Illegal gold miners are now operating very close to the second-tallest tree in the Amazon Rainforest, Mongabay’s Fernanda Wenzel reported in April.
Six giant trees, including a red angelim (Dinizia excelsa) that stands 85 meters (279 feet) tall, are found inside the Iratapuru River Sustainable Development Reserve in Brazil’s Amapá state. Despite the area’s protected status, gold miners are illegally operating just a kilometer (0.6 miles) away, the Amapá state public ministry reported.
“The expansion of garimpos [gold mines] at this rate is something new,” said Marcelo Moreira, a prosecutor from the Amapá public ministry. In October 2024, the ministry recommended that the state government create a protected area within a 1-km radius around each giant tree.
Gold mining in Amapá was previously less intensive compared to neighboring Amazonian states like Pará and Roraima. But with the government cracking down on illegal mining in the latter states, miners, or garimpeiros, have moved into Amapá in recent years, Wenzel wrote.
More than 20,000 garimpeiros were forced out of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in Roraima following government raids that began in 2023. A similar exodus appears to have occurred following raids in the Munduruku Indigenous Territory in Pará in late 2024.
“[Garimpeiros] noticed that in Amapá the inspections weren’t hitting so hard yet and rushed here,” a gold trader currently based in Amapá, who asked for anonymity for fear of backlash, told Wenzel. The trader said that miners arrived at Amapá through word of mouth, even bringing their backhoes with them.
Amapá has a history of artisanal mining, but Moreira told Mongabay the newcomers are bringing in more money and heavier machinery. “Each of these machines degrades at least 100 meters [330 ft] a day. They also use a lot more mercury,” the prosecutor said.
During heavy rains in February, a dam holding mining waste collapsed near the Cupixi and Araguari rivers, located near the Amazon’s giant trees.
Wenzel reported that rising gold prices due to global economic volatility and U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war is also likely incentivizing illegal miners to pursue riskier and pricier operations deeper in the Amazon.
Moreira said that even though the mine near Amapá’s giant angelim is only accessible by helicopter or a three-day boat ride, miners still take heavy machinery with them, dismantling a bulldozer to bring it across the river and then reassembling it at the mine site.
“The high [gold] prices mean that the surplus earned from mining is invested in new areas, machinery, airplanes, and helicopters,” Luiz Jardim de Moraes Wanderley, a geography professor at Brazil’s Fluminense Federal University, told Wenzel.
Indigenous groups say they fear the illegal mining operations will encroach onto their lands and contaminate the rivers.
Read the full story by Fernanda Wenzel here.
Banner image of the Amazon’s second-largest tree in Brazil’s Amapá state. Image courtesy of João de Matos Filho/Prodemac.
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