Hundreds of thousands of individual miners across Latin America are toting their own sums. 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% 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.
Relations between foreign mining companies and local communities have been far from smooth in El Salvador and Guatemala.
The most notorious case involved Pacific Rim, a Canadian firm that later incorporated in Nevada. The company began exploring for gold in 2002, eventually filing a $77 million lawsuit in 2008 charging that El Salvador's failure to issue it an environmental permit violated its rights as a foreign investor.
An activist against the Pacific Rim project was found slain with two gunshot wounds to the head in June 2011. He was the fourth mining activist murdered in the previous two years in El Salvador.
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