Gold wars in Peru town leave Amazon nature defenders vulnerable

• Peru's biodiversity 'capital' plagued by illegal mining
• Mining poisons environment, draws in gangs
• Environmentalists targeted in turf wars

PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru - Gunshots echoed through La Pampa as rival gangs armed with military-grade weapons battled for control of the notorious gold mining town in the Peruvian Amazon.

Images seen by Context showed dozens of armed men storming the jungle town as miners ducked for cover and shopkeepers hid behind shutters, with at least five men lying dead after the shootout last month.

Police in Peru's southeastern Madre de Dios region told Context they had recovered two bodies after the incident but provided no further details.

The gun battle is the latest bloodbath in La Pampa, at the heart of Peru's "capital of biodiversity" of Madre de Dios, for hosting record numbers of species, many of them endemic.

But La Pampa is also a byword for the violence, racketeering and human trafficking that have accompanied the illegal gold mining that has stripped away the rainforest for miles on either side of a highway that runs to Brazil.

Peru's largest mining pit continues to grow.

La Pampa lies in the Tambopata National Reserve's buffer zone, and miners have invaded the protected area, hacking down trees and leaving behind toxic pools with the mercury they use to extract gold.

Between January 2021 and March 2024, satellite images recorded total deforestation of 30,846 hectares in La Pampa - equivalent to more than 40,000 soccer fields, according to the Monitoring of the Amazon Andes Program.

Gang warfare

Record-high prices have spurred a gold rush in the rainforests of Peru, the largest producer of gold in Latin America.

Thousands of impoverished people have descended on La Pampa with the hopes of making their fortunes. But these unregistered miners fail to adhere to environmental rules, including government restrictions on the use of mercury, poisoning the environment.

Mining has also drawn in organised crime, as gangs take control of land, demand "protection" money from miners working without permits and unleash a wave of human rights abuses, despite the presence of police in the area.

Dotted by bars and brothels, La Pampa has become a sex-trafficking hotspot, spurred in part by local lore among the miners, said Berenice Romero, Peru's chief prosecutor for human trafficking.

"There is a belief that the more sex a miner has with virgins or underage girls, the better luck he will have in gold mining," Romero told Context.

Up to a third of the sex workers rescued by authorities in 2023 and 2024 were under the age of 18, she said.

Residents, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal, said rival factions of a criminal family are engaged in a turf war for control of the "Guardianes de la Trocha," or Guardians of the Trail, an armed group that purportedly runs the protection racket and part of the illicit gold trade.

Residents said they live in fear of the gangs, more so since prosecutors early this year discovered five bodies in a grave known as the "cemetery," some of whom showed signs of torture, according to witnesses and families of the victims.

One victim was Alex Cárdenas Flores, 43, who left home in November and never returned, his sister Leyla Cárdenas said. She learned that her brother, a father of three children, was dead from locals.

"Culprits are still walking around doing their thing in La Pampa. People are still disappearing, people are still being murdered," she said in an interview.

Government and law enforcement officials in the regional capital of Puerto Maldonado said that hundreds of people have been killed or disappeared in La Pampa in the last decade.

The Madre de Dios prosecutor's office reported that 351 bodies, attributed to homicides or work accidents, were recovered between 2014 and 2024.

Lucia del Carmen Martinez, head of the region's forensic medical unit, said at her Puerto Maldonado office that 375 violent deaths were recorded in the same 10-year period.

In 34 of the cases, the victims could not be identified, she said. During the same period, 183 people drowned, most of them in the ponds created by miners. 

Environmentalist's murder

In April, a judge sentenced Edison Fernández Pérez, an alleged La Pampa gang leader, in absentia to 15 years in prison for the March 2022 murder of environmental defender Juan Julio Fernández.

But the judge freed Edison's brother Jhon Fernández Pérez, despite testimony from eyewitnesses he shot the victim at point-blank range, according to court transcripts.

Karen Torres, the human rights prosecutor for Madre de Dios, told Context she was "surprised" by the ruling and would appeal.

Salvador Fernández, the brother of the victim, said his family received constant death threats from the gang who wanted to seize their land in La Pampa to mine.

"We know they are the killers and we demand justice," he said. 

In January, when the "the cemetery" was exhumed, images captured on a security camera in La Pampa appear to show gangs continued their killing spree. 

The video shows a pickup truck and two motorcycles pulling up alongside Ana García Solsol, a La Pampa community leader. Five men with covered faces and police waistcoats open fire with automatic rifles, killing her instantly. 

Police conducted a raid on the suspects' hideout the next day but were unable to find them, said Orlando Sanchez, the chief of police in Madre de Dios.

Breaches of confidentiality meant that "information gets out, (and) by the time we get there, the criminals are long gone," Sanchez told Context.

"I even mistrust some of my own police because they can leak information, which means some operations are not carried out effectively," he added. 

Prosecutor César Ignacios, who is investigating the "cemetery" case, did not respond to requests for comment. 

(Reporting by Dan Collyns and Manuel Calloquispe; Editing by Jack Graham and Ayla Jean Yackley.)