Amazon Gold Rush Laying Waste to Peruvian Rainforest's Madre de Dios

Amazon Gold Rush Laying Waste to Peruvian Rainforest's Madre de Dios

indiancountrytoda ymedianetwork.com

Up to 10,000 miners are working illegally in a 60-square-mile area in Guacamayo to extract gold from the Peruvian Amazon region known as Madre de Dios, and it is ruining the once pristine section of rainforest, known as one of the most diverse places on Earth.
It is reported that the Peruvian government mobilized nearly 1,000 military and police personnel to destroy 300 pieces of illegal mining equipment, including 200 Chinese-made dredgers.

(visit the link for the full news article)

To take yet another quote from this story
‘Madre de Dios is the most biodiverse region in the world because it was so remote and inaccessible,’

Madre de Dios means "Mother of God" BTW

Well this thing about it being so remote is no more.
the reason this atrocity is happening is because of a new new, 1,600-mile Trans-Oceanic Highway connecting Brazil’s Amazon ports with those of Peru.
remote no longer these people just drive their equipment right into the very heart of virgin jungle and destroy everything they touch....
yes they look for these people but often by the time they catch up with them the damage has already been done...



indiancountrytoda ymedianetwork.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by DaddyBare


I hear ya mate.... we have cut down too much of our forests to better the living of mankind wheras in all truthfulness what we've gained is more diseases such as cancers which have come from man mades pillutants into the atmosphere.... it seems there will soon be no more rainforests left because of our mass reproduction rate... i'm not sure if this highway is actually needed, is it? I mean i suppose residents use planes to cross from one Country to another at this moment which i suppose could be costly but to cut away a lot of rainforest just to build more roads...... i dunno....

Its this World we live in which has caused the destruction of forests.... will the day come when there will be no forests left on the planet? At current reproduction rate i doubt it.... and then we will have a situation where the Atmosphere is like Mars atmosphere.

I applaud anyone who has the guts and fortitude to get the information out about this.

Along the same line to give you an idea how long this has been going one; this new highway is the latest bit of bad news in how these people operate.

In the early 1990's I was doing an online newspaper in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The print paper in town had a former reporter who went to Panama to string for majors through a local down there. A former editor of the local Ypsilanti paper apparently was talking to him, told him about the "new fangled internet newspaper". So the guy calls me. Seems he was having a lot of problems getting stories that he was doing published because of death threats. His editor down there didn't like that at all.

So I tell him, sure, I'll publish them but I'm changing your name in the by-line and making it look like you are from somewhere else. At any rate, he sent me stories about some nuclear material missing in Panama, drug lords, abuse of people in the Amazon, clear cutting rain forests, the usual thing you'd expect.

In 1992 he sent me a story about some gold mining going on in the Amazon basin using water cannons to strip away the side of hills. What they were doing was just blasting the surface dirt away, gathering the gold and moving on to the next area - totally stripping the rain forest away and leaving mud in it's wake. This activity is dangerous for anyone reporting it or outsiders observing the activity. These folks caught him and killed him while he was getting more information. Make no mistake, these people are going to be the same type of people - cold blooded killers that are going to protect their turf.

reply to post by billxam


to take yet another quote from the story

Illegal gold mining is a $600 million industry in Peru that employs 100,00 people, up from a few thousand several years ago, and the practices have already destroyed at least 2,000 square miles of forest

to those folks that's more money than they ever dreamed of! and so many employed....
I too applaud your friend (Sorry to hear about his death) it's going to take governmental action to stop this and every time this story is retold and people cry out.... those governments will no longer be able to turn a blind eye