Gold prices and poverty fuel illegal mining in Peru's Amazon

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By Jack Graham | Deputy Editor, Funded Projects.

Remote crimes

Since COVID-19, the price of gold has been going in one direction - up. In 2024 it has surged by nearly 30%, on track for the biggest annual rise in more than a decade.

And in a remote part of Peru's Amazon, this is fuelling a lucrative business: illegal gold mining.

Our Peru reporter Dan Collyns went to the northern Loreto region to report on the destruction this industry is causing for the local population.

Illegal miners use mercury to extract gold particles from the river silt and then burn off the toxic metal, which turns to vapour and is absorbed by the surrounding plants, soil and river, said Claudia Vega, head of the mercury programme at the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation.

Miners, Vega said, “take the gold, but the mercury stays here in the Amazon. What the miners don't like to talk about is that mercury is a poison."

A toxic cocktail of high gold prices and local poverty has pushed more people into mining. A dredger operating for just 24 hours can rake in $8,000 worth of gold, said Herman Ruiz, an official at the National Forestry and Wildlife Service (SERFOR).

A report by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) detected 98 dredgers in the Nanay River - one of the region's largest - in the middle of 2023, having spotted none at the beginning of 2020.

The World Health Organization classifies mercury as one of the 10 chemicals of major public concern, and contamination is associated withdeformities and neurological disabilities .

The Loreto mining is too recent for comprehensive studies on the local impact, but in Peru's most heavily mined Amazon region, a previous study showed people had mercury levels in their hair above the WHO's recommended limits.

"When they are exposed when their mother is pregnant, it can harm the way that they learn, they think, their memory," said Vega.

Criminal groups

Ruiz from SERFOR said illegal mining was mainly led by criminal groups from Colombia, who recruit and train local people to build and use simple dredgers.

The gangs use violence to enforce their rule and may include dissident members of the now-demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a security official told Dan.

Illegal mines are becoming increasingly remote, and therefore more difficult to police. It can take up to 12 hours to reach?outposts by boat, said Carlos Castro, the chief environmental prosecutor for Loreto.

He said the police and prosecutors have been ambushed and are often outnumbered by "hostile villagers".

As countries prepare to meet in Cali, Colombia, for United Nations COP16 biodiversity talks this month, dealing with organised crime remains a major challenge for countries trying to protect the Amazon's nature and people.

Can they step up efforts before mercury poisoning becomes even more pervasive?

See you next week,

Jack