By Lauren Keane

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, December 19, 2009

In Amazonian gold rush, enforcement is elusive The price of gold has drawn miners to Madre de Dios, a department of southeastern Peru. But deforestation and use of mercury in the mining have created and environmental hazard for the surrounding rainforest. The Peruvian government is trying to crack down, but enforcement is difficult in the vast jungle of the Amazon. Video

PUERTO MALDONADO, PERU — Boriam Valera has seen his future. It shimmers — and sells for more than $1,100 an ounce.

The tousled 30-year-old works a homemade gold-mining dredge along the banks of the Tambopata River, a tributary of the Amazon, keeping watch over a sluice box that catches gold flecks in the slurry sucked up from the river bottom.

The price of gold has increased 50 percent in the past two years and tripled over the past five, as global investors look to hedge against a falling dollar. Gold hit historic highs this month. That surge has spurred a new Amazon gold rush, with illegal miners pouring into the region and setting up camp along riverbanks, highways and footpaths reaching deep into the rain forest of the Peruvian Amazon.

The influx threatens to overwhelm the region, which is home to some of the Amazon’s most valuable nature reserves, several indigenous groups thought to have had no outside contact, and more bird and butterfly species than anywhere else on the planet. Giant swaths of forest are gone, rivers have been diverted, and mercury used to separate gold from sediment has begun to poison downstream communities. Mining has turned an area the size of Washington into muddy wasteland and threatens an area at least 10 times that large. Continue reading Rising prices spark a new gold rush in Peruvian Amazon →