A report obtained exclusively by InfoAmazonia and PlenaMata reveals deforestation by gold mining growing since 2019 at the Juami-Japurá Ecological Station, 700 kilometers from Manaus and along the border with Colombia. Satellite images show that crimes in the area of integral protection increased in the first months of this year.
Juami-Japurá has been a federal conservation unit since 1983 and is home to forests, scientific research and the winding Juami River, a tributary of the Jupará River, which comes from Colombia and flows into Solimões, in Brazil.
“Official alerts on deforestation and forest degradation, reports of the presence of dredgers, changes in the bed and sedimentation of the Juami River, even during the dry season, when this should not happen, as evidenced by satellite images, indicate that there is illegal mining in the protected area”, said researcher Antonio Oviedo, from ISA (Instituto Socioambiental) when having access to satellite images.
Alerts from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) for deforestation by mining point to 531 hectares of forests lost since 2019. This year, 23 hectares have already been cut down where, by law, there should be no deforestation.
Satellite images from the Planet system analyzed by the report show that mining has spread along almost the entire Juami River and continues to increase this year.
The stretch with mining makes up 198 km of the river. The extension does not refer to the areas of scars left by the mining, but rather a linear measurement from the mouth of the river (where the Juami meets the Japurá) to the southernmost point where garimpeiro activity could be confirmed.
The ICMBio (Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation) and military overflight report, carried out on August 17, 2021, listed 31 dredgers and five boats linked to crimes in the protected area.
The material, from the Integrated Management Center of Tefé, describes that “the Juami river is compromised along its entire course, until very close to its right headwater, only the left tributary that forms it is, apparently, and even now, free from the mining impact”.
The document describes “consecutive stretches of destroyed banks and successive and increasing sandbars, resulting from dredging” that dominate the landscape and intensify upstream, “compromising almost the entirety of its course”.
In the report and satellite images, it is possible to see both the sandbars and the so-called “dredger burps”, a mixture of sand and stone sucked by the dredgers from the river bottom with a whitish appearance.
There are records of paramilitary groups operating in the area. A federal official, on condition of anonymity, claims that the problem involves collusion between organized crime in Brazil and neighboring countries.
The ICMBio report describes that “there are infiltrated members of paramilitary groups in Colombia, sponsoring the mining activity and harassing Brazilian communities and extractivists”.
The document recognizes that the ecological station had already been the target of mining activity in the 1990s and says that there was no more record of the activity since 2003. But the lack of servers, supervision and infrastructure, together with the high price of gold, made the mining return in 2019, when four dredgers were identified.
Since then, miners have hunted, fished, deforested and contaminate land and water with mercury and other chemicals that are harmful to people and wildlife.
Police actions reinforce that the protected area is the target of illegalities. In August 2021, the same date as the report, the Federal Police arrested nine people in the municipality of Jupará, close to the ecological station, for mining and using mercury, money laundering, arms and drug trafficking.
In September of the previous year, the Civil Police had already arrested two women in Coari (363 km from Manaus) with 87 grams of illegal gold coming from Japurá.
Contacted by Ibama, ICMBio and the Federal Police did not comment on the situation of the ecological station until the publication of this report.
By e-mail, the Military Command of the Amazon stated, in a generic way, that it acts in a preventive and repressive manner together with other federal and state agencies “against environmental and cross-border illicit in a permanent way in the border strip under its responsibility, protecting the sovereignty of the country in the western Amazon”.
Illegal gold taken from Juami-Japurá and other areas is usually “washed” in DTVMs (dealers of securities), in which it is sufficient to inform, on a paper form, that the ore was extracted from an area authorized by the National Agency of Mining. Then it is sold to companies in the country or exported. The DTVMs buy gold from mines guaranteed by the Central Bank and are the subject of investigations.
“Brazilian law is very lenient and requires that these transactions be done in good faith. This allows for the ‘washing of gold’, the indication of a potentially false origin, which may have been extracted from protected areas, such as conservation units and indigenous lands”, says lawyer Rebeca Lins, a project analyst at Instituto Escolhas.
A study by Escolhas found evidence of crime in 47% (229 tons) of national gold production between 2015 and 2020. Half came from the Amazon. The analysis shows that a third of the gold in the forest passed through just five DTVMs. The Federal Public Ministry investigates the performance of these companies.
“Poor traceability harms inspection and encourages illegal trade. The search for gold threatens, with mining requests, 6.2 million hectares in conservation units and indigenous lands in the Legal Amazon, equivalent to two countries like Belgium or 40 times the city of São Paulo”, highlights Lins.
The balance of the MapBiomas project shows that the Amazon covers 94% of the area with artisanal and industrial mining in the country, or 149,300 hectares. Of these, garimpos occupy 101,100 hectares (68%) of the total.
From 2010 to 2020, the area affected by mining jumped 495% in indigenous lands and 301% in conservation units. Last year, half of the national mining area was in these protected areas.
Actions by the Jair Bolsonaro government are sympathetic to the advance of illegal mining. In August 2020, miners who blocked actions against crime in Pará were taken on a Brazilian Air Force flight to Brasília for a meeting at the Ministry of the Environment.
The government also owns bill 191/2020, which is being processed as a matter of urgency in Congress, to release mining and other activities on indigenous lands.
Report produced by InfoAmazonia for the project Full Forest.
