Deep in the Amazon rainforest, Peruvian police and soldiers are on a search-and-destroy mission. They’re looking to demolish the equipment and headquarters of the area’s illegal gold miners before any more of the rainforest dies.
Peru is the top producer of gold in Latin America. Yet the area known as “La Pampa” has yielded roughly 25 tons of illegally mined gold a year, much more than the output of Peru’s best legal gold mine, according to the Peruvian government.
Illegal mining has transformed parts of the once-dense Amazonian foliage into a desert pocked with dead trees and toxic pools. The damage is mostly due to the toxic mercury used to separate gold from rock and sand during excavation. Tens of thousands of acres of the amazing rainforest God created have been destroyed.
“The damage to nature here is so terrible that all the water is poisoned,” says Major Gustavo Cerdeña, head of a police unit.
Now under “Operation Mercury,” authorities are evicting thousands of illegal gold miners from the rainforest. They deploy hundreds of police and soldiers for the long term—lodging them in some cases in the same makeshift quarters once used by illegal gold dealers. Men in uniform regularly patrol in vehicles and on motorcycles.
There is some concern that miners may emerge at night, wait for the military presence to subside, or simply relocate to more remote areas.
“As many miners tell me, these interventions just push miners into areas further and further into the rainforest,” says Jimena Diaz Leiva, who studies illegal gold mining.
The military bases in La Pampa will remain at least through mid-2021, when the term of the current Peruvian government ends.
Ernesto Ráez, a biology professor in the Peruvian capital of Lima, says it could take generations to restore and reforest areas affected by mining. “It will take more than a lifetime to see a forest comparable to the one that was destroyed,” he says. “But it’s worth it.”
(Aerial view of the Mega 12 police and military base in Peru’s Tambopata province. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
