeys leap in tall hardwood trees and clouds at least for now, for vastly more rainforest loss. Not only are of metallic blue morpho butterflies float in the breeze. gold miners burning the forest, they are stripping away the sur- On our first morning in Puerto Maldonado, pho - face of the earth, perhaps 50 feet down. At the same time, tographer Ron Haviv, Ortiz and I board a small wooden boat, miners are contaminating rivers and streams, as mercury, used or barca, and head up the nearby Madre de Dios River. For a in separating gold, leaches into the watershed. Ultimately, the few miles upstream, wood-frame houses can be glimpsed potent toxin, taken up by fish, enters the food chain. along heavily forested bluffs. Birds dart through the trees. Gold today commands a staggering $1,700 an ounce, more Mist burns away on the tranquil, muddy-brown river. than six times the price of a decade ago.The surge is attribut- Suddenly, as we round a bend, the trees are gone. Barren able to demand by individual and institutional investors seek- stretches of rock and cobblestone line the shore. Jungle is ing a hedge against losses and also the insatiable appetite for visible only in the distance. MAPS: GUILBERT GATES; PHOTOGRAPHS BY RON HAVIVVII / 40 SMITHSONIAN.COM • FEBRUARY 2012 “Most of the mines—90 or 98 percent in Madre de Dios state—are illegal,” says rainforest biologist and advocate Enrique Ortiz. “We are coming to the mining,” says Ortiz. “How much is that a day?” I ask. Ahead of us, nosed against the stony banks, countless “About $70 most days, but sometimes as much as dredge barges are anchored. Each is fitted with a roof for $600. Much, much more than many people back in the shade, a large motor on deck and a huge suction pipe run- town make in a whole month. It’s hard work, though.” ning from the stern into the water. Silt and stones extracted Princely though this renumeration may seem to the from the river bottom are sprayed into a sluice positioned miner, it is only a fraction of the price an ounce of gold on the bow and angled onto shore. The sluice is lined with will command once it passes through the hands of count- heavy synthetic matting, similar to indoor-outdoor carpet. less middlemen. As silt (the source of gold) is trapped in the matting, stones hurtle down the incline, crashing in great mounds on the ROUGHLY 80 MILES SOUTHWEST of Puerto Maldonado, banks. Thousands of rocky hillocks litter the shoreline. the gold rush boomtown of Huepetuhe lies at the foot of As we pass one barge—its blue-painted steel hull faded the Andes. It’s the summer of 2010. Muddy streets are by the intense sun—the crew members wave. We beach our pocked with puddles the size of small ponds. Pigs root barca and clamber over the stone-strewn shore toward the everywhere. Boardwalks keep pedestrians—at least those barge, moored along the bank. A man who appears to be in not too muddy or inebriated to care—out of the slop. his 30s tells us that he has mined along the river for several Makeshift wooden-plank structures, many on stilts, are years. He and his family own the barge. The entire clan, roofed in patched corrugated metal. From their stalls, originally from Puerto Maldonado, lives aboard much of vendors sell everything from automobile piston rings to the time, bunking in handmade beds on deck beneath mos- potato chips. There are rough little bars and open-air quito nets and eating from a galley kitchen run by his moth- restaurants. Along the main street are dozens of shops er. The din from the dredging engine is deafening, as is the where gold is assayed, weighed and bought. thunder of rocks tumbling into the sluice. Behind town, in the Huepetuhe River valley, virgin rain- “Do you get a lot of gold?” I ask. forest has been razed. “When I first came here, 46 years The miner nods. “Most days,” he says, “we get three, four ago, I was 10 years old,” Nico Huaquisto, a resident, recalls. ounces. Sometimes more. We split it.” “The Huepetuhe River was maybe 12 feet wide and its water FEBRUARY 2012 • SMITHSONIAN.COM 41 Along the Madre de Dios River, shoreline waste and rubble are left behind by miners who, after suctioning up the gold-laden riverbed, deposit stony residue. GOT GOLD? Destruction of Amazon rainforest is driven by demand for the precious metal. The commodities price has risen sixfold in a decade. Where gold comes from . and what we use it for Top 10 gold producers 2011 estimate, in tons World gold demand Third quarter 2011 CHINA 391 AUSTRALIA 298 UNITED STATES 261 RUSSIA 220 SOUTH AFRICA 209 PERU 165 CANADA 121 GHANA 110 INDONESIA 110 UZBEKISTAN 99 ran clear. Along the river’s edges, there was jungle all a stony, barren plain that was once mountainous rainforest, around. Now—just look.” two front-end loaders work 18 hours a day, digging up soil Today, Huaquisto is a very wealthyman. He stands at the and depositing it in dump trucks. The trucks rumble to the edge of the 173-acre backhoe-dredged canyon that is his top of the highest hill, where they empty their loads into a mine.