They came onto my property and broke everything.

My miners had no right to say anything.

They made them sit there and watch it burn, without even being able to put out the fire. No mercy.

Our focus is to curb these illegal mining activities.

And since we set foot here, installed our camp and started operating, the rates have practically come down to zero.

We’ll have to make an even greater effort, use all the power that the public apparatus can have,

because it’s not possible that we can lose the war to illegal mining.

Here, Itaituba is known as the city of nuggets, the city of gold.

When people said, “Let’s go to Itaituba”, they came to the mines. But Itaituba is the headquarters.

The Tapajós has a lot of gold, in this river, throughout the riverbed there is gold.

This is the famous Tapajós gold.

This piece weighs 15.5 grams, valued at about 7,000 reais ($1,250).

The economy here is based on gold and mining.

We need it, like the miner produces gold, brings it to the city, to sell his gold. The economy improves.

But with this [economic] crisis…

You can even look here, the avenue.

The crisis hurts me, it hurts a pharmacist, anyone who sells a cellphone. You can look: everything stopped.

Everything depends on gold.

We are in Itaituba, in the southwest of the state of Pará, with a population of approximately 120,000 people…

…where the main activity is, has been and will be for some time mineral extraction,

most strongly in the extraction of gold.

And Itaituba concentrated on offering support services for mining activities.

It is the main place for supplying materials for mining, whether food, machinery, fuel, etc.,

and also for purchasing gold. So Itaituba concentrates a large part of the buyers of this gold from mining.

It developed a lot from the ‘70s and ’80s onward and has always been an extractivist region.

Mining was a wonderful thing, it was excellent.

It was kilos and kilos of gold. All of it manual, all of it with the machete, ax, all of it with by panning,

all of it manual, rustic, different from what it is now.

We are now living in a period of change. In the past, some areas had authorized gold mining, others did not.

There were several gold buyers with an office in Itaituba,

the seller would come and deliver the gold for sale with a declaration of origin.

The big problem with illegal gold is that there was no control system to check that the declaration of origin was true.

So laundering gold was very easy because of the good faith of the buyer, which was covered by law.

There was an article that said that the gold buyer acknowledged his good faith in the declaration of origin.

It was an article that needed to be reformed and today good faith is not recognized.

The buyer has an obligation to verify that the origin declared is valid.

All of this has made it more difficult to falsely declare the origin of gold.

And for the gold buyer, it’s increasingly risky, because he runs the risk of losing the product.

We live in a region that has been taken over by businessmen or bandits dressed up as businessmen,

and for many years there has been money laundering and gold laundering here.

Due to a series of problems we had throughout this development [of mining],

that was done in a very uncoordinated way,

and at any rate, the bill has arrived.

In total, there are 240,000 hectares, or 240 thousand soccer fields of mining activities in the Brazilian Amazon.

We are here, temporarily camped at an ICMBio base, on the banks of the Transgarimpeira highway.

As the name suggests, it is the Gold Road, right?

Our focus is to curb these illegal mining activities.

We’ve been here for approximately 15 days.

And since we set foot here, installed our camp and started operating, the rates have practically come down to zero.

We’re not talking about small gold mining operations here.

We’re talking about gold mining of 40 hectares, 30 hectares, gold mining with heavy machinery,

with machines that can open up and cut down vegetation in days, weeks at most.

The main role of the machine is to open the entire pit and remove the layer of soil,

until it actually reaches where the ore is, right?

Different from clear-cut deforestation for the implementation of livestock or agriculture.

So, if there is no real attempt to restore that area, perhaps even using engineering methods,

it is impracticable to recover a mine.

Contamination by mercury and other metals from mining

has a serious impact on the health and food security of Indigenous peoples.

Mining kills us. It kills the city’s people too.

It kills the soul of the river, kills the soul of the forest.

There is no need to bring heavy mining into our house, into our forest.

And I want to tell you. We will definitely remove the miners from Indigenous lands.

We’ll have to make an even greater effort, use all the power that the public apparatus can have,

because it’s not possible that we can lose the war to illegal mining.

This machine … IBAMA set fire to it.

We were working there and we heard they were coming.

Then they set fire to it, set fire to the engines there, to the shacks and left.

Only here in this machine that burned, there were around 25 people, right? There were about 25 people working.

Unemployed.

They came onto my property, burned my excavator, my eight-wheeler, broke everything.

My miners had no right to say anything.

They made them sit there and watch it burn, without even being able to put out the fire. No mercy.

What was the size of the damage you had?

More than 1 million reais ($178,000). That’s a lot for a small business.

I had to start from scratch again.

We can’t afford to remove the machinery..

So we proceed with seizure, followed by destruction with fire, mainly. And we are legally backed to do this.

WE’RE HERE FOR ONE CAUSE ONLY!

The government claims that we don’t try to legalize ourselves,

but how can we legalize ourselves if it hasn’t opened the way for us to legalize ourselves?

We’ve been informing everyone to seek legalization.

Unfortunately the culture of mining here, and illegal mining, is very big.

People would rather buy a million reais’ worth of machinery and start working,

risk losing that machinery without having a license, than invest 50,000 reais ($8,900) to get a license.

So if these gold mines in our region stop, the miners won’t stop mining.

They’ll migrate to Suriname, they’ll migrate to French Guiana, they’ll migrate to Africa, to Venezuela.

They’re going to start migrating.

In the future, these other countries will all suffer from a major mining invasion.

They’ve learned mining. They’re going to die doing it.

While they can’t find a definitive solution for this, this cat-and-mouse game will continue and it’s pointless.

You see people shouting: “Miner is not a bandit! Miner is not a bandit!”

And if this keeps happening, and we don’t see a response, there could be a riot.

All of this is leading to changes and there will be a time for adaptation, which is always confusing.

And I still don’t know what the new break-even point will be.

I think we’re going to have to pay a lot of attention so that these new regulations don’t become dead law.

So I believe that some activity that complies with the legislation is possible.