The images of the hundreds of rafts lined up over the Madeira River are impressive, but only reveal part of the story. Unlike mining on indigenous lands, the search for gold is not carried out by capitalized bandits who arrive by plane and helicopter, but mainly by riverside dwellers in the region. The great environmental villain there is the federal government and its Jirau and Santo Antônio hydroelectric plants.
This is not a “garimpeiro invasion”, as occurs in the Yanomami Indigenous Land (RR/AM). Most, if not all, small ferries currently concentrated in Autazes (AM) were already working along the Madeira River, between Rondônia and Amazonas.
They only moved there because someone “bumped”, that is, found an above-average amount of gold. In the Amazon, this gold rush has a name: gossip. In 2016, when the sheet visited one of these gossips, the concentration was 700 rafts, similar to this year. But the topic of mining was far from the news cycle, and few paid attention.
The profiled ferries also suggest that this is a great one-of-a-kind venture. It’s not like this. The explanation lies in the ethics of mining. They stand side by side to ensure that no one has an advantage over the other when vacuuming the bottom of the river bed, where the gold is deposited.
The vast majority of miners have one or a few rafts, run by the family. The contract workers work together with the ferry owners and are paid according to production. It’s a strenuous routine, under the deafening roar of engines running 24 hours a day amid the nauseating smell of diesel oil.
The cost to build a mining barge on the Madeira River is relatively low, around R$30,000. This is an investment many times smaller than the excavators (PCs) that infest and destroy the rivers of the Munduruku Indigenous Land. Each machine costs around R$ 500 thousand, with diesel consumption much higher than that of the small engines used on ferries.
The PCs are the main protagonists of destruction in the search for gold, especially in the Tapajós basin, where the Munduruku live. In just a few weeks, they are capable of destroying and diverting kilometers of streams, opening huge scars in the Amazon rainforest. It is no longer about artisanal mining: it is illegal mining.
The social impact is also smaller than in Yanomami territory. Mining in Madeira does not lead to the creation of large illegal encampments with airstrips in the midst of a vulnerable and isolated indigenous population. It is a river dotted with several cities and with intense navigation. The indigenous people of Madeira, like the Muras, are more hardened by the presence of the “white”.
Although the raft mining on Madeira destroys much less, there is environmental damage. After being vacuumed and passing through a kind of mat to remove the gold, the mud returns in a concentrated form to the river. The “belch”, as this debris is called, tends to form islets in the river bed. Most, however, disappear in the flood cycle.
There are indications that the river is contaminated with mercury. A recent survey of one of the Madeira’s tributaries shows that fish have mercury levels above those allowed by the WHO (World Health Organization). The origin, however, is not exclusive to the garimpo. Deforestation and fires also take the metal, which occurs naturally in Amazonian soil, to water courses.
Mercury continues to be used on a large scale in mining, but the adoption of an instrument called a crucible, a practice adopted for some years now, has reduced the amount that goes to nature by allowing its reuse.
In an interview in 2020, the coordinator of the Ichthyology and Fisheries Planning Laboratory of the Madeira River Valley at Ufam (Federal University of Amazonas), Marcelo dos Anjos, said that regulation is the best path for Madeira. “Illegality has a much greater impact. What should be done is to regulate, through miners’ cooperatives, and create protocols that they can follow in order to minimize the expected impact of the activity.”
This process, however, has dragged on for years, amidst the divergence of attributions between the government of Amazonas and BrasÃlia.
What didn’t take long to come out was IBAMA’s environmental license for the two huge hydroelectric plants built by PT governments near Porto Velho (RO). As is the custom for works of this size, they had profound impacts.
The great symbol of this disaster is the sea bream, catfish that makes the largest freshwater migration ever recorded by science, up to 11,000 km. The dam poses a serious risk of causing it to become extinct in Madeira, according to research.
Angered by Ibama’s delay in releasing the license because of the impact on the ichthyofauna, then-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva criticized the agency during a meeting with his political council in 2007: “Now they threw the catfish into the president’s lap. what do I have with it?”. A phrase that his main political opponent, Jair Bolsonaro, would sign underneath.
Descendants of indigenous and northeastern people who migrated during the rubber boom, the riverside miners claim that the Madeira River was never the same after the mills.
Last year, Elanjo de Souza, who worked on a ferry in Humaitá (AM) with two teenage children, told me that he had abandoned farming in the floodplain and fishing. “The fish come and go. When it reaches the dam, how will it get through? Even the plants don’t generate anymore. Before, it was watermelon, corn, tobacco. Now the flood gets higher and kills everything.”
Vulnerable to pressure from the Planalto, public policies for Madeira remain indifferent to the precarious situation of the traditional population. Is environmental racism calling?
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