- Following regulatory changes and heavier enforcement of the gold trade, the Amazonian municipality of Itaituba, notorious as Brazil’s illegal gold capital, is struggling to deal with the new restrictions.
- Yet a series of raids and destruction of mining equipment hasn’t fazed the illegal miners, known as garimpeiros, who have simply picked themselves back up again and started working to resume their operations.
- The crackdown on illegal gold and its environmental destruction has outraged the garimpeiros, who accuse the government of preventing them from working in a region historically dedicated to gold extraction.
ITAITUBA, Brazil — José Maria Silva de Souza starts preparations early. Better known as Zé Maria, he has many stops to make before heading to his gold mine. A stop at the supermarket to buy groceries, another at the gas station. At another point, four workers climb into the back of his truck. A bit farther on, a woman who works as a cook also joins the team. Before 11 a.m., the loaded white truck is flying at almost 100 kilometers per hour (60 miles per hour) over a muddy dirt road, making it hard for our car to keep up.
Zé Maria is in a rush. Since federal environmental agents burned two of his backhoes a few weeks ago, his mines have stopped working — and he’s losing money. “Here we live off mining, right?” the strong 55-year-old, whose gray beard contrasts against his black skin, told Mongabay. “And the government is right on top of us, and we can’t work.”
After driving more than 90 km (56 mi), we leave the cars by the side of the road and walk around 30 meters (100 feet) to the margins of the forest. In the middle of the trees, a scorched machine standing 3 m (10 ft) high seems strangely out of place. “We brought it here to try to hide it,” Zé Maria says.
Zé Maria’s backhoe costs up to 1.5 million reais ($263,000). In the face of the loss, he’s brought his men to try to salvage at least some parts of it. “Then I can use about 30,000 or 40,000 reais [$5,300 or $7,000] worth of it,” he says while the workers climb the vehicle searching for any surviving parts.
A second group of employees is in another of Zé Maria’s mines, a few kilometers away, trying to install a tatuzão. This setup, whose name translates to “big armadillo,” consists of a massive pump and hose, spraying a high-pressure jet of water to strip down the banks of the river in search of gold.
It’s less efficient than a backhoe, but tatuzão is the fallback Zé Maria has to rely on to keep his mines running while he scrambles to get new equipment: “I’m not thinking of giving up.”
Zé Maria’s gold mines lie around the Transgarimpeira road, named after the word garimpo — wildcat mining that isn’t subject to the same rigorous environmental requirements as large-scale commercial mines. “It is the gold road,” Guilherme Alcarás de Góes, from ICMBio, Brazil’s federal agency for conservation areas, tells Mongabay.
The road is located in Itaituba, a municipality in the Amazonian state of Pará. Itaituba is more than 40 times the size of São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous city, and is known as the country’s illegal gold capital. It accounts for 16% of all mined areas in Brazil and 75% of all the illegal gold produced in the country, according to a report from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Itaituba is also at the heart of most of the schemes uncovered by authorities to launder illegal gold into the legitimate gold trade.
Stretching 190 km (118 mi), the Transgarimpeira is the nerve center of Itaituba’s gold mining industry. It lies 300 km (186 miles) from the Itaituba municipal center, crossing a reserve designated in the 1980s for artisanal mining. More than 40 years later, however, the rudimentary tools intended for use here have been replaced by expensive machinery like the ones used by Zé Maria, amplifying the environmental damage wrought by mining. According to experts, a backhoe can do in one day what three men using a tatuzão would take 40 days to do.
At the same time, several conservation units were created over the mining reserve, increasing clashes between garimpeiros and environmental agents.
“Most garimpos here are illegal,” says Góes when we meet him at a large camp settled by a federal task force at the margins of the Transgarimpeira to tackle environmental crimes in the region. “And we’re not talking about small garimpos, but garimpos of 40 hectares, 30 hectares [100-74 acres].”
The agents had arrived 15 days before, in an unprecedented offensive against illegal gold mines in the Tapajós Environmental Protection Area (APA Tapajós). Garimpos are allowed in this kind of conservation unit, but only when licensed.
Zé Maria’s backhoes were set on fire during one of these raids, following a decree stating that machinery used in illegal mining may be destroyed if agents don’t have the means to move them elsewhere. “These machines are located in hard-to-reach places. Our only alternative is to disable them,” Góes says.
This is the first time ICMBio has set up a camp on the Transgarimpeira. For security reasons, agents carrying out previous raids would come and go by helicopter. The raids, which involved 27 police officers, are part of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s offensive against illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon.
According to IBAMA, the federal environmental agency, inspectors destroyed 150 backhoes and 600 dredgers, which churn up the riverbed in search of gold, in 2023, Lula’s first year in office. As a result, deforestation linked to garimpos in the Amazon plummeted by 30% compared to 2022.
The federal government also changed regulations on the gold trade, making it harder for smugglers to launder illegal gold. Electronic invoices became mandatory for gold commerce. DTVMs, a group of financial institutions that are the only ones authorized to trade gold in Brazil, lost their “good faith” prerogative, a legal provision that exempted them from having to verify the origin of the metal.
The new regulations, in combination with major raids against DTVMs suspected of involvement in laundering gold, made these official buyers step away from the local gold market, since much of the metal traded in the region comes from illegal mines. The withdrawal of the DTVMs left a vacuum in Itaituba, quickly replaced by illegal traders—; according to experts, Brazil has now gone from being a gold-laundering hub to a supplier of illegal gold to other countries.
“We’re going through a transition,” Gustavo Geiser, a forensics expert with the Federal Police, tells Mongabay at his office in Santarém, a municipality north of Itaituba. “And I still don’t know what the new balance point will be. But you really have to be tough in this transition period for it to happen. And then the market will have to regulate itself.”
The authorities’ new approach sparked a wave of outrage in Itaituba’s mining areas, peaking at the end of April when dozens of people spent 10 days protesting on the Transgarimpeira.
“[Agents]came onto my property, burned my excavator, and broke everything with no mercy,” mine owner Carlos Mendes Moares told Mongabay during the rally.
“The garimpeiro doesn’t even carry a gun,” Manuel Edilson Santos, another mining entrepreneur, told Mongabay. “That’s why the government does what it wants. It invades, humiliates us, and says we are bandits.”
From the mud to the centers of power
“It’s the dead man’s motorcade,” a 10-year-old girl explains calmly as a cacophony of horns interrupts our interview with her father in the family’s living room. It’s our first day in the village of Creporizão, and a garimpeiro has just died of a snakebite.
He was leaving the muddy waters of the mine after a long day of work when the snake bit him on the leg. By the time he was brought to Itaituba’s hospital, nearly 500 km (310 miles) away, he was already dead. More than a sign of mourning, the long queue of motorbikes and cars crawling down the street is a protest against the precarious access to health care in Creporizão, a village of 6,000 people located at the far end of the Transgarimpeira.
The girl’s father, Edézio Fernandes de Araújo Filho, had also been “offended” by a snake, as people in this part of the Amazon call it. That accident happened years ago when he was working in a gold mine in the neighboring country of Suriname. Araújo Filho almost died, and the experience was a life changer.
“I became an evangelical, accepted Jesus, and quit mining,” he tells Mongabay. Even so, Araújo Filho has never distanced himself from garimpos. The activity is in the family’s blood, starting with his father, one of the pioneers in the Transgarimpeira region. “I feel like a garimpeiro. Many people even call me the garimpeiro’s pastor, because usually I preach in garimpo areas.”
Creporizão, like the other villages along the road, is a currutela, an old expression still applied to communities born near the gold mines. “In the old times, the garimpeiros spent months and months working [in the mines]. When they got their money, they would go to the currutela,” Araújo Filho says. “It was a place for fun, where there was cachaça [sugarcane liquor], women, cabarets.”
Our first sight of Creporizão, on a sunny Sunday at the end of April, is more depressing than festive, and not just because of the recent death. In one of the village’s main streets, dozens of men have gathered in front of three or four bars, listening to music and drinking beer in the early afternoon heat. According to residents, days like these often end with some man being stabbed in the middle of the street.
As the sun sets, however, the village is taken over by families — women, men and children — wearing their best clothes to go to church or out to a barbecue meal at the restaurant. “Today, Creporizão has become a family currutela. There’s a school, a health center. People on the outside think it doesn’t exist here, but it does,” Araújo Filho says.
In fact, Creporizão is as busy with shops and services as other small towns in Pará, with its own boutiques, bakeries, hotels and beauty salons. But without the money from gold (mostly illegal), none of them would exist. “Gold boosts trade in general,” Araújo Filho says, complaining the village has been experiencing a crisis since the arrival of ICMBio. “If you walk around Creporizão today, you’ll see several businesses closed.”
A brand-new square, with yards and sports courts, is being built in the upper part of the city. At the front of the construction site, a big sign credits Wescley Tomaz, a member of the Pará state legislature, with sourcing the funds to pay for the structure.
Born in the village and the son of garimpeiros, Tomaz is one of the leading spokespersons for the gold producers. “In Itaituba, seven out of 10 homes you visit have a direct link to mining,” he tells Mongabay at his office in the Itaituba municipal center. “I’m talking about more than 200,000 people who live in a region that has no other source of income except mineral activity.”
Tomaz is running in October’s municipal elections alongside 58 other candidates who openly declare themselves garimpeiros. He wants to be the next mayor of Itaituba, replacing the controversial garimpo owner Valmir Climaco, targeted by the Federal Police in 2019 when nearly 600 kilograms (1,300 pounds) of cocaine were found at one of his farms.
Elegant and resourceful, Tomaz is a well-finished example of the outreach of garimpo influence: with its roots firmly sunk in the muddy waters, it stretches through dozens of currutelas like Creporizão and large urban centers like Itaituba before reaching the country’s central cores of power.
Alongside other politicians, like Senator Zequinha Marinho and federal legislator Éder Mauro, who back the garimpeiros’ agenda in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, Tomaz vocalizes the main arguments in favor of the sector.
These include the anger over the creation of conservation units like APA Tapajós, designated during Lula’s first term as president in 2006. Another common complaint is the alleged difficulty in regularizing mining sites with government agencies. “The whole problem of illegal mining and environmental crime is the federal government’s fault. Because what is irregular can be made regular,” Tomaz says.
Regularizing a garimpo, which is essentially changing its status from illegal to legal, requires authorization from the National Mining Agency and an environmental license in which the gold miner commits to remediating the environmental damage caused by the activity. According to ICMBio’s Góes, mine owners along the Transgarimpeira have been told several times about the need to legalize their areas.
“People would rather buy a million reais [$175,000] worth of machinery and start working, at the risk of losing the machinery due to lack of a license, than invest 50,000 reais [$8,800] to get a license in about six months,” he says.
Yet some garimpos can’t be regularized, such as those located within Indigenous territories or fully protected conservation units, where mining is forbidden outright.
Money and mercury
A mine like Zé Maria’s employs around seven people: five garimpeiros, a backhoe operator, and a cook. Each one earns a percentage of the extracted gold. “They’re freelancers, so to speak,” says Geiser, the Federal Police officer. “At the end of each cycle, they weigh and divide the gold.” The garimpeiros who do the hardest part of the job get from 14% to 16% each.
Edvaldo Pereira dos Santos, 54, works on eucalyptus plantations in the neighboring Tocantins state, but has taken a few months off to make some money in Itaituba’s gold mines. “The service is not good,” he tells Mongabay as he fixes a part of the tatuzão in temperatures exceeding 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit). “But that’s where you sometimes earn money faster.” Around us, broken trunks of felled trees poke through the muddy water of what once was a healthy river.
“I have no doubt that the garimpeiro is a hard worker. Mining is a difficult, laborious activity, and you have to have a lot of guts to work on it,” Geiser says.
In a country of brutal inequalities, gold mining is behind impressive stories of social rise. Rosimeire Gomes de Souza came to a garimpo for the first time at the age of 14. Carrying her baby child and abandoned by her husband, she soon started “tinkering with machinery,” as she puts it. Now, at 45, Souza owns million-reais backhoes and runs her own mines. “I owe everything I have to garimpo.”
Maria Aldenora Azevedo Rodrigues has a similar story. Also a single mother, she lived in the Itaituba municipal center and worked as a cleaner, earning 80 reais ($14) a month. “I often stopped eating to feed my son,” she tells Mongabay. At 21, Rodrigues started working as a cook at a garimpo, earning around 4,000 reais ($700) monthly.
“After I came to the garimpo, I raised my son, bought my own clothes, wore jewelry, perfume, shoes, you know?” she says. “The garimpo was my father and mother.”
But not everyone has the same luck. In rural Creporizão and urban Itaituba alike, it’s common to see garimpeiros in precarious situations wandering on the streets. “There are also a lot of women, right? There’s a lot of temptation,” says Santos, the eucalyptus worker, referring to garimpeiros who spend much of their money on prostitutes and partying. Besides alcohol, the abuse of drugs like crack and cocaine has been growing among garimpeiros, locals tell Mongabay.
“It’s difficult to understand this part of the income that the garimpo generates and the accumulation that the garimpo doesn’t generate,” Geiser says. “They earn, but they spend. And it’s their personal choice, which is not for us to judge.”
While the earnings from the gold mines are a matter of individual nature, their impacts are shared across society — especially among the nearby traditional communities.
In what’s known as alluvial mining, machines like backhoes and tatuzões are used to strip away all the ground surface of riverbanks to expose the lower soil layers where the gold is. “All the recovery capacity of that area is lost,” ICMBio’s Góes says. “It’s different from what happens in an area that has been cleared by clear-cutting to establish livestock or agriculture, where there has been no deep movement of the soil.”
The other method of gold extraction involves dredgers, floating structures that churn up the river beds in search of gold. “The dredger has an arm that goes straight to the bottom of the riverbed. At the end of this arm, there is a crown that rotates to stir up all that sand,” Góes says. “It’s impossible to recover [from] the impact of a dredger.”
Less visible is the effect of mercury, a toxic element used to separate the gold from the ore. It ends up contaminating the water and the fish, which are fundamental to the sustenance of many Indigenous and riverine communities.
Mercury contamination in adults may cause symptoms like trembling, weakness and memory loss. The substance can also pass from a pregnant woman to her unborn child, and the baby may be born with rare neurological syndromes such as cerebral palsy. In less severe cases, the child may experience delays in neurological development, resulting in lifelong learning difficulties.
Nearly three-quarters of the mercury used in garimpos is smuggled into Brazil, according to a report by the Escolhas Institute, which advocates for sustainable development of natural resources. IBAMA, the environmental agency, puts the figure even higher: it tells Mongabay that essentially all mines in Brazil use illegal mercury.
“It’s an activity that needs to be highly regulated, and most of the garimpeiros find it very difficult to comply with the legislation,” Geiser says. “It’s a difficult conflict, isn’t it? But the role of the state is to ensure that the law is complied with.”
Zé Maria’s rush to get his mines back on track, however, shows that the garimpeiros don’t give up easily. “There is no more stubborn person than a garimpeiro. No one is going to stop them,” says Araújo Filho, the pastor and former miner. “They will continue to insist on what gives them food because everyone has the right to fight for their livelihood.”
Banner image: Each gold mine employs around seven people, including the garimpeiros, the cook and the backhoe operator. Image by Fernando Martinho.
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