The true price of gold

“There is this traffic of young girls to be prostituted – to be abused and raped every night in the illegal mining enclaves,” said Ráez-Luna.  “The activity is heavily related to other illegal activities.  A very good way of laundering money from drug dealing is to get engaged in illegal gold mining because the commercialization of gold is legal. It’s a commodity.  Not like cocaine.  You take your profits from cocaine, you turn it into gold, you are fine.”
And then there’s mercury contamination of water, air and fish – contamination that is having an outsized impact on indigenous communities. In Peru’s Madre de Dios, an area that has been hard hit by illegal gold mining, testing done by the Carnegie Amazon Mercury Eco-system Project has shown that on average, children in indigenous communities have levels of mercury in their systems more than 5 times the levels considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency.
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/techknow/articles/2015/6/4/the-true-price-of-gold.html