From the Archives: Daily life in the remote gold-mining camps of the Amazonian rainforest is difficult, dirty, and sometimes treacherous. But that’s only part of the story.
Early in the morning, when the sky is still dark, the men rise from their hammocks. These gold miners of Amazonia slip on their flip-flops and walk toward the light, sometimes stumbling on roots and other remnants of the forest. At the kitchen, they pour sweet steaming coffee into old jam jars, gripping the hot glass with their fingertips. They shake off the chill, stretch away the aches, and follow the steady purr of the excavator to the open-pit gold mines.
Serra Pelada was one of the biggest gold strikes in history, but it was only one chapter in the Amazonian gold rush of the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, gold prices crashed. In the mid-2000s, many areas containing gold deposits were made off-limits as protected forests or national parks, and small-scale mining seemed to be coming to an end.
These quick glimpses into a rough world are certainly shocking, but they tell us little about daily life in the gold mines of Amazonia. What is it like in these illegal gold camps? Who are the miners and what draws them here? How do they coax gold from the ground in this new age of excavators and governmental surveillance?
In some camps, we stopped for a few hours to talk under the shade of black plastic tarps draped on rough-hewn timber posts, and we took pictures of the mines and miners.* In other camps, we were invited to tie up our hammocks inches away from the miners and experience the process of extracting gold—from the excavator’s relentless clawing at the earth to the blasting of bedrock with a high-powered hose, and finally to the moment of truth, when the find was weighed and divided.