Dan Collyns

As gold prices surge, so has illegal mining in South America, destroying forests and polluting rivers, but women in eastern Peru are pioneering technology that does not rely on toxic mercury and even produces more of the precious metal.

In parts of Madre de Dios, one of Peru's most biodiverse regions, illegal mining has left a desert-like landscape strewn with lifeless craters and poisoned rivers.

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.

Thousands of gold miners camped out in the centre of the Peruvian capital and blocked the main highway this week to protest government plans to regulate illegal mining that experts say fuels extortion and human trafficking.

Peru's government presented a bill to Congress last week aimed at fast-tracking the formalisation of up to half a million informal and illegal miners in the country by replacing an existing registry known by its Spanish acronym REINFO.

The Nanay River meanders through Peru's Amazon jungle supplying water to Iquitos city's half a million inhabitants.

But there are growing concerns about the quality of this water as illegal gold mining, which uses the toxic metal mercury to extract gold, has surged in Peru's Amazon region since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Changes to a key forestry law in Peru are opening up its Amazon rainforest - the second largest expanse after Brazil - to more deforestation for agriculture and making it easier for illicit industries like logging and mining to prosper, researchers warn. 

Congress made changes to the Forest and Wildlife Law 31973 in December, which pardon all historical illegal deforestation of areas cleared for agriculture before January 2024 and undo any future legal constraints.

About 25 isolated Indigenous groups - an increasing rarity around the world - live in Peru's Amazon rainforest, but a draft law could strip them of rights over their land, advocates say.

Indigenous peoples living in isolation and early stages of contact in Peru - known as PIACI - are protected under a 2006 law that prohibits contact with them, primarily for their wellbeing, not least because their immune systems often have little resistance to common illnesses.

The waters of the Xingu River below the Belo Monte hydropower dam, in Brazil's Amazon, used to flood the river's forested islands during the rainy season, allowing fish to glide among the trees and gorge on fallen fruit.

But since the controversial dam opened six years ago, the forests no longer flood consistently, and the fish have lost a key place to feed and spawn, local people say.

Indigenous representatives from all nine Amazon Basin countries, gathered in the Peruvian capital Lima this week, pressed world leaders to adopt a global pact to protect 80% of the Amazon forest by 2025. 

The call comes as the world's largest tropical rainforest - a key weapon in the fight against climate change due to its role in storing carbon - edges ever closer to a tipping point beyond which it might never recover, scientists have warned.

One evening last November, hooded and masked men wielding automatic rifles walked onto the village green in the middle of Flor de Ucayali, an indigenous Amazon community in Peru.

Firing in the air, they demanded to know the whereabouts of the village's leaders.