A local newspaper in Brazil revealed that four major technology companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, use gold illegally collected in the Amazon rainforest, and according to 2019 and 2020 data, about 28% of Brazil's gold exports come from illegal mines. And these illegal gold mining gangs are also extremely cruel, not only burning the houses of villagers, forcibly occupying mining areas, and even shooting villagers with weapons, forcing them to carry out mining work without paying any compensation, why is illegal gold mining in Brazil so rampant?
Inhumane illegal mining
According to statistics, there are only 1,800 legal gold mines in Brazil, but the number of illegal gold mines has exceeded 20,000, and some experts even said that the number of illegal gold mines may actually be higher.
Many of these mining operations are in the hands of criminal organizations, who, in order to obtain high profits, do not hesitate to launch armed attacks on indigenous people, directly burn down the homes of local indigenous villagers, shoot villagers with guns, force them to mine, and even do not let them rest, requiring 12-14 hours of continuous work with little remuneration. Not only that, but these illegal mining organizations continue to squeeze the locals, and the Brazilian police once asked young people who mined how much gold it cost to buy a can of Coca-Cola during a crackdown on illegal mining. The young man replied that he wanted about 1 gram of gold (about 385 yuan).
Under the pretext of "getting rich easily," unscrupulous traders lure young people, even minors, from indigenous people to abandon their farming and engage in illegal mining jobs, paying guns and ammunition that would cause social disorder and conflict. Some organizations say more than 90 percent of violent deaths in Brazil are caused by illegal mining. Not only is illegal mining rampant in Brazil, but also in Peru, which is in the Amazon rainforest, the illegal mining industry has also brought serious social problems.
This simply processed, or even unprocessed, gold is packaged in the form of a "drug" and then shipped around the world.
The situation of illegal mining in Peru next door to Brazil is also serious, and General Luis Vera, peru's chief of the Environmental Police, once said: "Many miners have suffered from labor and sexual exploitation... They could not leave because the foreman or the so-called manager, provided them with shelter and forced them into prostitution and sold coolies. ”
Local residents also said that on the edge of the illegal mining area, miners are still working all night to avoid detention, and when dawn comes, they will throw wooden planks that assist motorcycles into the bushes to hide their tracks.
Why are there so many illegal gold mines?
In 2019, the newly appointed Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro advocated the legalization of mining activities on indigenous lands, and the 2020 epidemic has led to a global gold price surge, with the price of gold soaring from $1479.13 to $1858.42, an increase of 25.6%. The dual role of policy and gold prices has fueled a surge in both legal and illegal mining activities in Brazil, with only 92 tons of the 111 tonnes of gold exported by Brazil in 2020 alone being legally mined.
Over the past 7 years, illegal mining activities along the Ulari Coela and Mukajay rivers have surged 20-fold, and the surface area that has been mined or is being mined has doubled 32fold over the past 7 years, with a total area of about 8 square kilometers, equivalent to more than 1,000 football fields, and even 72% of illegal mining is carried out in protected indigenous areas.
The report by Brazilian prosecutors and the Federal University of Minas Gerais found that about 28% of the gold exported by Brazil in 2019 and 2020 came from illegal mines, indicating that at least 48.9 tons of gold showed signs of violation of the law, so there may also be falsified data among the so-called 92 tons of legal gold. Of this gold, 70% is exported to Canada, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and most of the rest goes to microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and other large enterprises, which are used for the manufacture of electronic components.
Christopher Vidmar, president of the Association for the Protection of Threatened Groups, noted that between 2020 and 2021, 5 tonnes of gold were transported to Switzerland from Itetubba, the state of Pará in northern Brazil, where most of the world's gold was transported, refined, and then shipped to various places. However, after August of that year, gold exports from Itetubba to Switzerland had ceased, but the Import Registry had confused gold destined for banks with gold raw materials shipped to refineries, making the overall condition of gold difficult to trace, which not only raised doubts as to whether Switzerland had become a fast transit point for illegal gold bleaching activities.
Chimet and Marsam, two refining companies that illegally mine gold, are considered legitimate gold and other precious metal refiners and suppliers by entities such as the SEC, and these suppliers and various intermediary companies have "whitewashed" illegally sourced gold through layers of reversals, allowing gold to enter the global electronics manufacturing market for batteries, computers, and data center servers.
When Repórter Brasil, a Brazilian newspaper, asked Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon for comment, only Apple issued a statement in response, saying the company had removed Marsam from its supply chain (but did not mention Chimet).
"Some people are trying to whitewash the gold and hide its true origin. But by cross-referencing images, the gold could not have come from the already announced origin. ”
The Amazon rainforest is heavily polluted
Chimet and Marsam were not only charged by Brazilian police for illegally collecting gold mines, but also because their illegal mining seriously polluted the environment. Some illegal mining practices have even spread to nature reserves, where most mining in the Amazon rainforest revolves around placer deposits, where operators rely on hydro-mining techniques, riparian blasting and floodplain deforestation, as well as heavy machinery to excavate layers of gravel deposits that may contain gold. This not only causes serious damage to forests, but also because illegal gold mining processes use large amounts of mercury, which is polluting to the environment, and although the mercury is reused or burned after the gold is separated, some of it remains in the river.
According to the study, small-scale mines are not as efficient at using mercury as legal factories, but for every kilogram of gold produced, about 1.32 kilograms of mercury are released into the water. The proliferation of illegal gold mines also allows inorganic mercury to be transformed into methylmercury through biological methods, which can not only enter the food chain through water sources, pose a threat to plants and animals, resulting in excessive mercury levels in their bodies, and also expose animals (including humans) that feed on a large number of fish. Local women were afraid to eat fish in order to avoid mercury poisoning miscarriage, and indigenous people in Brazil's illegal mineral areas had been tested for mercury, which showed that more than half of the people did not have safe levels of mercury in their bodies. Peru, which is close to Brazil, also signed an international treaty aimed at eliminating mercury pollution in 2018, yet the toxic metal is still widely sold on Peru's website.
Not only that, but the mining process will also expose toxic substances such as metal sulfides originally buried in the soil to the atmospheric environment, so that the sulfides are oxidized into more stable sulfuric acid and metal oxides, and they can be easily dissolved in water, making heavy metals pollute rivers.
In addition, some mines will use cyanide to separate gold from sediment, and once it is not properly controlled, a leak occurs, and the safety of miners' lives is worrying. In August 1996, there was a cyanide spill in Guyana, where 1 billion gallons of cyanogen-containing wastewater were released into tributaries of the Essequibo River, where countless aquatic and terrestrial animals died, crops were poisoned, thousands of people's drinking water was contaminated, and ecotourism was hit hard. But despite the devastation caused by the incident, the Government of Guyana allowed other mines to continue working.
These unchecked illegal gold mining activities have an impact on the Amazon rainforest and even the global environment, just this year, there are more than 3,000 square kilometers of rainforest because of illegal mining has been destroyed, according to the equivalent conversion, every kilogram of gold produced to produce 12.5 tons of carbon dioxide, which not only exacerbates the global greenhouse gas content, but also reduces the Amazon rainforest for the global climate regulation, this year's extreme heat weather in many countries on the earth, may be related to the serious destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
The disease is sweeping again
The gold rush brought not only the problem of environmental pollution, but also disease. In 1984, about 40,000 illegal gold miners poured into indigenous territories, bringing malaria, measles, and other diseases into the Amazon rainforest, but also massacring the Yanomami, resulting in a one-fifth of the population.
In recent years, the situation in Yanomami has become more serious, and when the gold rush re-emerged, this time it swept through the villages of Yanomami not only by armed conflicts caused by illegal miners, but also by the new crown virus that they are difficult to deal with. As of June 7, 2020, 446 people in the Yanomami tribe have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and a total of 92 people have died.
An Aboriginal nurse in Manaus revealed on social media: "Many Aborigines have died before being tested for COVID-19. The Remote Rural Health Plan, which provided medical care to these indigenous people for eight years, was also abolished by Brazilian President Bolsonaro. Brazil's ministry of health says only indigenous people living in traditional villages and registered in health clinics can be tested.
(Photo: This map shows the location of illegal gold mining camps and indigenous communities in the Amazon region Image source/Reuters)
Some indigenous people reported to prosecutors that in March 2020, about 20,000 gold diggers came to indigenous territories and traded them with food, flashlights and other items. The Institute of Social Environment of the Federal University of Minas de Minas, Brazil, issued a statement on its website: "Illegal miners who come and go at will are undoubtedly the main transmitters of the new crown virus in the territory of Yanomami. ”
The golden legend of the Amazon rainforest
However, the Amazon rainforest gold rush is not only in recent decades, in fact, as early as 1545, when a Spanish expedition in the Amazon rainforest fished out hundreds of pieces of gold jewelry after the news spread, the world set off a boom in amazon gold digging, according to statistics, in the late 16th century to the beginning of the 17th century, there were more than 300 expeditions into the Amazon rainforest, but they did not find gold, most of them died in the Amazon rainforest.
However, the mysterious Amazon rainforest still failed to stop the greedy people, and the nephew of the last Indian king claimed that the golden lake and the golden city of the Inca Empire really existed, which contained the treasures of the Inca Empire, and even because of the excessive gold, the Inca Empire also used gold to build palaces. When the news spread around the world again, people began to go into the Amazon rainforest on a large scale in search of gold, but although a Spanish team found $3 million worth of jade jewelry, most of the treasure remained in the City of Gold and the Lake of Gold.
"When the throne is changed, people will paint the new monarch with gold powder. From a distance, it looks like a piece of golden armor. Next, The new jun must go into the lake to bathe in order to wash off the gold powder on his body. During this time, ministers and people would offer all kinds of gold and jade. After the bath, the new king threw these treasures into the lake as a sign of reverence and reverence for heaven. ”
The British also dug a tunnel in the Amazon, draining the lake water in the golden lake, hoping to salvage the gold at the bottom of the lake, but the mud at the bottom of the lake was quickly hardened by the sun, and the British had to transport the drilling machine into the Amazon, but they did not expect that when the drilling machine arrived, the lake was once again filled with water, and the drilling equipment could not run, and after tossing several times, the British had to leave in ashes.
Although the treasures of the Lake of Gold were protected by the Colombian government in 1974, gold mining in other parts of the Amazon rainforest has been in full swing.
Brazil and Peru have targeted the illegal gold harvesting that still exists in large numbers and is still on the rise, but due to the Brazilian government's policy of encouraging mining, Brazil's crackdown has had little effect, but Peru's "Operation Mercury" has been quite effective, according to the Andean Amazon project, the deforestation area caused by gold mining has dropped from 900 hectares in 2018 to 67 hectares in the first half of 2019, a 92% reduction. Colonel Louis, the commander of Operation Mercury, said their forces were not just hunting down illegal miners, but also illegal gold buyers and traders.
At present, Brazil has entered the election stage of a new president, and now illegal activities are still seizing the time to extract the value of the Amazon rainforest as much as possible, while many countries and large factories in Europe and the United States are importing these "blood gold" from the Amazon, but they are still claiming that they do not know the source of gold.
Reference Articles:
Foreign media: Apple, Google and other US and technology giants buy illegally mined Brazilian gold
Wash the gold and sell it! Nearly 30% of Brazil's gold exports are illegal Three countries have bought large amounts | gold net
Can satellite imagery help combat illegal gold mining, | China Gold Network
Sparkling gold and infamous industrial |swissinfo.ch
Swiss gold refiners have pledged not to use gold |swissinfo.ch from the Brazilian Amazon region
Illegal Mining: The Millionaire's Way to Swiss Refinery | INFOAMAZONIA
BBC investigation: Brazil's "blood gold mines" | illegal gold mining BBC Chinese
Damaged property – threatened rainforest |MONGABAY.COM
Indigenous Brazilians protest the government's indulgence of gold miners| Global Times
The "golden robbery" of the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest: the new crown that cannot be hidden, the gold that cannot be kept| the eastern net
Brazilian indigenous people return to the "scourge of extermination" | Digest