The Gold Rush
Across Brazil, people in search of gold are flocking to illegal mineral mines in the depths of the Amazon forest. It's a story with a long tradition. In the sixteenth century the Amazon River was navigated by Europeans in a vain search for the promised El Dorado, the legendary Amazonian kingdom of gold, and since then the dream of gold has drawn people from all over Brazil into hidden corners of the forest.
Around 10 tonnes of gold are extracted in the Amazon each year, accounting for 20 percent of the national gold production of Brazil. Gold is only one of the metals contributing to the mineral wealth of the Amazon, which also contains iron, copper, manganese, aluminium, nickel, tin, diamonds and uranium. Mineral extraction is potentially highly lucrative; it has been estimated that in ideal conditions Brazil could make 50 billion dollars per year from Amazonian minerals.
Grota Rica
Just off the Transamazonica highway near Apui (a town of 30,000 inhabitants) lies the Garimpo Grota Rica. The 'Rich Grotto' mine has been active since 2006 and became a destination of choice for thousands of Brazilians when a Brazilian TV channel described individual miners finding kilograms of precious gold. Bruce and the crew arrived at the mine in April of 2008 to live and film with the garimpinos (miners).
The Grota Rica Mine uses both open cast and tunnelling methods. In open cast gold mining, generator-powered machines and water pipes are used to move around vast amounts of earth, which destroys the forest in its wake. As a result a new cycle of deforestation has begun in this region of the Amazon.
Once the earth is moved, clay taken from the soil is sieved with water, and then the sand is washed in a pan to separate it from the gold. The gold is so heavy that it stays in the bottom of the dish. During the washing of the sand, it is possible to illegally throw mercury into the water, which pollutes the water but reacts with the gold to make it stick together as granules rather than remaining a loose powder.
In every mine there is a strict hierarchy. The land of the mine is divided into plots, each owned by a landowner who takes a place at the top of the hierarchy. These landowners allow a few miners who own water-pumping machines to have an area of land to control. The machine owner then hires four or five paeos, miners at the bottom of the hierarchy, to do the hard physical labour of shifting the earth.
Every machine owner has a camp with a kitchen and a cook (usually a female partner) to look after his workers. The landowner takes a cut of 30 percent of any gold found in that land, and he or she carefully watches the washing of the gold to make sure nobody is stealing.
Mining can be dangerous. Landslides, accidents with machinery and explosions all have a high human cost. Equally dangerously, control in the mine is frequently established down the barrel of a gun and vendettas, suspicion, feuds and avarice can lead to violent encounters between grampinos.
