In May 2017, I was invited to join the Tres Islas native community for a trip upriver on the Madre de Dios River, to see a lake where giant otter lived and to observe the rampant gold mining eating away and poisoning the living grounds of the Indigenous peoples living in the area. The guides told me not to show my camera openly, as the Navy had come upriver recently – burning and destroying miner camps – and there were armed watchmen on the shorelines. Needless to say, outsiders were not welcome, especially if they were documenting the illegalities. We passed barges on the muddy river that were noisily sucking large amounts of mud from the riverbed, hoping to find their daily few grams of gold. From the boat we could see trailheads leading inland to mining sites, whose magnitude was only revealed to me later when looking at satellite images. When we finally landed near the lake, a group of people was coming down the bank with mining tubes and equipment. The meeting was silent, it was tense.

The tense mood finally eased once we returned to the village, where I could learn more about how the community was building facilities to process nuts for sale and developing tourism infrastructure as an alternative to the ever-present lure of fast enrichment by gold, on which some locals had embarked, causing tensions even inside the community. Later, I visited other sites of gold mining in Brazil in the southwestern Pará state, on land and on rivers, always seeing the detrimental impacts this sector has caused to the riverbanks, forests, and the social fabric of the community.

Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines in the Amazon, have been a major and multifaceted cause of socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises for decades. The study of this sector is important to understand the key political economic factors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. There are different types of RDPEs; for example, ranching-grabbing explains the dynamics in Acre, while in the neighboring Madre de Dios province in Peru gold mining explains the bulk of land and forest use. Between 2010 and 2015, gold mining was the key cause of deforestation in Madre de Dios (Nicolau et al., Reference Nicolau, Herndon, Flores-Anderson and Griffin2019). The already-consolidating gold-mining RDPE in the region was pushed by the completion of the Interoceanic Highway in 2012, which runs from Acre in Brazil to Cusco via Puerto Maldonado in Peru (Cannon, Reference Cannon2017; van Eerten, Reference van Eerten2017).

What is meant by illegal gold mining? Often this sector is referred to as artisanal or small-scale mining, but due to the central role of large and illegal capital, artisanal is not really an appropriate term (see Figures 5.1 and 5.2); better examples would be “network or syndicate mining” (Caballero Espejo et al., Reference Caballero Espejo, Messinger and Román-Dañobeytia2018). This means individual mining operations are connected to larger capital that is working for larger businesses. Therefore, in Madre de Dios, Peyronnin (Reference Peyronnin2019) studies mining as a “complex web of interlocking commercial networks.” These interactions could also be described as a kind of symbiosis between formal, informal, and illegal economies (Damonte, Reference Damonte2018).

Figure 5.1

Currently, so-called artisanal or small-scale gold mining in the Amazon is mostly mechanized and causes large deforestation and long-term degradation of the environment. A gold mine east from Castelo dos Sonhos, Brazil. November 2019.

Figure 5.1 Long description

A photograph of mechanized gold mine in Castelo dos Sonhos, Brazil, showing deforested and degraded landscape, likely due to mining or excavation. In the foreground, there are large, uneven mounds of dark-colored mud, possibly wet. Behind these mounds, there are prominent, light-colored piles of what appears to be sand. In the background, beyond the excavated earth, there is a scattering of trees, some appearing like palm trees, indicating a tropical or subtropical environment.

Photo by author.

Figure 5.2

An illegal “artisanal” gold-mining site east from Castelo dos Sonhos, Pará, Brazil, November 2019. These open-pit mines typically flood and leak, ravaging the rainforest and causing long-term damage. Additionally, they contain mercury and other toxic substances.

Photo by author.

Typically, illegality is framed as the key cause and problem of gold mining and its polluting and deforesting impact (e.g. Asner & Tupayachi, Reference Asner and Tupayachi2017; Diringer et al., Reference Diringer, Berky and Marani2019). However, to focus on the illegality and informality would give an incomplete or inaccurate picture of the political economy of this sector and how it impacts deforestation. The illegal and informal mining in Peru is closely tied to state institutions, networks, and commerce (Damonte, Reference Damonte2018; Peyronnin, Reference Peyronnin2019; Smith et al., Reference Smith, Hooks and Lengefeld2020), which is characteristic of an RDPE that has become nationally dominant. The legal-political system supports this sector, for example through activities like money laundering. Smith et al. (Reference Smith, Hooks and Lengefeld2020: 248) assert that the “illegally mined gold and exporting it is being done by legal firms.” The state often targets the wrong people and social actors in its attempts to curb the problem. The focus is on the people doing the mining, not on the people who finance the activity, run it at the upper level, and benefit most (Praeli, Reference Praeli2019). This is explainable because the corruption linked to the sector is so widespread, penetrating all levels of society (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Hooks and Lengefeld2020), which makes it difficult to enforce any efficient efforts that would hurt the powerful players in the system. It is typical in socioenvironmental conflicts that the lower-level workers and other people harmed by the practical work and impacts of extractivist RDPEs are held as key culprits; they are often considered to be responsible for the damage, which makes them policy targets. Political ecology has amply demonstrated and analyzed these dynamics in detail in many different contexts (Peet et al., Reference Peet, Robbins and Watts2010).

In February 2019 while in Brasília, I asked Ricardo, an expert NGO representative from Instituto Socioambiental, “who is responsible for Amazon deforestation?” He emphasized the importance of regional analysis in answering the question. In other words, the guilty parties vary depending on the region. He shared that “Deforestation inside the Caiapó [territories], for example, is the responsibility of garimpeiros [small-scale gold miners, typically illegal, and currently medium-scale, mechanized], which is one kind of actor.” He showed me several satellite and geographical information systems (GIS) tools that are used to trace the ongoing deforestation in different parts of Brazil. He then pinpointed another region in the Amazon and shared:

I have followed this approach here, developing my analysis about the RDPE to account for the diverging actors by regions. In Colombia, for example, illegal gold mining has quickly expanded in recent years, mostly due to the actions of the country’s many armed groups. About half of this expansion is taking place in environmental protection areas, operated by armed groups such as autodefensas (right-wing paramilitary groups), ex- Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) mafias, and National Liberation Army (ELN) guerilla groups. In these same deforesting gold-mining sites are also widespread coca cultivation, human trafficking, and other criminal activities, as described by an InSight Crime report (Valencia, Reference Valencia2023). Organized crime is controlling so-called artisanal gold mining, especially in Colombia, Venezuela, and many parts of Brazil, leading to an increase in the overall spread of the organized crime variety of the gold-deforesting RDPE. Several governments are either openly supporting this illegal gold mining (e.g. Venezuela, Brazil under Bolsonaro), being captured by their interests to a large degree (e.g. Peru), or it is outside the possibilities of the state to regulate the activities due to lack of state monopoly on territorial violence (e.g. Colombia, Guyana).

In this part of the book I focus on three regions where irregular gold mining can be argued to be the RDPE and the most important driver of deforestation (see Figure 5.3). The first is the triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil, where gold-mining operations are led by ex-FARC in Venezuela’s Yapacana Indigenous reserves, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by PCC and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands. Second, I further unpack the Peruvian dynamics through an examination of the Madre de Dios province in Peru. Third, I study the southwestern Pará state in Brazil and Brazil’s largest gold-mining town, Itaituba, known as Nugget City, due to the many illegal gold miners upriver in the Tapajós Basin. In southwestern Pará, gold mining is the leading cause of deforestation inside areas like the upper Tapajós Munduruku Indigenous lands near Jacareacanga, where deforestation tripled between 2018 and 2020.

Figure 5.3

This map shows the regions I analyze herein and the areas where there is illegal gold mining on land and in the rivers.

It is inspired by an illustrative map used in Angelo (2020).

The analysis of gold mining herein is based on the comparison between these three regions, which constitute the bulk of currently ongoing Amazon gold mining. These regions have also subvariations that I will discuss further.

In technical terms, in the Amazon there is no difference between illegal or legal gold mining carried out by noncorporate players (called garimpo in Brazil), Igor explained in our interview in December 2023. Igor had insight in this matter because he worked at ICMBio and specialized in the inspection of gold mining in southwestern Pará. This was our second conversation, as I had also talked with him and his colleagues at length in Itaituba in November 2019. He shared that for both illegal and legal noncorporates the same machinery and techniques are used. First, companies bring in hydraulic excavators to remove vegetation and then they make trails, which allows them to open the pits. Igor continued, “and from then on, they use the sandblasting technique. They use a hose, which is called a jet nozzle, for suction.” He explained that what he described happened on land, but a substantial part of gold mining also takes place from rafts that are on the rivers. Igor continued by asserting that none of the on-land or riverine gold mining is regularized, as the miners do not have the required environmental licenses. He indicated that of all these irregular mines, about 70 percent are illegal in the southwestern Pará region.

ICMBio officers (interviewed in November 2019 and December 2023), operating in the southwestern Pará region, stated that there was a mix of different types of miners, including families, especially from Maranhão, some of whom had moved to the area earlier, and others later. There is a complex set of gold-mining actors. They range from small miners to laborers who are paid a percentage of the extraction. In addition, there are miners who own the mines, barges, or dredgers, or who are investors. There are also some who operate as members of cooperatives or even companies (Coelho et al., Reference Coelho, Wanderley and Costa2017). In 2023, Igor shared that this array of gold-mining actors has been changing recently with the arrival of new bosses with capital from Mato Grosso who run operations, especially in the southern parts of Pará. There have also been the intrusions of narcogarimpeiros (those carrying out the criminal activities in the interlinked gold-mining and drug networks). Thus, the research needs updating, due to increasing narco influence and hierarchization of gold mining, away from the so-called small-scale or family-based operations, with increasing mechanization and deforesting impacts caused by garimpo, both legal and illegal, with the bulk being illegal.

In Amazon gold mining, it is essential to understand and take into account the legal–illegal networks, not just focus on one or the other. The situation is not a straightforward lack of governance, since a substantial number of those governing are deeply embedded in the system. Mining interests have permeated the state to such an extent that any idea that some kind of Western-style “ideal governance” could solve the issue is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the power and extent of the underlying RDPE. Curbing deforesting mining is not only an issue of governance or lack of regulation; rather, it is an issue of driving political economic forces and actors.

As a form of extractivism, gold mining in the Amazon is a process producing negative value, violence, human rights violations, and other developmental harms. The monetary value of losses caused by illegal Amazon gold mining has been estimated by Brazil’s Prosecution Service and researchers to be around 39 billion reais per year (about USD 8 billion) (Manzolli & Rajão, Reference Manzolli and Rajão2022). In Brazil, the support given to gold mining fluctuates, as the RDPE of gold mining is not as dominant as it is in Peru, where mining interests align with national elites that have captured the state to some extent and thus ensure lasting support (Crabtree & Durand, Reference Crabtree and Durand2017). Gold-mining damages are closely connected to the highest level of politics, which means they are affected by regime changes and especially major changes in the capitalist world-ecology.

Committing environmental crimes in the Amazon has become one of the world’s largest illegal businesses (after the global drug trade and counterfeiting), generating an estimated annual profit between USD 110 billion and 281 billion (Risso et al., Reference Risso, Quevedo, Brasil, Calderoni and Vallejo2023). In Brazil, the key for profit making is the production of commodities based on illegal deforestation, including gold mining, which is the key cause in Peru (Risso et al., Reference Risso, Quevedo, Brasil, Calderoni and Vallejo2023). This profitable illegal deforesting is linked to difficult-to-detect sophisticated forms of international crime, such as trade-based money laundering and smuggling. Mercury is the key substance required for gold production, with about 5 to 8 grams needed to produce 1 gram of gold. In Brazil, there is no legal market for mercury and it is smuggled in from Bolivia and Guyana (Senra et al., Reference Senra, de Paula Batista, Molina, Pecora and Oliveira2023). This mercury smuggling creates yet another way of making money through the illegalities of the gold RDPEs in the Amazon.

Gold Prices and Deforestation

While illegal, informal, and other forms of Amazon gold mining have been amply studied from various viewpoints, Peyronnin (Reference Peyronnin2019: 11) argues that the deforesting role of gold mining requires further scrutiny:

I will address this gap in literature. Most studies, although the main focus is elsewhere, can be used as a material base because they at least tangentially mention how the focus sector affects deforestation. Smith et al. (Reference Smith, Hooks and Lengefeld2020: 236) argue that the export value of illegal gold mining in Latin America has surpassed cocaine. In a comparison between Peru and Colombia, they show how these sectors, which they call “treadmills of production and destruction” due to their contribution to deforestation and environmental degradation, vary in their regional impacts and functioning. This variance also depends on world-systemic factors. Due to the damages caused, in 2021 the environmental cost of gold mining in the Amazon was estimated to be tenfold the price of gold produced (Diele-Viegas et al., Reference Diele-Viegas, Pereira and Rocha2020). Thus, in addition to ranching in the Amazon, Amazon gold is another form of unproductive capital (Dowbor, Reference Dowbor2018). It is extracted by a system that has become regionally dominant in many places, destroying lived environments and causing socioenvironmental damage. In the Amazon regions that have already experienced gold-mining booms, their bust has meant local economic collapse (Diele-Viegas et al., Reference Diele-Viegas, Pereira and Rocha2020). After the gold fever has passed, the miners typically turn to other deforesting livelihoods, or move elsewhere in the Amazon to open a new mining front. Gold leaves in its wake a trail of boomtowns that serve as hubs for further deforestation, especially ranching-grabbing based. Some quantitative figures on the extent of deforestation caused by the sector are provided by Asner and Tupayachi (Reference Asner and Tupayachi2017) and Nicolau et al. (Reference Nicolau, Herndon, Flores-Anderson and Griffin2019). In Peru the height of gold-driven clearcutting was in 2017, with a total area of 95,750 hectares deforested in Madre de Dios by 2017 (Peyronnin, Reference Peyronnin2019). Most of this deforestation has occurred in the time since the completion of the Interoceanic Highway. About 80,000 hectares of this deforestation is estimated to be caused by gold mining, with 30,500 hectares of the total happening between 2013 and 2016, although during that time the Army realized 109 interdiction missions to destroy illegal mining sites (Reaño, Reference Reaño and Chirif2019).

Deforestation caused by gold mining in Peru’s Amazon is not a new phenomenon, as it expanded by an average of 1,202 hectares per year in the 1985–2009 period; however, since then the figure has jumped to 7,432 hectares per year (Caballero Espejo et al., Reference Caballero Espejo, Messinger and Román-Dañobeytia2018: 10). This change, or the other fluctuations in the relations between mining deforestation, cannot be explained solely or directly by gold prices (see Figure 5.4), which do not correlate with deforestation. Between 2012 and 2017, gold prices decreased 26 percent, while the deforestation caused by gold mining increased by 53 percent (Caballero Espejo et al., Reference Caballero Espejo, Messinger and Román-Dañobeytia2018: 8). However, research in Brazil has shown that there is about a 10-year delay between gold prices, increased mining, and deforestation, with the correlation between gold prices and mining area showing the trend (see also Graph 2 in Senra et al., Reference Senra, de Paula Batista, Molina, Pecora and Oliveira2023: 28). Between 1992 and 2011, the area occupied by gold mining in Brazil remained stable at approximately 25,000 hectares.

Figure 5.4

The average price of gold in US dollars from 1985 to 2024.

Figure 5.4 Long description

A line graph showing the average closing price of a Troy ounce of gold in US dollars from 1985 to 2024. The y-axis represents the price in US dollars, ranging from 0 to 2500, while the x-axis represents the years from 1985 to 2024. Key data points include a low of $271 in 1999 and a high of $2160 projected for 2024. The graph illustrates a general upward trend with notable fluctuations, including a significant rise starting around 2001, a peak in 2011, a dip in 2015, and a sharp increase from 2019 onwards.

Data from Macrotrends 2024.

However, since 2011 there has been a steady linear rise in the deforested areas as the gold-mining area in Brazil increased to almost 100,000 hectares by 2020. Since the spike in 2011 (see Figure 5.4) the price of gold has remained high as central banks can use it to protect national economies from international financial tumults and attacks. Gold’s role in this capacity had increased as other asset classes have become riskier due to the multiple global crises since 2008.

The two most severely deforested conservation units in the Brazilian Amazon are in southwestern Pará, the FLONA do Jamanxim (86,110 hectares deforested between 2014 and 2023 according to ICMBio data shared with me by their personnel), and the environmental protection area (área de proteção ambiental, APA) of Tapajós (56,830 hectares deforested). In both cases, a key cause of this deforestation is gold mining. For example, the company Gana Gold commercialized over 1 billion reais (about USD 210 million) worth of gold from the APA of Tapajós without proper environmental licensing, which caused the police to ban their operations in 2022 (Piran, Reference Piran2023). Therefore, it is particularly important to study gold mining when analyzing why deforestation is taking place inside conservation areas and Indigenous lands in an extremely destructive, violent, and polluting manner. This deforestation inside conservation areas in Brazil, totaling 334,000 hectares between 2014 and 2023, increased dramatically during the Bolsonaro regime, with annual deforestation rising from 24,888 hectares in 2018 to 62,026 hectares in 2021. When Lula came to power in 2023, this came down to less than 20,000 hectares. Meanwhile, Brazil’s gold exports doubled between 2017 and 2022, from 11.6 tons to 22 tons, which was due, to a large extent, to illegal gold (Potter, Reference Potter2023).

A senior IBAMA officer I interviewed in November 2023 considered that currently the problem in Brazil with garimpo is still mostly related to the price of gold, not to the narco connections. An expert ICMBio officer shared this view, stating that the high price of gold makes the extraction of low-value deposits profitable in areas like the southwestern parts of Pará. The low real value in relation to the dollar allows the exporters to make profits even when they are mining less valuable deposits. The IBAMA officer told me that the banks are a key problem in the gold market dynamics because of gold’s value and importance to central banks and other financial institutions, which are making money off the illegal gold trade. In Roraima, he argued, “There are a lot of big people who make money from mining, a lot of politicians, a lot of banks. I think the banks really make the money, anyway. Banks make a lot of money from mining. Illegal mining is a very large network.”

The extraction volumes are high but vary. In Peru’s Madre de Dios, just one of the motors used in the process of mining was estimated to produce between 13 and 15 grams of gold per day. These motors are the most important part of the mining operation because they physically dredge the bottom of the riverbed to find the gold. The production from the gold-mining rafts situated in Roraima on one of the Yanomami rivers, such as the Uraricoera, were estimated to be substantially higher, 40 to 100 grams per day, which results in 1.2 to 3 kilos of gold per month (Ramos, Reference Ramos2020).

In the post-2005 setting, the gold–deforestation linkage needs to be understood as a part of the wider problem of cheap natures (Moore, Reference Moore2015). As the costs to obtain gold rise, profit margins are affected, as are the possibilities to expand in the same manner as previously. Thus, more destructive means of extraction are sought, usually by manipulating regulations by global and regional mining interests (Kröger, Reference Kröger2016). This process becomes systemic when state control has been captured. Once an RDPE is established, the deforesting and other negative impacts are no longer dictated by the logical reality of the place where they are felt. Rather, they become secondary to the interests of the wide variety of actors that benefit from further expansion of the sector. These interested are consolidated in the key nodes, for example, selling machinery, getting rents, grabbing a slice of the illegal/legal trade of gold, involved in other increased sales, and/or retaining overall power and clout. The linear expansion of illegal gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon between 2011 and 2020, even as gold prices were dropping relatively, is telling of how the RDPE, once established and set into an expansion mode, draws other sectors into its thrust (especially the drug trade and other organized crime in the case of Amazon gold), which causes the expansion to operate increasingly by its own logic. The expansion logic of the RDPE can overcome relatively small decreases in global prices, or decreases in state subsidies, as my prior analysis on the linkage between state crediting of industrial tree plantations in Brazil and their expansion showed (Kröger, Reference Kröger2013a). The state funding by BNDES in most parts of Brazil was the key to make the paper pulp sector regionally dominant – and globally most cost-effective. Even though the funding level dropped for a time, plantations continued to expand. This is the reason that, when investigating these sectors, it is important to look at fluctuations in price over a few decades and the links to world-ecological shifts. These cannot be seen when looking at fluctuations only a few years at a time.

The 2008 financial crisis, and the subsequent land and resource boom, were world-systemic moments that were synchronic with rising gold-mining-spurred deforestation in the Amazon, which is also suggested by Peru’s increase in gold deforestation in 2009. The global extractivist character of the financialized world-ecology gained momentum, including through the growth of informal/illegal economies and international trade, which explains to great degree how extractivist RDPEs have further expanded their grip and control. This phenomenon of extractivist RDPEs consolidating their grip on regional territories and national policymaking is global, these RDPEs creating an ever-larger part of global capitalism, which is extractivist.

The importance of extractivist RDPEs in global capitalism is highlighted by the overall rise in the price and relative value of commodities in relation to capital goods since 2005. Although there was a relative drop in commodity prices between 2014 and 2018 in relation to the boom of the commodity consensus years of 2008–2013, the figures stayed higher than they were prior to 2005. For gold, the global price was less than USD 300 per ounce in 2001, rising to USD 600 in 2005, and then skyrocketing to USD 1,800 in 2011. The price came down to about USD 1,200 in 2015 but rose to above USD 1,900 in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic (Heubl, Reference Heubl2021). The rise from USD 300 to over USD 2,000 is dramatic. Gold is not alone in this change as similar drastic changes in commodity prices for other goods have occurred since 2005, for example, iron ore (Kröger, Reference Kröger2020a). We are facing a new pushing or driving forces of regional extractivist sectors that are locally and even nationally dominant, but then join forces to form a new global race for resources. To make matters worse, this is occurring at precisely the same moment when the socioecological-climatic havoc that extraction creates should be avoided at all costs due to the closeness of breaching global climate tipping points. These RDPEs need to be studied in detail for their sectorial and contextual specificities, to understand the factors that drive and enable them, but also which factors can resist them.

The extracted gold from the Amazon has found its way into leading global technologies, electronics, and the production lines of electric car companies. Yet, it is practically impossible to trace the origins of this “blood gold,” as an Amazon Watch (2022) report details. An estimated 47 percent of the gold mined in Brazil between 2015 and 2020 was illegal, a total of approximately 229 tons. Organizations like Amazon Watch argues that the key buying countries (Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Italy) and global companies should consider and label Brazilian gold as a “conflict mineral,” which warrants much stronger regulation and inspection on the ground.

Gold mining explains most deforestation in parts of the Amazon, rather than ranching, soybeans, or other forms of deforestation. RDPEs have path dependencies, where they can block the entrance of other forms of capital, by several means. First, they already offer possibilities and channels for capitalist accumulation in a systemic manner, having many vested interests, for example, the routine use of specific machinery sellers. Clearly, these sectors can coexist in several places and support each other, as is visible in areas like the BR-163 in Pará, around Itaituba, and to the south until Castelo dos Sonhos. In this area, gold mining could be said to still be more dominant than soybean plantation complexes, as it runs alongside logging and ranching-grabbing schemes, which are also strong deforesting extractivisms operating in the region. However, in Peru’s Madre de Dios and Venezuela’s Orinoco Delta, illegal gold mining is clearly the dominant sector, regionally. This indicates that the polities and existing ties of politics and rooted economies can also resist the entrance of unrooted or foreign types of deforesting extractivisms. When Brazilian ranchers tried to enter Bolivia from Acre, the Bolivian government drove them out; however, the same government has not, in any meaningful way, curbed the gold mining in the Amazon along the border between Bolivia and Peru. Amazon gold mining is a cross-border system, crossing polities more easily than ranching. In fact, the Brazilian gold miners were essential in “transferring their knowledge of alluvial mining and dredges” to the local miners in Madre de Dios, and they also offered important financing (Cortés-McPherson, Reference Cortés-McPherson2019: 386). It is likely that the Peruvian authorities did not meddle with this impact due to the already-strong pro-mining attitudes within the government, as the sector was already becoming an RDPE and was much stronger than other sectors. Meanwhile, the Brazilian state would like to see illegal gold mining stopped in the Peruvian Amazon, a diplomat from the Brazilian Embassy in Lima told me in 2017. One reason is because mercury from these sites flows to Brazil and is consumed by and travels with the fish. However, these health considerations might not show the whole picture because in international relations many other aspects may be associated with such a wish. In Venezuela, gold-mining expansion has been related to closer ties with Russia, the arms trade, money laundering, the drug trade, and organized crime expansion. Other parts of the Amazon are also in the same situation, with growing links to the latter three.

Gold Mining in the Triple Frontier between Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia

Since 2017, illegal gold mining in the Amazon has grown rapidly, especially during the Bolsonaro era, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the political chaos in Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela. In Brazil, between January 2021 and June 2022, the area of mining expanded by approximately 16,000 hectares, while an estimated 158 tons of gold, worth about 44.6 billion reais (about USD 9.4 billion), were extracted during that period (Manzolli & Rajão, Reference Manzolli and Rajão2022). Bolsonaro strongly promoted mining, even signing several decrees that facilitated the entrance to areas like Indigenous lands. These actions led to a threefold increase during his term of miners invading Munduruku and Yanomami lands (Indriunas, Reference Indriunas2022). Bolsonaro was the first president of Brazil to visit an illegal mine, even more shockingly, this was located inside the Indigenous land of Raposa Serra do Sol in Roraima. During this visit he defended the approval of new laws in October 2021 that allowed mining (Indriunas, Reference Indriunas2022). This visit, along with other factors, signaled that the relevant government and state apparatuses had been captured by mining interests during the Bolsonaro regime.

Meanwhile, the rise of Maduro in Venezuela has also led to a dramatic increase in illegal gold mining in the Orinoco Delta and other parts of the Venezuelan Amazon (Lindberg, Reference Lindberg2020; SOS Orinoco, n.d.) There are an estimated 4,472 points of illegal extraction in the Amazon, of which 1,432 are in Venezuela according to a georeferencing analysis (McDermott et al., Reference McDermott, Ramírez and Robbins2023). After Brazil, this is the highest number of illegal gold-mining operations. The problems with this illegal mining started in early 2000s, when President Hugo Chávez offered FARC a safe haven in the Yapacana National Park, which is next to the triple frontier with Colombia and Brazil. Since then, the Colombian ex-guerillas have started mining gold extensively in the park, making it the most heavily mined region of Venezuela. In addition, according to a report by InSight Crime, Maduro has allowed ex-FARC (such as Frente Acacio Medina) and other operators (such as Frente ELN, with whom ex-FARC have a pact of nonaggression and division of territories and tasks) to expand further along the Orinoco Delta to provide funds for the regime (McDermott et al., Reference McDermott, Ramírez and Robbins2023). The ELN, a faction of whose leaders entered the region in 2017 after the Colombian peace deal, has an especially strong control of the ports and extorts money along the access rivers to the region. The same report found that the FARC leader Miguel Diaz Sanmartín, known as Julián Chollo, refused the 2016 peace deal, and later became the de facto leader of illegal gold mining in Yapacana. In this role, he demanded significant extortion money from gold miners (for example, with fixed bribes, such as 5 grams of gold for each backhoe in operation, 3 grams to maintain a business, and 1 gram for a boat to pass to bring in workers and goods). There are about 25,000 workers involved in gold mining in the region, if you include the workers in the supporting tasks, for example transport, cooking, selling goods, and so on. The biggest mines and machineries belong to persons who are ex-FARC and from the ELN. A local Indigenous informant explained that the guerilla groups have total control of the area, and Indigenous people have had to make pacts with them to receive donations for allowing operations. The situation may be a bit better for these Indigenous groups than those on the Brazilian side of the border, where the PCC and other drug-trafficking groups have a huge share of the control of gold mining and engage in extreme brutalities that amount to genocide against the Yanomami. According to the InSight Crime report on the Venezuelan side, some Indigenous people see Chollo as a kind of “Robin Hood” distributing goods for those in need, but in practice they must involuntarily submit to his power and violent presence. The illegal/clandestine airstrips are also used for drug trafficking and other illegal activities (see Figure 5.5).

Figure 5.5

Inspired by a map from InsightCrime.org, this map shows the proximity of illegal gold mines and crucial clandestine airplane landing strips on the triple border between Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela.

Figure 5.5 Long description

A map showing illegal gold mines and clandestine airstrips near the Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela border. Key locations include the Urucuera River, Orinoco River, and the Yapacana National Park. Symbols indicate water, national parks, illegal gold mines, and airstrips.

The most important RDPE of this triple frontier, which causes the most deforestation, is the conglomerate of various gang-based violent and armed criminal organizations. Local key authorities, such as intelligence and army officers, also seemed to be involved in the gold mining in these areas in 2022, offering arms and security against other public authorities’ attempts to enter and control the region. This is a heavily dominant sector, as it has even imposed its own currency, with gold accepted locally for practically all transactions. In addition, the borders are controlled by criminal groups, with miners and support workers moving frequently to other sides. In this context, available jobs are announced on social media and paid only in gold.

The Uraricoera River is the key access route to the gold mines that lie within the Yanomami lands in Brazil. The river is controlled by organized crime lords, with their pistoleiros attacking the Yanomami villagers with lethal force as they try to block other miners and gangs from accessing the area. The drug gangs extort the miners, and earn money by organizing brothels and selling goods and drugs to the miners. Mine owners – or the de facto controllers – organize everything under their grip, trafficking women with false promises about the conditions of the sex work. In this setting, rape is typical, as is extortion of the workers in the fashion of the established Latin American rural patrons, who first operated rubber estates and then later were involved with cocaine production. The gold interactions are used to launder all the money and even offer the possibility to launder illegal gold. This setup helps to explain the benefits of the mergers between the illegal gold, drug, and other businesses.

The creation of Pan-Amazonian police and official investigative institutional frameworks could help, but realistically this will not happen anytime soon, given the existence and political power of the RDPEs where profit making is deeply linked to environmental crime. Many reports focus on governance and policy-setting improvements, without recognizing the deeper, systemic causes of the illegalities, such as RDPEs. The lack of resources, corruption, and insufficient intergovernmental cooperation to tackle Amazon deforestation should not be primarily seen as obstacles that can be overcome by better policymaking and governance (as e.g. in the report on Amazon’s triple frontiers’ illegalities by McDermott et al., Reference McDermott, Ramírez and Robbins2023). These are some of the ways in which current key political economic powerholders in different regions retain, accumulate, and expand their fortunes and power. The rapid rise since 2011 of illegal gold mining in protected and Indigenous lands in the Amazon is a result of the “complete decontrol of the economic chain of gold” by states, which are too fragile in the regulatory, judicial, and institutional spheres, but have many institutions driving the mining, as found in 2023 by a large report on gold mining (Senra et al., Reference Senra, de Paula Batista, Molina, Pecora and Oliveira2023: 87).

The setting of illegality is essential because it allows the illegal gold to be turned into legal money capital. This laundering takes place practically by small airplanes and a long chain of different companies mediating the gold trail. Once the gold has passed through all these hands it is melded and the illegal gold cannot be distinguished from legal (McDermott et al., Reference McDermott, Ramírez and Robbins2023). Given the high costs of getting gold-mining equipment, such as barges, to remote regions, organized crime’s financial flows have become ever more essential as more remote areas are targeted. A single barge can produce about 14 kilograms of gold per year, which can fetch 150 to 200 million dollars locally and almost 900 million dollars internationally (McDermott et al., Reference McDermott, Ramírez and Robbins2023). These figures, showing the relatively much higher profit accumulation up the international chain, explain the availability of local financing. Given the high value, and proximity to frontiers, armed groups control the operations. Organized crime and guerilla and paramilitary organizations are participating both in drug trafficking and gold mining, which are used to launder money. In Chapter 6, I will discuss the Peruvian dynamics in more detail, and then in Chapter 7, Brazil.

In Peru, the Madre de Dios gold-mining conflicts (see Figure 6.1) have been seen as a recurring, uncontrollable socioenvironmental problem (Cannon, Reference Cannon2017). In addition to creating major local socioecological problems and conflicts, illegal gold mining also impacts people far outside the mining areas, as mercury is carried upriver to Indigenous villages by fish and downriver to Brazil and Bolivia. While forests can usually regrow on pasturelands, the poisoned and ravaged post-mining landscapes will remain as barren wasteland strewn with rubble. Shedding light on Peru’s mining capitalism is an essential step in starting to solve the problem, as Peruvian powerholders continue to lay highways into the Amazon. The Interoceanic Highway was just the first of a series of planned new roads on both sides of the border (van Eerten, Reference van Eerten2017). If extractivist expansion in these areas continues unabated, there will be very little left of the primary rainforests, landscapes, and lived environments.

Figure 6.1

Map showing the most significant places in Peru discussed in this book.

Figure 6.1 Long description

A map of Peru focusing on two regions: the Amazonian rainforest and Madre de Dios. The map uses various shades and patterns to differentiate areas prominent rivers such as Rio Inambari, Rio Tambopata, and Rio Madre de Dios; several towns or communities such as Puerto Maldonado. Solid lines represent main highways and logging roads and dotted lines represent borders. Shading denotes mountainous or higher elevation areas. An inset map of South America is in the upper right corner, with a shaded area indicating the location of the main map.

Basemap data from openstreetmap.org.

In Peru’s Madre de Dios, gold mining has been studied related to pollution, health, and environmental harms (e.g. Diringer et al., Reference Diringer, Berky and Marani2019; Martinez et al., Reference Martinez, McCord and Driscoll2018), local socioeconomic developmental and livelihood impacts (e.g. Chavez Michaelsen et al., Reference Chavez Michaelsen, Huamani Briceño and Vilchez Baldeon2020; Perz et al., Reference Perz, Espin and Castillo2016), and lack of governance and difficulties of regulation (Damonte, Reference Damonte2016; Reference Damonte2018; Reference Damonte2021; Dargent & Urteaga, Reference Dargent and Urteaga2016; Durand, Reference Durand2015; Reference Durand2016; Rodriguez-Ward et al., Reference Rodriguez-Ward, Larson and Ruesta2018; Salo et al., Reference Salo, Hiedanpää and Karlsson2016). In addition, contributions like Duff and Downs (Reference Duff and Downs2019) discuss gold-mining stakeholder and social actor dynamics. The severe negative impacts on biodiversity and nearby large conservation areas have also been studied (e.g. Mathez-Stiefel et al., Reference Mathez-Stiefel, Mulanovich and Jaquet2020; Sánchez-Cuervo et al., Reference Sánchez-Cuervo, de Lima and Dallmeier2020). Some studies offer formalization as a solution (Salo et al., Reference Salo, Hiedanpää and Karlsson2016). However, in the current institutional context formalization would most likely increase deforestation, a finding supported by the RDPE theory. In Madre de Dios, even formalized artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) has been found by green criminology to produce “lawful but awful” environmental harms (Espin, Reference Espin2023).

The reason why this deforesting mining has not been curbed is largely explainable by the failure of the Peruvian state, argues Damonte (Reference Damonte2021). This failure is caused by the power of the Peruvian elites, who, tied to the extractivist model, control the political process and “use the capture of key institutions to prevent the emergence of alternative development paradigms” (Crabtree & Durand, Reference Crabtree and Durand2017: 178). The Fujimori regime closed the Congress in 1992 and wrote a new constitution in 1993 that is still active. This action laid the groundwork for the chaotic setting where informal and illegal Amazon mining now thrives. The informality continues to be maintained as it advances the interests of the gold-mining RDPE.

There is ample discursive and developmental narrative support for mining in Peru, making the sector not only dominant but hegemonic to a very large degree, especially among the powerful decision makers. As Benites and Bebbington (Reference Benites and Bebbington2020: 216) write, “Peru’s political settlement both builds and is supported by the idea that Peru is ‘a mining country.’” In this setting, the state and governments do not have incentives to create mining policies that curb deforestation. If this were to be attempted, there is sure to be political backlash. Crabtree and Durand (Reference Crabtree and Durand2017) argue the elites have retained and consolidated their dominance by state capture, meaning the economic elites can make laws for their own benefit, which in turn allows them to capture the political process more broadly. This means key state and society actors have created a hegemony and “cognitive capture” where extractivist neoliberal growth is seen as the only developmental option. Mining-related elites manage to capture the parts of the government and the state that are of interest to their continued dominance and hegemony. Even with political support, the rampant informality and the widespread regional power of the RDPE make it hard to put in place effective measures against the RDPE. In this setting, the RDPE expands by various means of extractivist means into social, physical, and symbolic spaces to subsume and/or corrupt even those communities that want to resist.

Currently, the key actors of this RDPE obstruct the possibilities to regulate and effectively govern in a positive way; for example, by funding corruption or being in power themselves. When they are not personally in political power, it is not uncommon for them to work as powerful political lobbyists vis-à-vis Puerto Maldonado and Lima decision-makers. According to Cortés-McPherson (Reference Cortés-McPherson2019), what best explains the interest and power of mining elites in the Amazon gold mining in Peru are the capital interests of a heterogeneous class of mining financiers. These lead to what I call the establishment of a RDPE, in this case the capital interests for accumulation are via deforesting gold extractivism. Some of the components of this establishment are listed by Cortés-McPherson (Reference Cortés-McPherson2019), these include the appearance of regional (formal/informal/illegal) finance, the creation of a local mining bank and regional government, the interoceanic road, the commodity boom with its high gold prices, and the regulatory failures of the Peruvian state regarding gold trade. Malu, from the Comissão Pró-Índio (CPI) in Acre, who also acts on the Peruvian side with Indigenous communities to curb the deforestation and degradation perpetuated by various sectors, shared with me in Acre in 2022 that the paving of the highway was the main explanation for the rapid increase in deforestation along the roadsides:

The continued gold-mining boom in the Peruvian Amazon needs to be understood as an Andean–Amazonian phenomenon, as the regions are highly connected, even more so with new roads such as the Interoceanic Highway. The Peruvian state formed a national mining bank in the 1940s, and since then artisanal gold mining has expanded, especially in Cusco, Puno, and Madre de Dios (Sanborn et al., Reference Sanborn, Ramírez and Hurtado Lozada2017). In the 1990s, this artisanal mining turned extractivist, with the arrival of aggressive companies, such as Volvo, offering heavy machinery and financing (Peyronnin, Reference Peyronnin2019). As with other sectors that were created and then later turned into RDPEs, initial state credit was crucial and later, especially since the 1990s, international financialization, mechanization, and globalization have resulted in the original extractive operations becoming ever more extractivist in scale and scope. This has turned Amazon governments into widely polluting and deforesting sectors, which can be characterized as globally extractivist due to their linkages and exports. The state birthed the sector, by initially providing a tax exemption for the “artisanal” gold miners in the Amazon in 1968. This was followed by concessions being granted at a fast pace and, in 1978, the Law to Promote Gold Mining was passed (Damonte, Reference Damonte2016; Sanborn et al., Reference Sanborn, Ramírez and Hurtado Lozada2017). This marked a turning point where hereafter the hierarchization and ecological damage typical of capitalist developments, which are especially visible in these kinds of resource frontiers, took place in earnest. The worst deforesting mining expansion took place during the neoliberalization of the 1980s–1990s, which is when the state lost control and international and irregular local finance displaced the state-regulated artisanal mining (Damonte, Reference Damonte2021). Large privatized, corporate, and internationalized mining operations started to dominate Peru’s politics during the 1990s Fujimori era, which led to substantial socioenvironmental conflicts and impacts, as the mining sector became dominant. Amazon gold mining is situated under the umbrella of this wider capture by the mining elite of large parts of Peru, its state, and governments. However, it should be emphasized that while the corporate, large-scale, and formal mines also pollute and cause deforestation (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Hooks and Lengefeld2020), the Amazon gold problems extend beyond the alluvial mining and rainforest pits.

Local and nearby societies are deeply affected, including in the areas of labor regimes, class formation, and interregional justice. Most miners come from Cusco and Puno and other nearby Andean regions, while, in the lowlands, the Amazonian Indigenous people see their forests, rivers, livelihoods, and communities destroyed, divided, and polluted. Sometimes they do partake in the gold plunder themselves in a bid to at least have some of the spoils stay in their communities, instead of seeing them all flowing upriver.

It is the mining workers and others affected by mining sites who suffer. Ulmer (Reference Ulmer2020: 325) emphasizes the cruciality of “disposability of life,” as workers’ lives and health are not considered in the push for extraction and its violent environments. In this moral economy, which is a key enabling factor for the RDPE, damage and killing are not abstained from, but, in addition, human and other-than-human lives, including those in the forests, are ontologically transformed, lessened in value. This is not just a commoditizing resource frontier (Kröger & Nygren, Reference Kröger and Nygren2020), but also a frontier of existences (Kröger, Reference Kröger2022), radically dividing who can exist and how in the forest. These existences, and their radical redistribution, are defended by new kinds of moralities and moral discourses on rights. For example, a new narrative has grown that emphasizes the right to extract gold (Cortés-McPherson, Reference Cortés-McPherson2019). This narrative is dominant in Madre de Dios, but also nationally, as other local-level politicians adopt this rights discourse. This new moral economy, which justifies and priorities gold livelihoods in this context, is a key enabling factor of the RDPE.

The gold-mining boom in Madre de Dios, based on high rents extracted as the environmental licenses for operating inside or outside concession areas were not required in practice, and an absence of inspection, had by 2016 resulted in the hierarchization of the supposed small-scale or artisanal sector. In this irregular or illegal gold sector, “a group of power” consolidated itself as regionally dominant. This group included former small-scale miners who had become extraordinarily rich, owners of mechanized plants where gold is separated, and “capitalists immersed in highly profitable crimes (drug and human trafficking, smuggling) and corrupt officials at all levels and powers of the State” (Dourojeanni et al., Reference Dourojeanni, Ráez Luna and Valle Riestra2016: 170). Due to the influx of people from elsewhere, most inhabitants in Madre de Dios are not Amazon Indigenous and are pro-extractivist. This group is so extractivist that they elected a regional president for the 2015–2018 term who was a figurehead for the miners’ roadblocks, which were in protest of campaigns since 2010 by the police to eradicate illegal mining areas (Ráez Luna, Reference Ráez Luna2023).

The sector is highly hierarchical in Madre de Dios; for example, the power in the most important mining hub and town of Huepetuhe is consolidated in the hands of a single family who came to the region as pioneers and have been there since the 1970s. They are a “dominant commercial and political force” and control most gold-mining areas, trade directly with local and international buyers, and have deep ties to local and national politics (Peyronnin, Reference Peyronnin2019). There are several emblematic factors here which show how extractivist deforesting RDPEs in the Amazon are often very hierarchical. This shows that their dominance is not only regional and in relation to forest-use decisions, but that RDPEs also have internal dominance within the system. In this case, the head of the family managed to lobby for the region to become an official administrative district and then became its mayor, while other family members have key political influence in regional and national legislatures. In addition to their direct political ties and many concessions, they own hotels, mining equipment companies, and other key service and trade companies in the region linked to mining (Peyronnin, Reference Peyronnin2019). This family, called Baca Casas, controls the routes of gold from the mine pit to foreign refineries, receiving millions from foreign banks. A series of gold-exporting companies, controlled by the family and related to cases of bribery and links to politicians, are listed by Peyronnin (Reference Peyronnin2019), with the key buyers being companies from Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, and India.

A key feature that drives this kind of deforesting open-pit mining in the forests is the ready availability of machinery and equipment provided by foreign companies. Key among these were Volvo and Ferreyros (a brand of Caterpillar), whose arrival in the region in 1992 strongly shaped the style of extraction. In particular, the flexible payment terms on purchased machinery turned mining into very industrial and heavily mechanized process (Peyronnin, Reference Peyronnin2019). This industrial mechanization has had such an intense impact on the landscape that one can see the signs of mining from space now. These machinery companies were crucial in getting early financing to the sector (Cortés-McPherson, Reference Cortés-McPherson2019), which is really the point at which the area turned from small-scale mining to gold extractivism. This mechanization has led to a dramatic multifold increase in the amount of gold extracted per month, and has lessened the need for workers, but at the cost of “widespread deforestation, despoiling land, runoff of topsoil and stagnating pools of water, and damaging waterways and ecosystems” (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Hooks and Lengefeld2020: 247). The gold buyers are key intermediaries in the process; for example, locals told me in 2017 that one role they play is providing security by buying the gold that is often stolen by corrupt police. In addition, these dealers arrange the machinery for the miners and pay for the large loans they receive using gold. It is not a surprise that these dealers are also being investigated for money laundering (Cortés-McPherson, Reference Cortés-McPherson2019: 386).

Illegal trading of gold is even more profitable than drug trading. Peruvian mining and political elites export gold directly and through third countries to companies that, for example in the United States of America, could not be seen to be involved in this illegal and deforesting trade (Cortés-McPherson, Reference Cortés-McPherson2019: 385). Some companies involved in this illegal importing from South America and Peru, which is worth billions of dollars, have been investigated and caught by the police in the USA. The involved exporting companies in Peru are owned by officials, such as a director of the Ministry of Mines. The laundered gold and eager buying companies abroad provide ample financing for further expansion. It should be noted that it is not just importing/exporting companies that are involved, but refineries and gold exchanges in London, Canada, and other places. Formal gold buyers in Lima have bought a significant amount of gold from the Madre de Dios Basin, which then counts toward exports and state revenue to some extent (Damonte, Reference Damonte2018).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, with its record high gold prices, a dirty gold economy strengthened globally and Amazon mining and its deforesting impacts expanded uncontrollably and fast. This expansion is despite the state of emergency and raids by the Navy and Army that aimed to destroy mining sites (Damonte, Reference Damonte2021). Madre de Dios is an example of an RDPE of gold mining linked to global gold extractivism, which has captured the local political economy to a large degree. In addition, together with the national mining section it wields substantial power, for example in influencing the voting process for Peru’s president. The pro-mining and anti-environmentalist conservative political parties dominate Peruvian politics, opposition is weak, and the civil society debilitated, which means necessary monitoring and regulatory rules, institutions, and resources have not been created. This situation explains the deforesting expansion by extractivist elites (Pereira & Viola, Reference Pereira and Viola2021: 128).

In 2022, Elsa Mendoza explained that since COVID-19 new methods of deforestation have arrived in Madre de Dios, caused by fruit and other types of agricultural plantations. This food is needed to supplement the tens of thousands of gold miners who do not produce food but pay very high prices to get it locally: “The value inflates since mining is dangerous,” a “banana costing 1 peso elsewhere costing there 5 pesos.” There has also been a surge of new speculation, lotting, and selling of unused land, especially by roadsides. “Mining is not cheap, it has a high cost,” the influx of this capitalist tendency bringing an overall increase in the values of everything: “All is commercialized in these areas where mining is installed.” Mendoza explained that the mines that are “floating,” alluvial on the rivers, “do not require territories, but are starting to buy lands” in this general post-COVID land commercialization. People are also asked for payments to stay in roadside shantytowns that are rife with exploitation and insecurity, to the extent that locals must “pay for someone to protect them, or else they are invaded, robbed.”

Counterattacking the Gold Expansion

Some government and state actors have tried to prevent mining from expanding in the direction of the Tambopata National Reserve, which is an important tourist destination. In 2018, the area around the city of Puerto Maldonado received over 200,000 foreign tourists, which brought a lot of money to forest lodge operators. However, most of these lodges are not locally owned, so much of the money spent on accommodation flows outside the community. This results in the area being more of enclave economy, as there is too little local spending by the foreign tourists. Yet this link to global tourism does seem to have lessened the deforestation around the major conservation areas south of the Interoceanic Highway.

In February 2019, the Army and the police carried out Operation Mercury, which, according to some reports, resulted in a 92 percent decrease in deforestation in the area called La Pampa, which is between the Interoceanic Highway, Tampobata, and the Malinowski River. A substantial amount of Madre de Dios gold-mining expansion was taking place there (Villa & Finer, Reference Villa and Finer2019). While this would appear to be a clear win for the authorities, the displaced miners seemed to have moved to other areas nearby, where deforestation subsequently increased, for example in Apaylon, Pariamanu, and Chasp. Chasp is a new gold-mining frontier that is located within the buffer zone of a national park. Yet, despite the increase in deforestation in some locations, the overall impact of Operation Mercury had positive effects on curbing deforesting. This suggests that, with a strong political will, it is possible to control the key deforestation locations. However, as of the mid-2020s, economic power has suppressed such will. Often these operations target the activities of the informal miners and not the root causes and political-economic drivers of the deforestation following gold mining, which suggests that mining will continue where the police and Army are not physically present. In contrast to prior police actions, Operation Mercury left a police force on site to prevent the return of miners and designated funds to help the miners’ socioeconomic situation so they would not immediately return to mining (Ráez Luna, Reference Ráez Luna2023). However, due to COVID-19, the police did not stay for long and miners retook the areas. In January 2024, Augusto Molanovich, a Peruvian state official, explained to me that by 2023 the situation had already become chaotic again. He argued that the “financing is too large” for the repression and destruction-based military operations to be effective, as gold miners have so much money that they can quickly replace the broken machines. The military operations and presence are also very expensive and do not consider that miners also are human beings. Therefore, he argued that the way to effectively curtail the mining is to “regulate and restore” the forest cover. However, this restoration would be expensive, technically challenging, or even impossible in places. Additionally, the restored areas constantly run the risk of the miners returning to tear them open again. At the end of this chapter, I will make a more detailed exploration of the possible solutions to curb these problems.

Tres Islas: Gold Extractivism Dynamics within Indigenous Lands

In Madre de Dios, most of the Indigenous people belong to Native Communities, which were forcibly formed in the twentieth century by the Church, state, and missionaries to gather various Indigenous people in towns to be converted by force. This took place during the disastrous rubber boom (1900–1940), which was promoted by the state. Prior to the 1900s, the region had remained largely protected from colonialism due to difficult access. The slavery and violence of the rubber boom led to genocides against several of the Indigenous communities; for example, the population of the Ese Eja was devastated, with those remaining now forming a part of the Tres Islas community. The rubber barons forcibly dragged the Shipibo ancestors of the current Tres Islas Indigenous people from Pucallpa (Merediz Durant, Reference Merediz Durant2017). Even those communities who escaped from slavery now live in voluntary isolation as nomads, for example the Harakmbut. According to Gray (Reference Gray1996), the worst reduction in their numbers happened during the rubber boom of 1894–1914, during which time some subgroups lost 95 percent due to use of machine guns in massacres by rubber barons, as well as slavery, disease, and related causes. They numbered around 30,000 in 1940, when missionaries encountered them, bringing with them diseases. After that, the road was built, which further spread epidemics which wiped out most of the Harakmbut who were left. In the year 2000, there were only around 300 of the Harakmbut left (Reaño, Reference Reaño and Chirif2019; Tuesta, Reference Tuesta2018). The first gold boom in Madre de Dios took place in the 1960s–1970s, as previously President Benavides had promoted the building of major highways without any consideration for the environment, including the road to Puerto Maldonado (Reaño, Reference Reaño and Chirif2019). However, during this period, until 1978, there were no concessions, and mining was mostly artisanal. The state was buying the gold and paying a global market price and generally supporting the establishment of gold frontier in Madre de Dios, which included subsidizing the colonization of the region by Andean migrants (Moore, Reference Moore and Chirif2019: 209). In 1978 the government passed the Law to Promote Gold Mining (Decree 22178), which did not give concessions to local Indigenous groups, or to the existing state-controlled artisanal miners, but instead opened the region on a first come first serve basis (Moore, Reference Moore and Chirif2019). This can be considered a capture of these lands by Peru’s internationally linked and Lima-led mining elites, as this law opened the possibility for their companies to grab the existing gold-mining lands from the existing users. Since then, there has been social chaos around mining in Madre de Dios, argues Moore (Reference Moore and Chirif2019). Therefore, the second boom started in the 1980s as a more rampant process and intensified after 1993 as the neoliberal Fujimori government’s 1993 constitution decreased protection of communal lands (Reaño, Reference Reaño and Chirif2019). Until 1991, some Indigenous communities had successfully used a tactic of filing for and holding gold-mining concessions themselves, without operating them, to avoid a situation where outsiders got concessions and started mining. However, this tactic became ineffective after the 1991 General Mining Law required payments to maintain the concessions (Moore, Reference Moore and Chirif2019). Even though it was established in a top-down manner by Fujimori and hastily pushed through to favor capital, the 1991 law still applies. Since its start it has caused conflict and broken many other laws, such as the General Environmental Law. These political moves were part of the Fujimori government’s economism policy, where neoliberal reforms were used as a tool to quell political dissidents and enforce a steeper elite control of politics (Teivainen, Reference Teivainen2002). This sequence of developmentalists first building infrastructure and then neoliberals radically decreasing community land rights, has repeated itself since, as the Interoceanic Highway was paved between 2005 and 2011, followed by waves of liberalizations.

Rampant mining expanded in Peru as the 2008 financial crisis led to booming gold prices, there was a domestic economic crisis, and the highway was being built. Several governments tried to establish some laws from Lima, without understanding the local setting. They tried to use the military to crack down on the miners, but these top-down and noncontextually aligned policies just added violence to the problems and caused the mines to spread to other places according to Moore (Reference Moore and Chirif2019: 212). Moore (Reference Moore and Chirif2019) also made the observation that by 2018 all the mines were still illegal as it was too difficult and expensive for the miners to try to meet the required environmental standards set by the government. Recently the expansion has got worse, starting with invasion of forest lands by mafias focused on illegal logging, who then sell the land to miners after they have removed the valuable wood, details the Regional Strategy for Low Emission Rural Development of Madre de Dios (Estrategia Regional de Desarrollo Rural Bajo en Emisiones) (Governors’ Climate and Forests (GCF) Task Force, 2021: 40; Alarcón et al., Reference Alarcón, Díaz, Vela, García and Gutiérrez2016). The state policy document also details the rapid expansion of coca plantations close to gold-mining sites, as both mining and logging are increasingly financed and controlled by drug-trafficking mafias. Importantly, none of this chain of deforestation would have started without the developmentalist idea of building the road to Madre de Dios. While this infrastructural driver is a crucial cause, there are also multiple causal factors that explain why deforesting gold mining continues. The GCF Task Force (2021: 44) listed the following: perception of impunity, idea of “available land,” low productivity, demand for gold, availability of cheap labor, existence of an informal land market, high corruption, access to new areas, readiness of property owners to rent lands, lack of capital to improve low-producing lands, lack of new markets for biodiversity-protecting produce, and lack of technical help for Amazonian diversity. These factors illustrate how local, alternative development should be supported alongside measures to control and curb mining.

Many of Peru’s Native Communities have received legal status since the 1990s as Indigenous peoples, but several are still waiting to get formal titles conferring land and legal rights. Most of these Native Communities resist gold mining, but the state has granted mining concessions on top of much of the Indigenous land, which has created major conflicts and pushed some community members to also start mining; for example, in the Tres Islas Native Community, which received its title already in 1994, after a long struggle (Ráez Luna, Reference Ráez Luna2023; Reaño, Reference Reaño and Chirif2019). However, Tres Islas is the only Native Community that has obtained a positive court decision on its appeal in the Constitutional Court of Peru, against the illegal decisions of miners and the regional state, which forced them to open the roads giving access to their titled Indigenous lands for the holders of 137 state-granted mining concessions over their land. Of these, 123 are held by outsiders, while 18 are in the name of Tres Islas community members (Merediz Durant, Reference Merediz Durant2017); the latter are primarily to block the outsiders. The miners officially pay the state a small sum for the mining concessions, which makes them think they have rights. A local court ruled that the Indigenous people do have the right to block the miners’ entrance to the land, which is an action the Tres Islas community needed to take as the state was not protecting their rights. The mining licenses granted by the Ministry of Mines and Energy are unconstitutional as they did not respect the constitutionally granted autonomy or seek free and prior consultation with the native community members, which is also demanded by the ILO (International Labour Organization) 169 Convention signed by Peru (Movimiento Regional Por la Tierra y Territorio, 2017). ILO 169 grants primary land rights to Indigenous peoples even in cases where state laws or, in this case concessions, would violate these rights.

Augusto Molanovich, from Peru’s Forest Service (SERFOR), told me in January 2024 that the majority of Amazon Indigenous people, and especially their organizations, are resisting extractivisms and gold mining. He had been writing the policy plan for alternative development for Madre de Dios in an attempt to resolve the gold conflicts; however, the plan had not been executed. While the majority resist, due to the pressure, Indigenous people are simultaneously “involved” with mining, Molanovich shared. In 2022, policy consultant Elsa Mendoza told me that it is common for the local Amazon Indigenous communities to cede their lands in Madre de Dios for gold miners to get a part of the proceeds. They are typically not involved themselves in the mining. However, when I visited Tres Islas in 2017, some of the people there were involved with the mining and that has created major polarization in the community. Tres Islas – which has 30,000 forested hectares out of a total of 32,212 – has over 100 families and is a mix composed of several Indigenous groups, including Shipibo, Ese Eja, some Ashaninkas, and mestizos (Movimiento Regional Por la Tierra y Territorio, 2017).

One part of the community tried to promote tourism and nonwood forest products (NWFP) such as nut production, but, as Mendoza explained, these ventures are hard as “no other economic activity can be compared” with gold. While many Indigenous leaders do succumb to the temptation of bribes by gold miners, argued Juana Payaba, a renowned ex-president of the community whose actions were central in gaining the court and other victories against miners, the resistance has also been strong (Movimiento Regional Por la Tierra y Territorio, 2017). The actions, starting in 2008, included denouncing the miners’ illegal actions and demanding that the miners leave. If the miners did not leave, after prior notification, they “burned their machines, their camp, their food.” The Indigenous people slept on beaches and installed radios, and little by little expelled the miners in 2008. However, in 2010, as gold prices soared, there was a larger wave of miners entering the area, with 30 to 40 motors. Again, the community decided to evict them and entered the “war that we are living now,” explained Payaba in 2017 (Movimiento Regional Por la Tierra y Territorio, 2017: 10). According to her, they planned and organized the actions well, including setting watch posts and burning tubes and other things if the miners did not leave. In addition, they threatened to shoot the miners with poisoned arrows, which brought them into close encounters with the armed miners who were unwilling to leave. Thus, they managed to evict all the miners in 2010. However, soon after this, a local court in Puerto Maldonado ordered the watch posts to be taken down, after which the miners reentered and the resistance became disorganized. Payaba claimed that it was the bribes paid by miners to local officials that explained the court decision that was fatal to local resistance.

The local officials also tried to imprison the community leaders, which prompted them to seek help from an outside human rights organization and their lawyers, who filed a Constitutional Court case. In September 2017, they won victories in the Constitutional Court (Exp. 1126-2011-PHC/TC), and in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the Organization of American States (Medida Cautelar N° 113-2016). At the same time, the Peruvian Judicial Power also decreed the mining licenses to be null (Chumpitaz, Reference Chumpitaz2020). The Human Rights Court had been approached by Payaba and another leader, because of the threats to their life by violent miners, and of mercury and other pollution. The Human Rights Court found that their situation was “grave and urgent,” and their lives at risk, which promoted the court to solicitate the state of Peru to take action to ensure their safety (Resolución 38/172017). However, by March 2017, the miners had not paid the ordered fines and costs to the Indigenous community members and the state was still allowing the miners to enter their lands, which I witnessed myself in May 2017 while visiting the area (see Figure 6.2). Being there in person, I could observe the things that are left out of most accounts, such as the dynamics involved when a part of the community participates in the mining.

Figure 6.2

Traveling upstream on the Madre de Dios River with the Tres Islas Native Community watch patrol, with illegal barges sucking gold from the riverbed in the background. May 2017.

Photo by author.

Already in 1978, Tres Islas community members had registered at the Mining Bank, and by 2002, Shipibo in Tres Islas were engaged in artisanal gold mining (Merediz Durant, Reference Merediz Durant2017). In 2017, there were at least two outsider mining concessions within Tres Islas with whom the community had made an agreement and from whom they were receiving considerable fees that went to the communal fund (Merediz Durant, Reference Merediz Durant2017: 172). There were also some families that were mining, but, in line with Merediz Durant’s (Reference Merediz Durant2017: 180) experiences, I also found that when asked these community members did not want to reveal that some members of their own community were involved in mining. Merediz Durant (Reference Merediz Durant2017: 206) argues that Tres Islas was among the 10 Native Communities in Madre de Dios for whom gold mining was the principal or the most profitable economic activity. When I landed with them on a mining spot upriver in Madre de Dios, we encountered some community members with mining tubes coming from the forest. Yet, there was no conflict or speech, as the tourism-focused and mining-focused community members maintained their silence and the meeting was cordial. No one explained to me at the time that these miners were also community members. I only learned this afterwards when an NGO coordinator traveling with us in the boat revealed it to me. However, when observing these dynamics, in line with Merediz Durant’s (Reference Merediz Durant2017) notes based on her participant observation, it is important not to participate in the general framing where locals involved in extractivism are chastised in popular media. Often this framing has the effect that all the focus is placed on these small-scale participants, while the roles and responsibilities of big businesses and finance in global cores are downplayed or invisibilized.

Within these more complex dynamics, mining and conflicts have continued in Tres Islas since 2020, when the COVID-19 price boom aggravated the temptation to participate in mining. Criminal groups extracted an average of 600 grams of gold daily from Tres Islas, which in 2020 fetched a price of at least 45,000 dollars on the black market (Radio Madre De Dios, 2020). Therefore, the community members continued their resistance and had to use their own force to evict miners, also calling on the military to intervene. At their behest, in February 2020, the Navy, Army, and special environmental officers’ taskforce found and destroyed two miner camps, six rafts with implements, eight engines, a gold-smelting center, and 1 kilo of mercury. However, this was only a fraction of the over 40 motors in Tres Islas in February 2020, each extracting about 15 grams of gold per day (Chumpitaz, Reference Chumpitaz2020). Between 2019 and 2022, over 500 hectares were deforested in Tres Islas, as illegalities by and related to mining, such as logging, continued amid the COVID-19 pandemic and political crises in Peru (Praeli, Reference Praeli2022). However, in comparative terms, mining has been held at bay by the resistance in Tres Islas, while those Native Communities that made deals with heavy machinery miners, such as Barranco Chico, which has one of the richest gold deposits, have lost their land and lived environments, existing now in misery (Merediz Durant, Reference Merediz Durant2017).

Since 2019, under the guise of formalization, the parliament has been approving new measures that support further mining expansion. The miners from Madre de Dios were also spreading to new, intact areas of Indigenous peoples located in very distant parts of the Peruvian Amazon and Andean–Amazon forests, such as Huánuco and Cenepa in 2022 (Praeli, Reference Praeli2022). This spread shows how RDPEs may leapfrog to new deforesting frontiers in distant places.

Resistance and Ontological Conflicts

There are many people, such as environmentalists, human rights activists, and especially local Amazonian Indigenous community members, who resist gold mining at a more fundamental, ontological political level. I witnessed this during my visit to the Tres Islas Indigenous community by the Madre de Dios River in May 2017. During this visit I took a boat upriver with them to see the ravages of barge and onshore gold mining on their lands. While walking with the leaders in the forests I talked to them about their ontological, cosmological views on the matter and the conflict with the miners.

These conflicts, where Indigenous people increasingly challenge not only the right-wing and neoliberal corporate resource extraction, but also the left-wing or progressive, neodevelopmentalist, neoextractivist policies, signal a key change in their relations. These fractures are visible across Latin America, for example in the Ecuador presidential elections, where a significant part of the Indigenous movement sided with the Indigenous movement’s Yaku Pérez, against the Rafael Correa-led leftist candidates, who were backed by leftist intellectuals such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos. De Sousa Santos claimed the Indigenous-candidate supporters were driving right-wing power by not supporting Correa. Atawallpa Freire, an Andean philosopher, criticized de Sousa Santos for this stance:

Ultimately, progressivism is part of the postmodern expression of the media and academic sectors that seek to displace the social movements (especially the Indigenous movement) or co-opt them to be under their social-democratic or even Christian Democrat tutelage, under the heading of “New Left.” For that reason, we’ve been clashing, because we are no longer following the Eurocentric path of “Socialism of the 21st Century,” but are contesting its conceptions and horizons. Because they want to keep having us only as a mass base or Indigenist or feminist or environmentalist or popular arm. And because we have taken up a struggle which is no longer only about class or morality (as they want it to be) but is an ontological and trans-civilizational struggle. This is what is behind one position and the other.

(Alteridad, 2021, author’s translation from Spanish)

A new kind of thinking is behind these clashes, ontological politics (de la Cadena & Blaser, Reference de la Cadena and Blaser2018), which revolve very much around Indigenous challenge to the extractivist, modern worldviews. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Report is among the many recent studies which have recognized this need and have called for greater attention and a larger role to be given to Indigenous populations. “Regional and global scenarios currently lack and would benefit from an explicit consideration of the views, perspectives and rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, their knowledge and understanding,” argues the UN Report’s summary (United Nations, 2019). Yet, the reality is quite different. Indigenous peoples have been facing ever greater pressure, threats, and killings as extractivisms have expanded since 2005. Modern states have failed to safeguard the right of Indigenous populations to live in peace when they have allowed and/or participated in extractivist expansions such as gold mining.

The COVID-19 pandemic worsened the situation around the world for Indigenous peoples, as during this time the expansion of legal mining (Vitor Santos, Reference Vitor Santos2020), and especially the unchecked actions of illegal miners, destroyed enormous areas in South America, including in Venezuela (SOS Orinoco, 2021), Peru, and Brazil.

While forests can usually regrow on pasturelands, the poisoned and ravaged post-mining landscapes will remain barren wasteland. The Indigenous people, and an NGO individual, who showed me in 2017 the ravages of gold mining in Peru’s Madre de Dios, shared with me the conflict dynamics when an Indigenous community starts to be divided due to pressure coming from outsiders who enter their territories with an extractivist mindset and practices. This situation started to divide the community into two, some people moved to the city of Puerto Maldonado, bought houses there, and then came to mine in Tres Islas. Another kind of logic, that of “our gold,” had started to grow among some community members, while others were frantically resisting this approach, and called those community members “outsiders.” I ran into some of these so-called outsiders while participating in a pilot tourism tour, which was being developed by community members not participating in mining as an alternative and antidote to the expansion of extractivism. When these two groups met each other, they were silent. When I asked who the other group was, the pro-tourism group did not respond to me and the feeling of the entire interaction was odd. Later, after leaving the community, an NGO coordinator told me those we had run into on the shore with the mining equipment were also Indigenous people and community members. I asked questions of the Indigenous leaders in Spanish (translated by me into English). We saw many mining barges on the river, and I asked a middle-aged Indigenous leader, whose name I will not reproduce for informant safety, “And the miners we saw mining, where are they from? Are they from Cusco?” He answered, “Exactly. – They are outsiders, from Cusco, mostly, who come to work here. Mining. They are outsiders. Or … People from Maldonado. They are not from here.”

By correcting the answer in relation to where the people are from, the quote reveals this thorny issue. I asked if the concession is easy to obtain: “If you have money. You pay. Monthly or annually, you pay. Per concession.” I then asked if the government also grants concessions on native community lands, which revealed the active resistance to this, based on a valuation of the existence of trees and forest:

Yes, they do. They have been granted. That is why sometimes we fight them because there are miners who want to enter [the forest] right, and we depend on that. We even go there, we stand our ground so they can’t work, so they don’t cut down the trees. Because when they bring the machinery in, they destroy the whole tree, they kill the tree. A tree that sometimes has stood tall for many years, they kill them and sometimes that we do not want.

The resistance is active, vigilant to protect especially the key places, such as the beautiful lake, which according to him had over 15 lobos de rio (giant otters), a species in danger of extinction. He explained that the site was also the sacred dwelling ground of other other-than-human beings (see Figure 6.3). He pointed to the areas along the Madre de Dios River we passed:

There are places for example in here with others, we take good care of them. We always keep watch there. We don’t let anyone in. For example, how has it been that all of our territory is there? Over back there, about a thousand meters from here, more or less, they wanted to invest some money in there, but we have not let them. Like here, excavators dig and then leave, we do not let them. Here, if another, we throw away. We have repeated. Everything, from here to a thousand meters away, belongs to us, everything.

The leader lamented that part of the community had been participating in mining, “they have won over us [a part of the community], like that, for money. They had money, they could pay everything, right? That is how. They paid.” However, they have also had victories, some by litigation, to defend their areas against mining, “we have won a trial and it is still known nationally.”

Figure 6.3

Tres Islas Native Community member in Madre de Dios, Peru, watching over a sacred lake that has suffered due to illegal gold mining. May 2017.

Figure 6.3 Long description

A person standing near a polluted lake, wearing a vest with text. He appears to be observing the environmental damage caused by illegal gold mining. In the background, large mounds of earth and debris are visible, indicating mining activity. The scene is set in Madre de Dios, Peru, with lush forest surrounding the affected area.

Photo by author.

An NGO expert, whose name I will not reveal for safety reasons, working for years on the topic and trying to help the affected Indigenous communities, explained the resistance to me in more detail: “There was a time, a few years back, when Tres Islas was very heavily mined, right? That is why many community members, community members who live in the area, took a stand to defend their territory. They sought this protection, under the constitution, to defend their territory” (translated from Spanish, May 2017, Puerto Maldonado). However, since this struggle, the resistance side partly lost control of the community and some of them started mining themselves, the expert explained. This shift had to do especially with the migration of outsiders into the community. Due to in-migration, they changed the community rules: “so that not just anyone can be a community member.” However, the turn to mining left many arguing the group should not be classified as a Native Community anymore, with its special rights and privileges:

[T]hat bad perception that exists [of the Indigenous people mining], there is truth in how they have exploited the territory, but it is not correct to say they are not natives. It is no longer true that there is a group that actually descend from the natives, that is, in the end, these new generations will no longer be pure natives … but they do have a history, a cultural past.

These moves to try to bar mining expansion revolve deeply around political ontology. They are ontological conflicts that challenge the modernist understanding of value imbued in modern gold markets. The Tres Islas people told me that the miners are “terminating with the spirit of our land.” I asked them if they told this to the miners coming to their lands, what their activities do to the spirits. The following replies are interesting because they show the kind of discussions around existence that seemed to take place in the daily encounters between miners and those critical of mining. I asked, “And you tell the miners about this? About the spirits?”:

We tell them. There are miners who react, you know. Jeez! we are doing wrong, you know? Jeez! You know? And we sit them down … I, I have friends that are miners. And I tell them. Jeez, you know? Not to destroy – well that is how we make a living [the miners reply]. [To which they respond:] But there are many ways to make a living without destroying the environment like that, you know? There are many ways. Look at us. I am a farmer – life is cleaning [referring to the Indigenous agroforestry practices of farming and care at chagras, the forest home gardens,Footnote ¹ right, – I do not need to go to the mine, to make a lot of money. For us here in the community, what we have is enough. To eat, – something for our family, nothing more. We do not need what money buys. Jeez! – a luxurious life, you know? We live here as, as a community – with what we have. If we have agriculture, it is like our little farm, to survive – cassava, banana … that we have. The spirits are grateful to us because it is a quiet place. There aren’t even any evil spirits.… [The spirits] protect us. But before, when there was mining, yes, there was plenty [of crime], you know? Jeez! Theft, robbery and you would hear about muggings and people that were killed. But not now. We are just starting out, trying to fight for tourism, fighting [through tourism] against illegal mining as well.

The Indigenous leader explained to me that by 2017 they had been successful in slowing down the activities, barring the mining entrance, driving the miners away:

[B]efore, it was full of miners. Here, there, everywhere. But not now. With all this, –- our support, you know, trying to get rid of the miners that harm the forest, the environment, we have fought as well [for them]. And, therefore, there is a difference.… They are leaving … we told the miners not to come work here. And as you say, mining is polluting the environment, mostly the river, right? with the mercury. We don’t want that. We want a better life for our children, a better community, a clean one. That is what we want. As I said, we are starting to bring tourism here, we are just at the beginning. We are trying to improve so that you can see and appreciate what we have in our community.

During the time of the mining invasion, crime and violence also increased, which the community’s anti-extractivism actions helped to quell; for example, by not allowing the excavators to enter, “There was plenty … because, as you know, miners dig for gold here. It brings crime, right? Now that there aren’t so many miners around here, we don’t have that problem anymore with criminals coming to the area. It is a quiet community. It is safe.” Those locals not partaking in mining were engaged in traditional or new, alternative livelihoods, with the support of projects, such as Brazil nut-packaging facilities. Most were resisting mining, among these were some cattle-breeders, but mostly they were involved with activities that did not deforest, such as caretakers in households, nut collectors, and other non- and anti-extractivist work, “here we are castañeros [Brazil nut collectors]. We bring our product here. This is the port to the world. In forest – hours from here, on foot – that is where we the castañeros work. Where we work with the Brazil nuts … it isn’t agriculture.”

Their current livelihood prospects are narrowed by the destruction of the river and river-based livelihoods due to mining pollution. For example, there used to be cane growing amply in the river that they used for many things, but it is not there anymore, and they also cannot consume the fish, “Illegal mining has corrupted everything, the river, as you can see.… Unfortunately, we have yet to see what else the mining will bring.”

The Tres Islas journey of resistance revolved around finding ways to combat the power of money: “[W]e have a vision earned by us, us as a community, with the miners we say [in the struggles with the miners]. At first, they beat us, because of money. They had money and could pay everything, right. That is how it is. They would pay. But now … we have even won at trial, which is nationally known.”

The resistance had earned respect inside and outside the community, even among the miners, “they respect us, we are there, we are fighting. The whole community is heard, we make a stand that nobody” is going to get paid by the miners. “We don’t let them work. That is ours, it is our duty, ours as a child of Tres Islas, of the Tres Islas community. Of all this.” As he explained, he showed me the forests, rivers, lands, and community buildings. They showed to me their traditional dances, practiced by youngsters, and crafts, which they would be showing and selling to future tourist groups.

The resistance of the community is not so hardcore as, for example, by the IBAMA in Brazil, or Navy in Peru, which destroy everything they find linked to illegal mining, including the accompanying family goods and food, burning them. The Tres Islas patrols negotiate with those miners who are poor. They do this also since they own the concessions, which they gained in the process of making concession claims to forbid outsider entrance. The NGO expert explained:

Sometimes the community is not very, let’s say, radical, when they confront people because they see a family, you now? You see, miners are not just destroyers … they are families that work. – Sometimes you go on an intervention, and you find an older lady, or children, or entire families that work, so.… They understand that this family has needs and sometimes they give them a deadline to finish their work. And, well, sometimes the families do not comply. They come to some kind of agreement. They [the mining family] pay them a little more and postpone the deadline. But, in theory, there is a limit to that income. There is also a problem there because there is a community concession there, so they can’t get rid of them completely.

This kind of mining problem is not won overnight, but time is needed, as the miners have accumulated a lot of money and resources at some point in time. The mining people in the Tres Islas community have houses in Puerto Maldonado, where their children go to school and have “more opportunities to go to college.” This mining part of the community is from another area, not the village headquarters, but from “an area they call Palmichal, and who [we] are always in conflict with.” I was visiting the part of the community that was promoting tourism and nonmining stances. Yet, these Palmichal people are also “part of the community,” although of them, “almost nobody is a native,” according to the NGO expert. They then went on to explain why they have not wanted to raise this issue of there being nonnatives within the community who are mining, “That subject is more sensitive, you know, because it has to do with the image of the community.” Losing the image of this being an Indigenous community with “ancestral knowledge” would be perilous considering the defense against outside threats, as the community would be judged for mining themselves.

In this sense, the physical and social damage mining causes within Indigenous communities carries an even higher price in the symbolic space, on which depend both the valuation of the communities’ ways of life and the discourse on special rights. The situation of extractivist pushes is therefore much more complicated for Indigenous communities. This is the reason that Bolsonaro and his allies, evangelical missionaries (often involved in mining), would like to see their understanding proven right – that all are as sinful as others, “naturally” participating in extractivisms. However, the NGO expert explained that if the Indigenous people start mining, they lose support from all sides and “they only attract problems. They attract policemen who want to intervene,” taking bribes, using extortion, and destroying the mining equipment. However, if they do not mine, “all of them sympathize with that territory if they work [with] Brazil nuts.”

The NGO expert recognized that the community that he had worked with for many years was going through a transition:

I think there is a conflict [within the community]. But, maybe even more than just a conflict, there is a transition. At least in the way they were working, which can no longer be sustained. And this is accepted by the community members, even those who have mined or who continue to mine, you know? Because they know what is happening to the environment and how the community has been affected. [The change is] cultural, and of identity itself with the territory. It is seen in their impact, how they intervene and in the vision of development that each one [of them has themselves].

However, this transition to post-extractivism was hard to oversee, given the lack of state support for controlling the vast territory, “That is the hard part, managing or controlling problems over such a vast territory, to know, also, that you are monitoring the entire territory without the support of the authorities.”

Recently, especially since 2022, development cooperation projects have created positive results; for example, one project by Rainforest Foundation aims to build communal inspection capacity by training Forest Oversight personnel among native community members (Ráez Luna, Reference Ráez Luna2023). The use of new satellite, drone, and mobile technologies where locals are given better tools to denounce deforesters have had positive effects in Tres Islas and elsewhere in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon (González & Kröger, Reference González and Kröger2023). The key is to raise the role of regional Indigenous peoples’ representative organizations for monitoring deforestation, such as the Madre de Dios Native Federation (FENAMAD – Federación Nativa del Río Madre de Dios y Afluentes) as it is far less susceptible to corruption than state officials. FENAMAD lobbies for the Forest Oversight personnel to be paid a proper salary from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their monitoring work, which would ensure longevity after external project funding ends.

There are several studies that propose mining formalization as a solution to the problem. However, the local environmental officers of national parks and research institutions experts, whose interviews are presented in Reaño (Reference Reaño and Chirif2019), argue that what would be needed to ensure a safe place to live is to attempt to recreate ecological corridors and reforest the destroyed areas. Nowadays conventional plantation agriculture is often suggested as a mining alternative, but realistically any production intended for human consumption will be problematic due to the poisoned terrain. When this is proposed, the change in economic activity, a kind of “just transition” for miners away from mining, is not actually a return to forest-based livelihoods in the region, but rather a shift to monocultural production, which is also highly problematic. Therefore, any reconversion should be based on agroforestry, but mostly on reforestation, as any produce from agroforestry efforts would be contaminated for a long while. To make this happen in practice would require extensive use of machinery to remold the destroyed areas in several stages. The local experts and directors know the names of those local peasants and Indigenous people who actually own the lands and forest concessions that outsiders, illegal miners invaded by force, and they also know which of them aided the illegal access. The rights of those locals who try to still live in the area should be restored in any “just transition,” instead of legitimizing the illegal arrival of outsiders, who also destroyed the others’ lived environments. In this sense, the transition away from an extractivist RDPE should not signify a payday for the deforesting RDPE members.

The accumulated economic power is a problem, as those with the most money can use their extensive power and networks to bar transitions. Despite these problems, the case of Tres Islas – amid Peru’s mining RDPE pressure – shows how even Indigenous communities, divided by the power of RDPEs, can start a transition into post-extractivism through struggle. They can create a transformative resistance to extractivisms by their new livelihoods, patrolling practices, and grounding in nonmodernist cosmologies and ontologies.

I will next turn to the analysis of Brazil, in Chapter 7, where there have also been cases of Indigenous resistance to mining amid the rise of Bolsonaro and the new type of narcogarimpo (the linking of organized drug traffickers and criminal networks with gold-mining activities), against which resistance is harder than against nondrug-trafficking-linked gold mining.

Many Amazon people depend on both urban and rural livelihoods, moving between two or more residences depending on the season and economic prospects (Hecht, Reference Hecht2005). During the first PT era (2003–2016), there was a lot of work in cities in construction, and minimum wages and social support were increased, including monetary perks for not deforesting. This lessened the deforesting activities undertaken by the working population. However, in 2013 the Brazilian economy started to decline from its boom years and the construction and oil sectors were mired in major corruption scandals, with many projects coming to a halt, which meant urban workers had to look for other opportunities. During the latter part of the 2010s many workers moved from northeastern cities and elsewhere to work as illegal gold miners, often under bosses who kept them in slavery-like conditions. Between 2008 and 2021, the authorities rescued 333 miners from Amazonian gold mines, mostly in Pará, who were working in conditions analogous to slavery (Senra et al., Reference Senra, de Paula Batista, Molina, Pecora and Oliveira2023). The owners of garimpos (originally meaning artisanal gold mining in Brazil, but currently, in practice, this is mostly medium-scale, illegal, violent, and crime-linked mining, as discussed herein) make their already highly profitable actions even more profitable by forcing the miners they bring into the operation to take on debt. The owners demand that the miners pay for basic goods, transport, and other services in gold, at a rate that is routinely five to ten times more than they would pay in the town (Senra et al., Reference Senra, de Paula Batista, Molina, Pecora and Oliveira2023). Most gold miners in Brazil seem to come from Maranhão, which shows how the supply of certain types of labor and entrepreneurs create path dependencies, as some who have gone to mine gold in the Amazon tell friends and relatives back home of the opportunities. Thus, through the translocal labor flows, RDPEs can have close ties with labor and capital dynamics in other areas.

An IBAMA officer, who had been active in curbing illegal gold mining around the Amazon for a long time, told me in an interview on November 23, 2023, that in Maranhão the daily worker salary is 50 reais (about USD 10), while in gold mining the same worker easily earns 8,000–9,000 reais (about USD 1,600–1,820) per month. The work is hard, and the conditions are bad, but still, making so much more money, they do not return to their previous employment. I met and talked to these workers when I visited illegal gold mines in the Amazon, for example in the region around Castelo dos Sonhos in Pará (see Figure 7.1). Their accounts helped me to understand how the system of illegal gold mining works and gets boosted or changes its character due to major regime and economic shifts in the country. In 2019 at the bottom of a mining pit, a gold miner from Maranhão explained to me that he had previously worked in the construction sector, but as the sector descended into crisis, he switched to gold mining. This sector fluctuates often as the workers migrate. However, although there are these decentralized aspects of the system, the key gold buyers, machinery sellers, money launderers, and international traders, amass the most wealth and power.

Figure 7.1

A gold-mining operation east from Castelo dos Sonhos, Pará, Brazil, November 2019.

Photo taken by author.

In 2019, a gold shop operator in Itaituba, Pará, explained to me that “now a lot of people are coming from Venezuela,” which shows how Amazon gold digging is an international, cross-Amazonian process. Venezuela had started to create its own gold RDPE in the Orinoco Delta and had labor supply from other regions. After February 2023, when Lula cracked down on miners in Roraima, according to my informants, they went in large numbers to Suriname, with others returning to Yanomami lands after a while, as these areas are very hard to monitor.

In November 2019, I went to visit several illegal gold-mining sites in southwestern Pará with a reporter, a guide, and a former miner who also served as our driver. On one of those trips, we stayed at Castelo dos Sonhos, a real frontier town, which had even a hotel called Fronteira (frontier). The main street, on BR-163, had shops for buying gold-mining equipment, cowboy clothing from the United States, and others stocking items that deforesters might need, such as ranching equipment. There was also a supermarket owned by Castanha, who is considered to be the worst single deforesting person in the Amazon, with his operations responsible for between 10 and 20 percent of the yearly Amazon deforestation. Although condemned several times, he continues to run free in these frontier regions as he is waiting for the Supreme Court’s final decision. As he remains free, he continues to drive further devastation and accumulate capital as he owns much of the town. At the start of our trip, in Cuiabá, I witnessed a car protest where the expensive pickups were covered with pictures of Supreme Court judges. The protestors were calling them criminals and calling for the abolition of the Supreme Court. The people who can afford such expensive cars in these regions are also most likely related to all sorts of environmental and human rights crimes. Castanha was responsible for organizing the logging of tens of thousands of hectares inside conservation areas, which abound around the BR-163.

We went to a gold-mining shop to ask the price of a mining set. The whole package could be attained for 30,000 reais, and if we would top that with another 30,000, we would get the best Mercedes-Benz motor to power the crushing mill and suction pipe. The salesman said we could earn back the price in just a few days if we were at a good spot. He did not ask us any questions about why we were interested in the set but was assuming we were going to go dig for gold as he showed the machinery parts, which seemed crude. He told us that 30,000 was the discount price coming directly from the boss.

Early the next morning we pointed our car eastwards on the small gravel road leading out of the town and saw the roadside brothels and bars already in full swing because the gold miners were spending their earnings in town. We asked people we met on the road where there are garimpos and used unreliable maps and satellite images to try to spot the mines. We stopped to listen to sounds of motors and were on the lookout for signs of garimpo. These are wholly illegal operations, as lands have been captured illegally and the operations break environmental laws, human rights, and labor laws. The driver, who had toiled in mines for years, told us that there were big criminals hiding here.

We first tried to enter a gold-mining site behind several fences, but a lady appeared telling us that it was not wise to continue further, as the mining boss operating at the end of the road welcomes everybody with a rifle. We turned and kept searching for a few hours. Finally, we found a gold mine whose boss was in town, as we found out after walking carefully deeper into the mine site, along the ridges of sand, between the holes. At the end, there was a group of seven men toiling at the bottom of a pit, working with a backhoe and a conveyor belt for washing the excavated ground. Powerful water hoses were used to wash the dirt sliding down a grid, with the rocks falling through and the gold staying in the grid. The scoop put more and more dirt on the grid. The men were barefoot on the mud and clay, with ragged shirts, working 7 days in 12-hour shifts, in slave-like working conditions. After filming and managing to talk for a while with one of the miners who was willing to talk, we quickly drove away as the boss had already been notified of the appearance of strangers and would most likely be heading back and arriving soon. We used a drone from further away to get an aerial view of the expanse of the destruction (see Figure 7.1).

The 30-year-old miner I talked to there explained the work was hard and that he was working “from six to six,” 12 hours per day. He said the only way to really know where there is gold is “to take out that thing on top,” referring to the forest. Contrasting with what an IBAMA officer had said to me, the miner said a worker earns about 3,000 reais (about USD 600) per month, based on the percentage of the gold they find. He said they found about 50 grams of gold per day, varying by day. He said that he had been there just for a very short time, for two months, and did not know when the area was opened. He explained that each digging machine costs about 500,000 reais. I tried to inquire about land access, knowing of the illegality, “It is complicated” to get access to land, “we just work here,” the man replied. When asked about the job, he said, “It is not very good.” He then explained how workers end up in the mines, “[one] arrives there in the city, and the guy [gold mine owner] talk when they need workers, and they go to gold mines.” He was going to return to Maranhão at the end of the year. They were about to expand, as their area was already “weak,” mined-out.

We then tracked the route of gold to the towns and their gold shops. Itaituba is the key gold-mining hub in Pará, a gold town where most of the economy revolves around gold. Most garimpeiro donos live in town, although they are “passing most time in there [at mine sites], to administer,” as a gold shop operator in Itaituba told me. We were able to interview this gold shop owner only after many attempts to find someone in the gold shops willing to talk to us. Most would not talk to us, even anonymously, fearing that we might be environmental police, as they were engaged in illegal gold trading. In 2019, Itaituba was seeing a major mining expansion, but there has been gold mining in the area for a long time, explained the shop operator, “I had not even been born, there was a lot of garimpo here for many years, who made the city was the garimpo and therefore it [the city] keeps on growing all the time … most of the garimpos are illegal.”

He explained that miners spend most of their money on liquor, women, and overpriced goods at mining site canteens and mostly stay in the forest. When I asked about who sells the gold to them, he explained, while casting a small gold bar worth about 500 euros, that the many small gold-buying shops in the town are mostly geared toward the smaller, individual miners and mine workers, while the big miners, garimpeiro donos, have their own direct sales channels:

Gold mining has become an RDPE around and in Itaituba. The gold shop owner feared that the economy would collapse if mining was forbidden, “if they shut down garimpo here that is the end of the city.” He argued that pollution could be controlled if mining was legalized. Such discourses are indicative of system-internal thinking, where no other options outside of the established trade are seen as possible and solutions are sought only within the system boundaries, even if those would be practically unfeasible (such as mining regularization). His view of the local society and the way development was going and should go was also indicative of system-internal thinking: “All are living well, but, as I told you, [state] inspection impedes a lot for us to grow.”

Just as in the Peruvian context, in the Brazilian Amazon there were also problems related to some Indigenous village chiefs, a minority, and other members of the aldeias participating in gold mining or allowing the entrance of gold miners to their land. In November 2019, I asked what the Sawré Muybu community members thought of these Munduruku, south of Itaituba in Pará, by the Tapajós River, whom I was visiting, who were allowing this. Aldira Munduruku responded:

Similar dynamics were also taking place among the Kayapó, as Carlos, from the Kayapó Institute, explained to me in 2019. The push is very strong and violent, but most of those granting access are won by a cheap means of co-optation:

This proliferation of the gold RDPE is driven by its rapidly increasing links with drug and other organized crime, which I will analyze next.

The Rise of Narcogarimpo and Violence against Amazon Forest-Dwellers during the Bolsonaro Government

The significant rise of narcogarimpo, which is the linking of organized drug traffickers and criminal networks with gold-mining activities, took place during the Bolsonaro regime. Bolsonaro himself is the son of a “wildcat” miner, who promulgated illegalities and deforestation in the Amazon. Bolsonaro, for example, issued Decree 10,966/2022, which promoted Amazon gold mining by “wildcat” prospectors, but which Lula revoked in 2023. Meanwhile, under the Temer and the Bolsonaro regime, and especially since 2016, established gangs, first the Comando Vermelho from Rio de Janeiro, and then the PCC from São Paulo, expanded their operations to the Amazon, which made the region far less governable (Resk, Reference Resk2023). They, and other drug traffickers from neighboring countries, especially Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, seek to control drug-trafficking routes in the Amazon border areas and hinterlands. Venezuela’s strongest organized crime group, Tren de Aragua, has allied and intersected with PCC, also expanding to the Yanomami lands in Brazil (Senra et al., Reference Senra, de Paula Batista, Molina, Pecora and Oliveira2023). A vast network of airstrips and logistical nodes are already established, both to operate new illegal gold-mining ventures deeper in Indigenous territories, but even more so to operate and control the drug and other illicit trafficking (see Figure 5.5). For example, this activity happens between Brazil’s Yanomami-area airstrips and Venezuela. Gold mining is especially useful to launder drug-trafficking money, but the gangs also spread their operations to other illicit operations, including grilagem of lands, land buying and speculation, ranching, and urban lotting of lands. All these activities increase deforestation, are based on the rapid rise of violence, and introduce the society and especially the youth to the ills of organized crime.

In fact, gold is currently the best way to launder money according to the chief of Federal Prosecution in Brazil, which alone could be an explanation for why organized crime is interested in being involved, although the logistical networks are also crucial (Senra et al., Reference Senra, de Paula Batista, Molina, Pecora and Oliveira2023). Gold mines are typically deep in forests, and heavily guarded, and have traditionally offered a haven for escaped prisoners. The connections with the prison-originated PCC and Comando Vermelho narco-criminal organizations have since deepened as these organizations offer drugs to garimpos and then use their logistics for drug, gold, and laundered money trafficking. In 2022, the Federal Police arrested a large group of criminals involved in the laundering of over 1 billion reais in the garimpos of western Pará (Resk, Reference Resk2023).

The merger of gold and drug criminals has resulted in a significant increase in casualties and losses of Indigenous and land defender rights. The effects are felt more strongly because these crime mergers took place at the same time as COVID-19 and its bad handling by the Bolsonaro regime. This resulted in a mix of a state power vacuum and purposeful participation of highest political powerholders in mining ventures and militia-type operations, to which the Bolsonaro family has had close ties according to several reports (Paes Manso, Reference Paes Manso2021). In this sense, a significant part of the state apparatus, and Amazonian territories, were captured by organized crime, which brought the Amazon closer to a situation of a failed state, with an increase in dangerous areas where it is not safe to enter and areas where the state does not have the monopoly of violence. In fact, the Bolsonaro Cabinet prohibited the state officials from executing their rights and duties with regard to policing environmental criminals, such as loggers and miners. In fact, Environmental Minister Salles several times personally (and illegally) stopped operations to bring gold miners and deforesters to justice.

The gold shop owner I visited confirmed that in Itaituba there is a lot of money laundering by drug traffickers, who “enter in contact with you and send the money saying that they want to buy gold. They give you a higher price, so the person gaining more [the gold shop owner] does not care, but washes the money.” This is one example of how narco and garimpo have come together, increasingly making a joint system or a narcogarimpo. This is quite similar to how ranching and land grabbing are deeply interlinked with the soybean frontier.

Gold mining is closely linked to illegalities and violence and these links have only deepened since the rise of the narcogarimpo. Statistics about the growing violence attest to the Amazon’s descent into an abyss of lawlessness. During the years of the Bolsonaro administration, the state’s connivance in the invasion of territories became evident in the conflict records of the entity that produces the most comprehensive statistics on rural violence, the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). Between 2013 and 2022, 1,935 occurrences were recorded of invasions carried out by people and groups coming from outside of the communities. However, between 2019 and 2022, during the four years of the Bolsonaro government, there were 1,185 of these invasions, which represent 61.25 percent of the total. Furthermore, over 37 percent of these invasions occurred on Indigenous lands. Of the 661 invasions recorded in Indigenous lands in a decade, 441 occurred between 2019 and 2022, representing 66.71 percent of the total (Comissão Pastoral da Terra, 2023: 6).

Celinha, a long-term state employee of the ICMBio and other state organs, shared with me in Brasília in March 2022 her personal experience in working as a fiscal, federal environmental policewoman, which is an inspector and environmental policeperson. In this position she worked to create a RESEX and she targeted illegal gold-mining operations inside multiple-use conservation units. ICMBio is responsible for conservation units with traditional peoples, while IBAMA is responsible for Indigenous territories and private lands. She stayed for about 40 days in Novo Progresso, working with IBAMA, the Federal Police, and other state actors to expose garimpo illegalities. The local secretary of the environment had invited them to stay at his house for four days while they were in the area, as no hotel would accept their credit cards. She shared with me what happened at night on the last day:

The mayor advised the secretary of the environment to also leave his house and he traveled with the environmental inspectors to Itaituba. Celinha explained that that day she decided she would never again conduct inspections “since we do not have any security.” At times, they had to stay for days camped next to riversides when they were creating RESEX. Sometimes, with enough pleading, they were able to get two police to accompany them, but even then, “what are 2 police in that region? Nothing!” She said that she had “already suffered many serious problems,” as “these areas have a lot of mining, garimpo, madereiros, there is the question of cattle, and it is clear that … all these people were against [us].” She said that some in the area do view the environmental protection in a positive light, “but for the majority, principally these large latifundiários [landholders], it is very ‘frowned upon,’ so they make it as difficult as possible, we’re at risk all the time. But the inspection I think is worse [than the field trips needed in the creation of RESEX].”

I asked if she knows who was behind the violence in Novo Progresso, she replied, “It was a secretary there, one of the municipality secretaries, of the local government. He is a madereiro and he was part of garimpo yes, with certainty.” There seems to be a growing tendency for the deforesters to become the political officeholders, as this way they can ensure that the people representing them will not threaten their illegal activities. Celinha explained that these people, grileiros and garimpeiros, typically make up part of the government. To get elected

Gold-mining schemes are often backed by even more violence, top-level power, and economic resources than ranching or logging. This is why intervention needs to be at the highest level, by professional forces that are well armed. In early 2023, in an intervention to drive the narcogarimpeiros out from Yanomami lands in Roraima, Lula ordered in the Army, Navy, and police. These drastic moves have led to a decrease in garimpo in several parts of Brazil’s Amazon, which has resulted in an estimated 70 percent drop in garimpo in the Humaitá region, which is in the southern part of the Amazonas state (Lábrea, 2023).

However, many of the poor miners, whose barges and goods were destroyed during the intervention, seem to have moved to work as loggers and farmhands for ranchers in the deforesting frontier. This shows that the RDPEs are interlinked, especially in many of the key deforesting regions. Thus, to combat only gold mining is ineffective because the power of all the RDPEs needs to be curbed more or less at the same time to avoid spillover effects, which might create an even worse situation; for example, turning the garimpeiros into ranching clearcutters.

Illegal Amazon gold mining has its closest links to Bolsonaro – whose father was an illegal gold miner – so it was politically an easy and visible target for the government to use in response to the January 8, 2023, invasion and destruction of the parliament by Bolsonaristas in Brasília. According to Police Chief Conrado Wolfring in Novo Progresso, who has comparative experience of many forms of deforestation, it is most problematic and dangerous for police to try to affect mining. He had already been forced to move due to questioning the corruption perpetrated by politicians in Jacareacanga and illegal loggers in Placas: “I went on questioning corruptions. So, at times a simple arresting of a mayor’s nephew can roll your head, to move your region … imagine messing with a miner, where the scheme is large, where there is some politician participating in that, imagine if your head would not roll.”

Wolfring also gave me insight into how he observed that drug trafficking feeds gold mining: “A guy makes an investment in garimpo and gets these airplanes that land in the forest and brings drugs to supply the garimpo and earns money to buy mining machinery – one thing leads to another.” Wolfring had previously been involved in arresting large drug gangs, “I went to arrest a large gang in São Felix, they provide the supply and bring to other states, bringing drugs from Bolivia. They land and transport the drugs. There needs to be a better control of aerial transport, they use small airplanes.”

Local police are often involved in gold mining by extortion and corruption. A gold shop owner in Itaituba explained to me that police “Are tranquil, but they all are wanting a part. There are some who prefer to go to the garimpo as there they can get more money” by extortion and bribes. In Peru, when I took the boat up the Madre de Dios River with Tres Islas Indigenous community members, we passed by many gold-digging barges. The locals explained that the police are often waiting at the roads leading from the river to the Interoceanic Highway, practically stealing the miner’s illegally mined gold. The miners cannot ask for help from anyone in these situations. Therefore, it was understandable that the miners were on the lookout also for our boat, as we could be police coming for money.

The executive power has many problems in policing RDPEs due to the corrupting power of money, but there are also problems with the judiciary. As the justice system is typically slow, those responsible are often not really formally punished by a court of law even when they are caught. The method adopted by environmental police has been to burn the mining equipment when it is found. This happens sometimes over and over to the same perpetrators. Wolfring explained about the justice system, “The judge has to judge small things (marital fights) instead of judging these serious crimes, devastation, and loses time.… So, things are not advancing in the judiciary, the sensation of impunity makes people to commit crime, it takes 10 years, 20 years.”

A court in the style of India’s Green Tribunal could be copied also elsewhere; for example, a special court of the Supreme Court, that could be accessed directly in cases of mining crimes. That judicial arrangement was highly useful and effective in curbing mining illegalities in India (Kröger, Reference Kröger2020a). In the absence of such a state channel for resistance, working closely with pro bono green-tribunal expert lawyers in India, illegal gold-mining resistance has used other means in the Amazon. There is civil society and state actor resistance.

A key moment for resistance came in early 2022, when Alter do Chão, a major tourist destination, called the Caribbean of the Amazon for its clear waters and sandy beaches, had its waters badly muddied for the first time. This created a major societal and state response that led to curbing illegal alluvial gold mining upriver on the Tapajós. A local man, Claudio, explained this to me in 2022:

Consolidating Organized Crime in Amazon Gold Mining

Profit making by environmental crimes is less observed and harder to detect than other forms of criminal profit making, with only a fraction of the money-laundering cases investigated in Latin America being directly related to environmental crimes (Risso et al., Reference Risso, Quevedo, Brasil, Calderoni and Vallejo2023). Instituto Igarapé, a Brazilian research NGO, found that illegally mined gold is laundered in various ways. The laundering happens by paying bribes and simulation of gold production using mining companies and inactive areas as the supposed official origins of the gold money. In comparative terms, Peru has a more robust legislative and regulatory system than Brazil for identifying money laundering linked to illegal gold mining and other forms of environmental crime (Risso et al., Reference Risso, Quevedo, Brasil, Calderoni and Vallejo2023: 23). In Brazil there is a greater sense of impunity. For example, there is no legal gold mining in the state of Roraima, yet the state capital, Boa Vista, has a whole “street of gold” with dozens of jewelry and gold shops and securities distributors (called DTVM) that openly buy the illegally mined gold, without state interference, but with Central Bank licensing. Only DTVMs and cooperatives, licensed by the Central Bank, can buy gold.

In 2013, a year after Brazil’s environmental and forest protections were generally watered down by the new Forest Code in 2012, a new mining bill (Bill 12.844) made it the seller’s responsibility to testify that the gold is legal. The requirement is routinely circumvented by falsifying the origin documents so on paper the gold is coming from legal mines (McDermott et al., Reference McDermott, Ramírez and Robbins2023: 27). In 2023 the Supreme Court reconsidered this lack of regulation and Lula made a new Resolution (ANM No. 129) that obliges the gold buyers to prove the legality of gold they purchase (Doherty, Reference Doherty2023). This might make it easier for the state to intervene in the crucial role of securities distributors. The three biggest distributors in Brazil, FD’Gold, Carol DTVM, and OM DTVM, were sued in 2021 by the MPF for socioenvironmental damages worth over 10 billion reais. The Igarapé Report sees these distributors as key in organizing and running large gold-mining operations and organizing and laundering the illegal gold. However, an ICMBio official (interview in December 2023) was unsure that the 2023 Lula decree would substantially change anything. For more substantive changes, policy recommendations are needed, including the immediate recognition and approval of Indigenous territories being studied by FUNAI, putting a feasible upper limit to theoretical mining maximum in a concession, digitizing DTVM receipts, and putting national and international pressure on the Central Bank and Securities and Exchange Commission to demand proof of origin (Risso et al., Reference Risso, Sekula and Brasil2021). For example, in September 2020, FD’Gold bought about 2 kilograms of gold from Grota, who is the key suspected narcogarimpo organizer in southwestern Pará (Piran, Reference Piran2023). Grota is linked to PCC and, since 2018, his actions have focused on laundering drug money from the Itaituba region (Senra et al., Reference Senra, de Paula Batista, Molina, Pecora and Oliveira2023). Unlike in Roraima, in this region there are gold-mining concessions and legalized shops that will buy the gold. Itaituba has 772 issued titles for gold mining (41 percent of Brazil’s total). The titles under 500 hectare are issued by a municipality in Pará (which is an unconstitutional decision as deforesting activities should be licensed on the state level) and are frequently used to launder the gold from the Yanomami lands (Senra et al., Reference Senra, de Paula Batista, Molina, Pecora and Oliveira2023: 84).

In December 2023, Igor Silva, an ICMBio officer responsible for carrying out the inspection and policing of gold-mining intrusions inside conservation areas in the southwestern parts of Pará, explained to me that it would be essential to first update the registry of gold mines that are active and legal. Currently, the key practice for gold sellers to “prove” the origin of their gold is to fill in a paper document needed at the buying gold shop, where the seller declares the origin. Approximately 70 percent of the gold in the region is illegal according to Silva’s estimate. There are also legal (yet equally deforesting and destructive) informal gold-mining concessions given by municipalities in that region, which increased dramatically during the Bolsonaro government, as the Itaituba mayor and environmental secretary permitted a huge number of new permits, causing a boom in gold mining around the Tapajós Basin. Despite this high boom in municipal mining area titling, 92 percent of gold-mining sites in the Tapajós Basin are illegal, as was explained to me in December 2023 by Rodrigo Oliveira from the MPF, an analyst specializing in gold mining. There are legal concession areas, but looking at the satellite imagery, one can see that these legal mines have never been opened as there is not yet any evidence of mining there. Yet, these unopened legal mine sites are marked as the origin of the illegal gold. These redundant mines should be removed from the list of applicable mines for origin statement and the list should be digitized and put online. Igor argued that the decree during Lula government in 2023, which ordered the buyer to prove the origins, did not change anything, as the same shadow mine names are just used on the papers. The real focus should be on the higher levels, for example the banks and Internal Revenue Service, to whom taxes are paid when gold is sold in the shops. Thus, these institutions should have the best data on the flows of gold. However, governments are not very eager to touch the gold trade, even if illegal, because this gold export enriches the bank coffers and state export figures. The banks and governments argue that providing the required data would require breaking bank secrecy, but this is exactly what should be done in order to track the illegal gold.

The corruption extends also to Indigenous lands and within the upper echelons of the states. A part of the Indigenous community is participating in the mining sector by collecting fees from miners, getting other perks, or by mining themselves. In southwestern Pará, this rift between the mining and anti-extractivist Munduruku has led to attacks by garimpeiros and their Indigenous supporters against the Indigenous resistance and the state officials. This happened in 2021 after the Federal Police, IBAMA, and Armed Forces expedition to remove illegal miners from Munduruku lands (Limão, Reference Limão2021). At the request of the majority of the 14,000 Munduruku, IBAMA had tried to intervene in 2020 to reduce the drastically expanding violent gold mining on their lands. Unfortunately, the Minister of Environment, Ricardo Salles, interrupted the operation, not surprisingly, as he was suspected of transporting the garimpeiros by Airforce planes and leaking confidential state information to them, which only led to escalating conflict and destruction (Limão, Reference Limão2021).

Igor Silva from ICMBio said he had not found evidence in his garimpo visits in southwestern Pará on the narcos operating the mines. Rather, what he did find in the mining sites was an omnipresent trade and use of drugs, especially cocaine and marijuana. In addition, there was evidence of money laundering and investment in gold mining by drug criminals and the narcos were definitely using the gold mines’ airstrips as a key logistical network. However, in 2023, the idea that the drug traders were creating a greater presence and stronger links was still so new that more investigation was needed in order to establish that this was in fact the case. That gold mining and airstrip owners were linked to the drug-trafficking business was already well known to the regulators. Igor explained that the drug traffickers coming from Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru use “always small planes, because they have to fly lower to escape radars, and as they have a low range, they have to make sporadic landings in some locations. So, in the Amazon, the easiest way to make these landings is where there are these runways.” There are a lot of airstrips in southwestern Pará and they are mostly located in Indigenous lands or next to mining sites. Silva explained, “These airstrips have owners, or they belong to the [Indigenous] community.” In the case of mining, the airstrips “belong to the owner of the mine” and anyone landing who is not delivering mining goods “has to pay a percentage to the owner of the airstrip. Thus, it is very likely that there is a connection between trafficking and mining owners, so that they at least allow the passage of these aircraft that are loaded with toxic substances, to reach a capital destination, or Santarém, Manaus, or even Belém.”

The most notable and visible narco-gold miner in Pará is Heverton Soares, known as O Grota, The cave friend, and Garimpeiro. In 2021 he faced charges in three states for drug, gold and arms trafficking, criminal organization of a militia of military police, bank robberies, money laundering, and homicide. Despite these activities, he was still applauded by some for being a large and successful businessman in the Itaituba region (O Globo, 2021). According to a 2021 news report on the Federal Police Narcos Gold Operation, Soares’ business was to connect the criminal factions in the southeast to several other regions. He used a series of businesses, including illegal gold mines, ranches, stud farms, airstrips, and mining machinery and car parts selling companies to launder 30 million reais of drug-trafficking money. He and his pilot friend had been on the police radar since 2004, when he was suspected of owning tens of airstrips used to transport illegal gold and cocaine in the Amazon (Potter, Reference Potter2023). After nine months of hiding, Soares managed to win a legal claim in the absence of solid proof, reclaim his confiscated aircraft, and walk freely. However, the Federal Police consider that he is a leader of the narcogarimpo, organizing them and illegally moving about 1 billion reais between 2017 and 2020 in Pará (Potter, Reference Potter2023).

In fall 2023 Grota was operating ranches in Itaituba, passing thousands of heads of cattle, which Federal Police also suspected of being used for money laundering. He was free at the time as the Brazilian courts had not been able to decide since 2021 which of them should judge the case. This shows clearly how the complex and slow legal system allows for environmental crime to flourish and extend to several other illegal spheres.

The key thing denoting the term narcogarimpo seems to be the trafficking of gold and drugs by the same logistics, laundering drug money with the purchase of illegal gold via the regional gold shops and by expanding the gold-mining and related operations. There are many such narcogarimpeiros in the Amazon, who make use of the large number of clandestine airstrips for gold operations and drug trafficking. By September 2023, the police had arrested 225 people suspected of narcogarimpo and confiscated 235 aircraft. It is especially the ease by which money can be laundered in the illegal gold-mining value web that attracts these narcotraffickers. This extends to foreign machinery companies that seemingly do not worry that they are making money by selling their machines to whomever and for whatever purpose. For example, according to the Federal Police, Grota paid in cash at the Hyundai offices in São Paulo to purchase heavy machinery destined for use by illegal gold miners. This was in addition to paying the BMG Hyundai company 300 million reais for an aircraft (Piran, Reference Piran2023). Another reason for the marriage of the illegal gold and drug businesses is the flexibility to invest the drug money in gold when cocaine prices go down. This happened in 2020 due to overproduction, which led to a major push toward narcogarimpo according to experts (Potter, Reference Potter2023).

A senior IBAMA officer operating in Yanomami lands said that in November 2023 they were just starting to explore how narcos are connected to gold mining and why it is hard to study this shift:

However, Igor, the environmental policeperson from ICMBio, argued that there is a marked difference between the southwest of Pará and Roraima, in terms of the use of heavy guns by miners against Federal Police and IBAMA officers. This difference made him suspect that the garimpeiros in Roraima might be linked to organized crime, as “this type of weaponry is generally with criminal factions.” The presence of what he called “narcoterrorists” in nearby Colombia might be a spillover effect of more civil war-type resource conflicts, with use of heavy arms and warlike conflicts. He shared that in Tapajós, he had not personally experienced miners shooting back but explained that the likelihood of this had been growing in the past years: “What called my attention was that some were with many guns, guns that we do not see in the garimpos of Tapajós.… This caught my attention due to the caliber of the weapons, the carrying of the weapons and this attitude of [gold miners] offering resistance [by shooting] to the activities we [environmental police] carry out in the field.”

Based on these accounts it is clear that much more research is needed on the intersectorial consolidation of a narco-gold mining in the Amazon, the changing characters of both gold mining and the drug trade, and the efforts to curb this process. Many solutions have been tried and suggested to curb gold and other linked varieties of Amazon deforestation; the next section discusses these in more detail.

Solutions

Many solutions for curtailing deforestation have been suggested and in fact some have been implemented since 2023, which is significant because this is a crucial moment for the survival of the forest. Apart from resistance, other measures are also being taken by the government and state actors. I will discuss in this section the politics of these proposed and ongoing attempts at finding a solution to these complex problems.

Earlier, I discussed how rural and environmental registration are key tools for land grabbers, as their misuse of these allows them to proceed with deforestation as their illegal system is not curbed. To overcome the rampant illegalities caused by CAR misusage, the Lula government announced in April 2023 that it will try to designate the nondesignated public lands (terras devolutas) as soon as possible, as this is the category of lands most readily available for land grabbers. According to Moraes and Alves (Reference Moraes and Alves2023), the federal government sought to advance quickly in their allocation of vacant lands, especially public forests that are not yet designated. The lack of inspection or insufficient inspection, combined with the unclear or nonexistent allocation of these public lands to different user groups, creates an environment conducive to land grabbing, as the invaders hope that the public authorities will grant amnesty for their crimes and legalize the properties that they are using. In April 2023, the Lula government explained that the land allocation process would consider different social demands, such as Indigenous territories, Quilombola territories, and areas of high biodiversity or exceptional landscapes, while the remaining areas could be transformed into national forests for sustainable forest management, including timber and nontimber products, or used to implement land reform based on agroforestry systems (Moraes & Alves, Reference Moraes and Alves2023). However, in practice, the heavily rural caucus and Bolsonaro-supporting Congress has made achieving these progressive aims much more difficult. For example, the Marco Temporal legislation would seriously hinder the possibilities to recognize and create Indigenous territories.

To combat organized crime, Brazil’s justice and prison system structure should be urgently changed to allow the prosecutors and judges to uphold the rule of law in Brazil. A key problem in the justice system, argued Federal Prosecutor Felicio Pontes, is that all the judges he works with have a caseload of approximately 12,000 cases. This is due to the justice being “very cheap” to access in Brazil, “so there are a lot of cases for few judges, and this makes the cases advancing very slowly, not in the speed they should run.” This has had extremely serious consequences, as people are left in the prisons for years to wait for trial, based on feeble charges. While in prisons, which are basically recruitment and training grounds for the powerful organized crime groups, principally PCC and Comando Vermelho, the inmates become part of these shadow state groups whose actions are now challenging the whole state apparatus, including in environmental protection.

Meanwhile, as justice is slow, the police have adopted other measures. Geisel, a member of the Federal Police specializing in deforestation forensics, explained to me in 2019 that police burning the illegal deforestation equipment works because it increases the risks and costs of the illegal business. The people behind criminal activities also use business logic, he argued. Geisel reasoned that, for them, losing machines worth 200,000 euros or more is a more important motivation to think twice about their activities than the actual laws or other punishments. Brazil’s jails are largely full of favela-living young Afro-Brazilian and Nordestino-origin men charged for petty crimes. But jailing rural pistoleiros, grileiros, and environmental criminals is very difficult in Brazil, Geisel shared. Therefore, he saw that increasing the costs of criminal deforesting operations is most effective in this setting, because it makes the business more costly, less profitable, and riskier. A key policy measure to achieve this would be to increase the available budget and police personnel for inspections.

However, the causes of Amazon deforestation cannot be attributed primarily to the lack of inspection and policing, but to the simultaneous passing of laws that drive, open loopholes, and institutionalize deforesting land theft, argue Torres, M. et al. (Reference Torres, Doblas and Alarcon2017), based on their extensive study of southwestern Pará. In their book titled Dono é quem desmatama (Dono Is Who Deforests), the title referring to the words of an illegal land grabber, Torres, M. et al. (Reference Torres, Doblas and Alarcon2017) argue that some of the laws served deforesting land theft, for example Laws number 11.952/2009 (Tenure Regularization in the Legal Amazon by the Terra Legal Program) and nº 12.641/2012 (the New Forest Code). The 2009 Terra Legal program reversed the goal of the federal prosecutors, who, since 2006, had been trying to retake the illegally grabbed lands in the Amazon, but whose work was reversed by the parliament and the PT-led regime in 2009. Through the Terra Legal program the government enabled deforestation by legalizing the land claims of even those who had used extreme violence, slave labor, and implemented large-scale environmental devastation. M. Torres et al. (Reference Torres, Fagundes, Figueiredo and Tredezini2017: xix) point out that in the area impacted by the program 6 percent of the beneficiaries held over 63 percent of the land. In addition, M. Torres et al. (Reference Torres, Fagundes, Figueiredo and Tredezini2017) argue that due to the chaotic and incompetent manner in which the program was extended and applied it ended up benefiting the largest land robbers. Impunity is the key here, because deforesting land theft is one of the key ways of de facto becoming a landholder, “Even if the State may emit millionaire fines (very rarely paid) and, more rarely, order imprisonments, the retaking of illegally appropriated public lands is never discussed” (Torres, M. et al., Reference Torres, Doblas and Alarcon2017: xvi).Footnote ¹ Thus, the decades by the PT governments were a mixed bag and there is still too little focus on the systemic quality of illegal land grabbing, as driven and enabled by the dominant regional and national political economy.

The command-and-control structure and operations created during Lula’s reign in the 2000s have often been framed as key explanations for diminished Amazon deforestation. Geisel disagreed with this claim, arguing that most important was the political decision to create large new conservation areas and units. This significantly raised the costs and barriers of accessing new protected forest areas and made it less feasible for the land grabbers to think that they could eventually legalize the grabbed land. However, as M. Torres et al. (Reference Torres, Fagundes, Figueiredo and Tredezini2017: 185) note, while the creation of many large conservation units along the BR-163 during the PT terms did make it unviable to legalize the stolen land, and therefore decreased the expanse of this activity, which is the key deforesting RDPE in southwest Pará, after this the conservation areas were targeted more vehemently by illegal loggers, miners, and other forms of degradation. Therefore, degradation by logging increased, while deforestation in the area decreased, giving a wrong impression that the issue was resolved. Deforestation started to increase again earnestly when the Temer and especially Bolsonaro government declared that they would degazette conservation and relax their access rules, which in practice meant legalizing burned and grabbed deforested pasture areas for the benefit of land grabbers. Bolsonaro made the actions of IBAMA, ICMBio, and other environmental policing forces practically impossible, for example by constantly changing IBAMA’s director of inspections (19 times), which in effect created a chaotic setting without regulation, which amounted to an attack on the good parts of the state (Gonçalves Pereira, Reference Gonçalves Pereira2022). However, Bolsonaro could not dismantle the created conservation areas so easily, although he stopped the creation of new ones. The key is therefore to create more socioenvironmental set-aside zones by bottom-up political processes and decisions.

Upholding the rule of law is also important. In November 2023, I interviewed a senior IBAMA officer involved in environmental policing and heavy crackdowns on environmental criminals all over Brazil, including the Yanomami lands dotted with gold miners in Roraima. He told me that the key reason why during 2023 deforestation rates started going down was the increased inspections. He did not think that any of Lula’s actions were particularly effective. He also offered a very important comparative note on where most attention needs to be placed:

This is a key point to be considered when looking at the political strategies to curb deforestation and where to place resources. Of course, the creation of conservation areas also helps, but as my comparative research shows, if those conservation areas are next to new infrastructure (like the BR-163 and Interoceanic Highway, Belo Monte), and the areas do not have very active and nonmodernist resistance organizations, the pressure of expanding existing RDPEs is too strong to retain the forest cover. Thus, the first order should be the resistance to key investment and infrastructure projects, and deforesting RDPEs, by cutting their subsidies, and enabling legal frameworks and incomes based on allowing exports of commodities. However, there are many signals that the message about avoiding (neo)developmentalism and extractivism had not been fully integrated by the PT and its allies by 2023 (Fernandes et al., Reference Fernandes, Fernandes and Fearnside2023). For example, there is new infrastructure funding from the BRICs bank, whose president is Dilma Rousseff, the continued financing of deforesting projects by Banco do Brasil and BNDES, and Lulás support of dam building and amnesty for illegal land grabbers in the Amazon public forests. There should be active resistance to further expansion of the clout and extension of these systems on top of forests. A key is to avoid large infrastructural and extractive investment projects, such as dams, highways, ports, railroads, open-pit mines, and mining concession areas. According to Federal Prosecutor Felicio Pontes (interview, December 2023), large projects, especially the Belo Monte Dam, are the key causes that explain why the municipalities next to them have the highest rates of deforestation. According to Pontes, who is specialized in protecting the rule of law regarding large investment projects in the Amazon, the deforestation and other negative impacts continue for a long time after the projects have been concluded, sometimes even for decades; for example, opening huge swathes of forests for ranching and land grabbing.

Farm expansion is logistically enabled and pushed by illegal logging as it creates access roads and diminishes the amount of wood, making further forest cutting and burning for pasture less costly and easier. Open-pit mining destroys the forest and rivers for a much longer time than pastures or logging: The forest will not grow back in open-pit mining areas and the river will be destroyed. Therefore, open-pit mining deforestation is qualitatively very bad, among the worst. Fresh pasture with trees is comparatively not as bad as mining, because these lands can be reforested with natural trees more easily, or they grow back by themselves if there is another forest area within 500 meters. However, if an area has been used for nonforest activities, especially extensive soybean plantations, for a long time it can be very difficult for the forest to naturally regrow.

To quell the power of deforestation RDPEs, a key focus should be on curbing the international trade of deforesting commodities. The senior IBAMA officer I interviewed in November 2023 told me that boycotts deeply confound the logic of commodity production. The boycott would need to be “serious,” meaning that production could not be hidden by cheating maneuvers, as has happened with Amazon beef restrictions:

The points raised by the IBAMA officer suggest that if a serious boycott is to be considered, then a whole country, or a trade zone, including countries and areas where the commodities can be leaked, should be banned from exporting the potentially deforesting product. Otherwise, new methods will be found by the RDPE to circumvent and launder the origins of the commodities.

In sum, it is essential to curb the power of deforesting RDPEs in fragile forest areas that are approaching their tipping points, such as the Amazon. In these areas, deforesting commodities, such as soy and gold, or their transport, should simply not be allowed. While unlikely at the highest political levels, this does not mean that in the real world of policymaking different and smaller steps in that direction could not begin to help the situation.

From the viewpoint of the RDPE theory, the formalization and certification attempts to deal with illegal deforesting activities are futile if the power of the RDPE as the deeper cause of deforestation is not also tackled. This should happen at the regional, national, and international levels – targeting both political and economic power. Regarding the economy, a way to approach this would be to curb the financing and export possibilities, infrastructure, and machinery and technology availability, while providing alternative sustainable economic activities to locals. To take an example from gold, it would be especially impactful to ban United States-based and other gold refineries from buying gold from Latin American and other drug-traffic-infused gold production and trade settings (see Netflix, 2020).

On the political side, effective ways to curtail power, in the light of the RDPE theory, would be to provide more power for prosecutors and autonomous police forces to tackle the widespread corruption. Some strategic approaches could be making it impossible and illegal, or at least more challenging, to finance political campaigns with the proceeds of illegal deforestation. Additionally, the key political culprits could be imprisoned. Lastly, it is important in the anti-extractivist sense that effective localized resistance to deforestation should be built. This can be done by bottom-up organizing, politicizing, protesting, networking, and state coproduction and embedding while retaining autonomy. These actions are what foster the crucial contentious agency and consolidate democracy for grassroots economic and territorial decision-making (Kröger, Reference Kröger2013a; Reference Kröger2020a).

Chapters 8–10 will discuss the role of industrial forestry – the pulp, paper, and energywood sectors – in driving clearcutting in Finland. This allows a deeper comparative analysis of extractivist RDPEs to be made globally, across varying contexts and polities.