From Nicaragua’s mining district to the goldfields in Colombia’s northwest, and on to Peru’s Madre de Dios jungles, wildcat miners are tearing up forests and dumping mercury in rivers in their quest for gold.
In Guyana, a nation the size of Idaho on South America’s northeastern shoulder, authorities in July suspended all further mine permits to halt devastation by some 14,500 independent miners, many of whom blast river banks with hoses to expose gold-laden sediment, then use mercury as an amalgam to pull gold from silt.
In Colombia, some 200,000 small-scale miners produce 50 percent of that nation’s gold, while 20,000 miners now operate in the pristine Madre de Dios region of Peru, where they commonly filter mercury into the food chain.
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