Fast and Furious Jungle Edition

Jungle

A gold rush is a fast and furious thing. This stampede to the Brazilian jungle was triggered by nothing more than “rumors that someone had found gold there.” By the time the news hit the street, it was already too late for everyone but the prospecting suppliers. When officials finally stop finger pointing and do something about the “illegal mining operation,” it will be over. The tricky part is to get in first, then get out with the goods. You have to move fast or you’ll get bushwhacked by banditos, shot by Federales, or lose your head to a machete. If you’re really unlucky, you might get stuck with a blow dart and tossed in some cannibal’s cook-pot.

Gold in that thar jungle

The jungle has become the latest climate change battleground. “We counted no less than 300 rafts. They’ve been there at least two weeks and the government has done nothing.” Environmentalists are going spastic.

Greenpeace Brazil activist Danicley Aguiar hired a plane to see for himself how extensive the illegal Madeira River mining operation is. He was horrified. “It’s a free-for-all,” he declared.

So many miners have gathered on one of the Amazon River’s largest tributaries they’re calling it “a floating neighborhood.” Slowly drifting downstream, miners aboard the makeshift rafts equipped with pumps – and in at least one case a satellite dish, vacuum the riverbed for gold.

Clumps of rafts are moored together in lines stretching from bank to bank across the jungle river. All it took was a single rumor. “They’re making a gram of gold an hour down there,” one prospector claims in an audio recording obtained by the Estado de São Paulo newspaper.

Aguilar still hasn’t stopped ranting over what he saw in his flyover. “There are no rules,” he gasped. “It’s as if we’re living in Mad Max.” He’s been “working in the Amazon for 25 years. I was born here and I’ve seen many terrible things: so much destruction, so much deforestation, so many illegal mines.” Yet, nothing like this.

Hundreds of rafts “hoovering up the Madeira’s riverbed.” Located near the jungle towns of Autazes and Nova Olinda do Norte, He’s “seen this kind of thing before in other places – but not on this scale.”

A condominium of mining dredges

The “vast flotilla” operation has been described in the press as being “like a condominium of mining dredges.” So large it seems to be “occupying pretty much the whole river.”

It leaked to the press when the left-wing COP26 climate change conference was going on. The jungle river flows from Bolivia through the Amazon in Brazil and into the Amazon river. That makes it an international affair.

Liberal Brazilians are furious with their Right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. Not only did he blow off the Glasgow summit altogether, he backs the jungle miners. He actually dares to back “the wildcat garimpeiros who trawl the Amazon’s rivers and rainforests for gold.”

Whale huggers insist that as “many as 20,0000 garimpeiros are believed to be operating within the supposedly protected Yanomami indigenous reserve in Roraima, one of nine states that makes up the Brazilian Amazon.”

According to what passes for an environmental protection agency in Brazil, “the illegal dredging on the Madeira river was the responsibility of Amazonas state and its environmental agency.” Deep in the jungle, the Instituto de Protecao Ambiental do Amazonas points the finger back at the federal government.

They “instructed state security forces to act, but insisted the river falls under federal jurisdiction and enforcement should be run by the federal police and the National Mining Agency.” By the time troops hack their way to the illegal operation, it will be gone.

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