Porto Velho (Brazil) (AFP)
"27.2 grams!" Zé exclaims as he weighs a little gold aboard his boat on a river in the Brazilian Amazon, where the scourge of illegal gold panning weighs heavy on a forest already mistreated by fires.
In this isolated area of the state of Rondonia (north), reachable after 200 km by boat, the draggers of gold washers are hidden in the curves of the river.
From the deck of their makeshift craft, Zé (her first name was changed) and four other members of her crew see the smoke columns and trunks burned by fires, favored by galloping deforestation in the area.
For international organizations and environmental NGOs, the main culprits for damage to the Amazon, vital to the future of the planet, are loggers, landowners, illegal land occupiers and gold miners.
"If the government made our activity legal, we would not be perceived as bandits, we would generate money, we would work with a contract", defends the young man, holding in his hand a blowtorch with which he cleans the impurities of the metal.
"I did not have a choice, I found myself unemployed and in this country you know how it is," he adds. Brazil has 12 million unemployed people and an extremely high number of informal workers.
His dream could become reality, if President Jair Bolsonaro, who supports the exploitation of protected areas and extractive activities, eventually legalize manual or mechanical gold panning, in a country where the gold tradition goes back to the time of the Portuguese colony.
"I believe that if there are minerals, if the land has wealth, it must be exploited," said Zé.
A phrase that would not be denied by the Brazilian president right extreme, who confessed to have been himself a gold digger during his youth, instructed by his father.
- Exceptional checks -
The tranquility with which Zé's team works suggests that controls are an exception. Another similar boat is working just as quietly half a kilometer downstream.
A large pipe connected to a pump sucks up soil at the bottom of the river, which then goes through a series of separation processes to produce raw gold.
Environmentalists denounce the indiscriminate use of mercury, which acts as a magnet to separate the metal and causes, according to them, irreparable environmental damage.
In December 2018, a group of environmental associations denounced an illegal gold mining "epidemic" in the Amazon, with 2,300 clandestine mines in six South American countries, in particular Brazil and Venezuela.
"Like an epidemic, illegal gold panning destroys the forest, pollutes the rivers and threatens the survival of hundreds of indigenous communities," said Beto Ricardo, director of the Socio-Environmental Institute, a Brazilian NGO.
"Here we reuse mercury, we do not throw it into the water," Ze says. "It's still a little polluted, I do not say the opposite, with the support of the government, we would pollute even less," he insists.
In this region, however, the greed of illegal gold miners has almost drained the river of gold.
This makes the work of gold miners much slower and difficult. "These 27.2 grams allow us to pay for gas, you have to find an average of 50 or 60 grams a day to make money," Zé explains as he shows the gold he has just melted.
Nevertheless, the activity is profitable. He earns between 3,000 to 4,000 reais (between $ 730 and $ 975) a month, or three to four times the minimum wage, enough to support his wife and child who live in the nearest city.
The five miners and the cook who make up the crew live together in the dredger and take turns, working 30 days for 10 days of rest. There is no telephone, no television, no internet. "It's better not to be distracted and to work harder," jokes one of them.
© 2019 AFP