ENVIRONMENT-MINING: Small Miners Dredge Amazon For Gold

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

PUERTO MALDONADO, PERU, Feb 12 1997 (IPS) - Crews of four to five men, stripped down to their underwear, search for gold from a dozen boats in the middle of the Rio Madre de Dios, deep in the Amazon jungles in southern Peru.

Most of the men hail from Cuzco, three days’ journey away by truck high up in the Andes. Others have come from as far away as the town of Tumbez, travelling six days overland.

Like the famous gold rushes of Australia, California, and the Yukon, the miners are following the glittering lure of one of the most expensive metals.

And as deposits in accessible areas are exhausted or claimed by multinational corporations, the miners are increasingly forced to travel to some of the most remote parts of the world armed with small, but environmentally destructive technology. Whether it is the state of Roraima in Brazil or Ghana in west Africa, tens of thousands of small miners have invaded river systems and forests in search of the yellow metal.

Their families often accompany them.

Here, standing quietly on a boat, a woman alternately nurses a two-month-old baby and cooks a simple lunch of fish and rice atop a little stove under a blue tarpaulin sheet.

The woman, who gives her name only as Rosa, explains that Gloria Estefan, her baby, is the daughter of Mario, who is currently under water seeing to a suction pump that is sucking up the gravel from the river bed.

Workers like Mario typically spend two hours lying on the river bed with an oxygen mask strapped over their faces. The divers do not use goggles, so they use their sense of touch to guide the suction pump in the turbid waters.

On occasion, Mario’s companions (known as ‘dragas’ or dredgers) will add to the gravel on the river bed by attacking the river banks with a high pressure hose, causing them to collapse into the water where the resulting debris can also be sucked up by pumps.

Other members of the crew then feed this debris into a grading machine on the boats. The machine flushes the mud over pads where the heavier silt gathers among the thick fibres.

Choqe Rodriguez, the owner of the boat, picks up a handful of the silt in a metal pan, adds water, and swirls the mixture. Gradually the heavy mud settles and a fine speckle of precious yellow metal appears as if by magic.

“Fifteen years I’ve worked on this river,” he says. “It took me six years of work to buy this machine for four thousand dollars. But now I have five men on each boat and they can extract 15 grammes of gold a day with 10 hours’ work.”

For this, Rodriguez gives them a quarter of the profits he gets from selling the gold at 28 soles (11.20 dollars) a gramme in the town of Puerto Maldonado about an hour away by motor-boat. Each man makes about 21 soles (8.40 dollars) a day.

Travelling a few kilometres down the broad, muddy river fringed by banana plantations, one comes across much bigger boats, like the ‘Madre de Dios’, that employ similar but much more powerful technology to strip gold from the river bed.

Reiber Mamani, who works on this boat, explains that the ‘Madre de Dios’ has a hydraulic pump that can suck up 10 times as much gravel. The boat costs 40,000 dollars, 10 times as much as the equipment belonging to Rodriquez.

But the ‘Madre de Dios’ uses the same number of crew members and pays them a fixed salary of 20 soles (eight dollars) a day to retrieve a daily total of 120 grammes of gold.

These boats have slowly but surely ripped up and destroyed the river bed of the Madre de Dios and its banks for many kilometres. The resulting sediment has choked the spawning grounds of fish for many more kilometres downstream.

But that is not the only environmental hazard. Perhaps the most dangerous part of this work is the use of highly toxic mercury to extract the gold from the silt.

Lifting a small, white container that looks like it might hold 50 aspirin tablets, Mamani explains that it contains a kilogramme of mercury that is added to the silt in order to extract the gold.

Beside the collection mats is a small stove where the amalgam of mercury and gold can be heated, so that the mercury would evaporate as white smoke, leaving behind the almost pure gold.

It is technically possible to trap the mercury in a chimney and recycle it, but this is almost never done. Instead, the mercury escapes into the air where the heavy daily rains wash it into the river.

“It takes 40 soles (16 dollars) a kilogramme of mercury to extract 330 grammes of gold,” says Mamani confidently. “At that price, it is so cheap that we don’t need to recycle it.”

Mamani says that years of working with the mercury have not affected him, but other local boatmen are not so sure. Sahi Riva, who takes commuters up and down the rivers in his 16-horse-powered boat, says the mercury has killed the river life.

“There are almost no fish left in the river,” he says. “And the fish that have been caught are very dangerous because of the mercury contamination.”

Still, for Riva, who can make as much as 50 soles (20 dollars) a day as a ferryman, the river fish is a cheap source of protein which he eats like everyone else.

Worst hit are the indigenous peoples, including the Harakmbut, who live in the forests near the river. Not only have they gradually lost land to the colonists, but they consume the remaining mercury-contaminated fish.

Studies have shown that over time, mercury will cause affected people to lose sensation in their limbs, as the toxin destroys their nervous systems. Eyesight eventually deteriorates, and they suffer convulsions, paralysis, and eventual death.

“Yes, the Harakmbut have difficult times,” says Riva. “But hardly any of us make a lot of money here. Neither the dragas nor the boatman can make enough to survive. The only people who do profit are people like the boat owners and the people who buy gold from us.”

In the streets of Puerto Maldonado — a boom town of 17,000 that was hacked out of the jungle at the turn of the century by miners and timber merchants — dozens of little stores will buy gold from the ‘dragas’.

One of these is the Casa de Cambio Fortuna (Fortune Exchange Bureau). The owner Juan Carlos Rosada says he can buy gold at 28.5 soles a gramme (11.3 dollars) and sell it to buyers in Lima at 30 soles (12 dollars) a gramme.

“On an average day I buy and sell a kilogramme of gold, which means I get 700 soles (280 dollars) a day,” he says. “That’s a lot more than I made when I worked as a journalist for the local radio station.”