Brazil ramps up its war against illegal gold mining in the Amazon

A motorboat carves through the Upper Tapajós River in Brazil's Amazon, carrying gun-toting public security forces and an inspector from the Indigenous affairs agency FUNAI. Two more boats follow with federal special forces.

They patrol a corner of the vast Munduruku Indigenous Reserve for over two hours as part of an enforcement operation to ensure illegal miners have not returned to sites deep in the jungle.

The federal task force disembarks and after a 4km hike through the forest, they find toxic lime-white pools, abandoned wooden sluices, rubber mats and plastic tubing -- all traces of garimpo, the Brazilian term for small-scale mining, but the miners or garimpeiros are long gone.

"We are eliminating all mining on indigenous land carried out by (native) Indians or non-Indians. It's illegal," said Jefferson Rodrigues, the FUNAI inspector who led the raid.

"We continuously seize and render useless equipment being used in mining areas," he added.

The raids are part of recent government efforts to curb illegal mining, which has also seen Brazil's Revenue Service introduce new regulations requiring electronic invoices for gold trading.

The move comes after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva returned to power in 2023 promising to eliminate illegal mining from Indigenous lands and conservation areas -- where any type of mining is strictly illegal.

Illegal mining has boomed over the past decade, causing environmental destruction such as deforestation and water pollution, while health experts warn that mercury poisoning from the illegal extraction of gold is hurting residents' health.

The raids have been focused on the Munduruku and the Yanomami territories, Indigenous areas the size of Belize and Portugal respectively, where illegal mining is especially prevalent, with the Kayapó territory expected to be next.

About 90% of the Indigenous lands devastated by garimpo are located in those three territories, according to data from mapping project MapBiomas Brasil.

Over 400 air, river and land raids have been carried out in more than 50 camps in the Munduruku territory since early November, Lula's executive office said. The raids have destroyed masses of equipment -- from motor pumps and backhoes to river dredgers and excavators -- and have cost illegal miners more than $16 million since November, it said.

MapBiomas Brasil estimates that the area occupied by illegal mining in Indigenous lands grew five-fold between 2010 and 2020.

Illegal mining has surged in Brazil as international gold prices have soared, while former president Jair Bolsonaro, in power between 2019 and 2023, advocated for wildcatters and sought to legalise mining on indigenous land.

"(Lula's) big commitment is that there is no more illegal mining inside Indigenous lands or conservation areas," said Nilton Tubino, who is leading a federal task force of more than 20 government agencies prosecuting the expulsion of illegal miners from Munduruku.

"That's the big challenge," he said.

A 2020 study led by Brazil's National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPQ), assessed 200 residents in three villages in Munduruku and found that a majority had high levels of mercury in their bodies.

Over 60% had mercury levels above the measure considered safe internationally, while 15% of the children in those villages had some kind of neurodevelopment problem, the study showed.

Miners commonly use mercury - a toxic metal - to bond with and draw gold from the soil and river silt.

They then burn off the mercury, turning it into vapour which is absorbed by the surrounding plants and soil or is tipped into the waterways, thus entering the food chain and contaminating local food like the large carnivorous fish in the Amazon.

Given that Indigenous people tend to live in remote areas and rely on this fish for protein, they are disproportionately impacted by mercury poisoning compared to other residents of the Amazon who can more easily access beef and chicken, the 2020 study said.

Although mercury is banned in Brazil, it often enters as contraband from neighbouring countries including Bolivia, Venezuela and Guyana, according to Instituto Escolhas, a Brazilian think tank.

After the publication of the 2020 study, Brazil's health ministry sought to investigate the matter further.

Its Secretariat of Indigenous Health sent a group of experts to Itaituba, where three-quarters of Brazil's illegal gold is laundered, in November to examine Munduruku children with disabilities. They aimed to assess to what extent these were linked to mercury poisoning and to gauge whether the children had any genetic predisposition. The results are still pending.

Claudio Gusmão, one of the experts who went to Itaituba, said the Munduruku population was facing a "perfect storm of poverty, environmental stressors including nutritional factors such as mercury intoxication, poor healthcare ... and possibly a genetic component" which made them more prone to be "affected more severely by all these other factors."

Mercury poisoning can cause neurological disorders that can range from "developmental delay to more severe problems in muscular contractions, such as are seen in cerebral palsy,” said Gusmão, coordinator of the paediatric movement disorders programme at the University of São Paulo.

Munduruku activist Alessandra Korap, who has campaigned against mining in the Amazon for a decade, said illegal mining and the related mercury poisoning was leading to physical disabilities amongst the population in the Amazon.

"Children (are) being born with problems they shouldn't have," she told Context.

"Sometimes they don't have the strength to walk," Korap said. "It's quite frightening, because we in the Amazon had never thought of asking (the Indigenous health agency) for so many wheelchairs."

Korap won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2020 for her work defending indigenous rights and the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2023 after heading a campaign that led mining corporations to respect her people's Indigenous territory in the Amazon.

But she said she had also received death threats over the years and in 2018 intruders broke into her home to steal her private data and documents.

"I got scared right then. My son hugged me and said: 'Mum, I don't want you to be killed'," she said, adding it was her children and future grandchildren that motivate her to keep on fighting.

"It's the women and children who really inspire me," she added.

The government's fight against illegal gold mining appears to be bearing fruit.

Gold production from illegal mines dropped 84% in 2024 and 45% in 2023, when the government started its expulsion operations and began requiring electronic invoices for gold mining transactions, according to Instituto Escolhas.

But Tubino, who has led the "desintrusão" or expulsion operations in Yanomami and Munduruku since 2023, told Context the fight was not over as garimpeiros were changing tactics and moving operations to other parts of the Amazon.

He said efforts to end illegal mining in Indigenous lands were "a step towards restoring historical justice and preserving the Amazon as the heritage of all humanity".

Surging international gold prices continue to lure criminals into the lucrative business, however.

"It's like this: you're plugging a hole, but ahead there's another hole for you to fix as well," he said at the operation headquarters in Jacareacanga.

Garimpo culture runs deep in Jacareacanga and along the Trans-Amazonian Highway, also known as BR-230, that connects it with the larger city of Itaituba some 400km away.

Raimunda Carlos was born and raised in Mamaé Anán, a community along the Tapajós River some 90km from Jacareacanga.

She said the town of around 400 families had lived directly or indirectly from gold mining ever since she could remember.

"If we don't have garimpo, then this place will become a ghost town," she said. 

As the government seeks to flush out illegal miners, other people who migrated to the Amazon to make the most of the gold fever are feeling the pinch.

Migrants who set up shops or restaurants in gold rush towns to service the miners passing through are finding it increasingly hard to make a living.

"If this (government) operation doesn't stop, we won't be able to survive," said Ana Rita Da Cunha who owns a shop, a hostel and a restaurant in Mamaé Anán.

Da Cunha, 56, said she had to close her restaurant because there was no passing trade, adding that most of the younger people had left town to seek work elsewhere.

Osmar Gino, 63, migrated to the region for work from his native Porto Velho in 1979. After 45 years working as a garimpeiro, carving mines out of the rainforest, he said he had no option but to quit after the latest expulsion operation.

"I never earned a lot of money," said Gino, adding "now, there is zero work."

"My main worry is my family but we'll have to take it as it comes."

Reporting: Dan Collyns

Editing: Jack Graham and Ana Nicolaci da Costa

Photography: Dan Collyns

Graphics: Diana Baptista and Jack Graham

Production: Amber Milne