The offensive continues against illegal mining in Peru

The Peruvian government’s offensive against illegal gold mining in the Madre de Dios region was once again the leading news item. This time, the articles were accompanied by heart wrenching photos published by the Associated Press of the devastation that the illegal gold mining activities had wrought on the Peruvian Amazon. American reporting on the offensive noted that this offensive took plus curiously close to the UN-sponsored climate talks that Peru is scheduled to host, starting on December 1^st.  The article discussed the anti-illegal mining offensive exclusively from an environmental perspective, describing how illegal mining had turned the jungle into “a war-scape, pocked with craters and littered with the trunks of amputated trees.”

Latin American reports on the offensive provided a bit more context. Noticias24 explained that this area in Madre de Dios, called La Pampa, was lawless and inhabited by thousands of gold hunters, who had escaped conditions of unemployment in small Andean towns and other impoverished areas along the Pacific Coast. According to the report, the military operation displaced the approximately 40,000 people who had moved to the area in search of gold riches. The Associated Press quoted a woman who said, “The state does not think about us, we are thousands [of people], we come from many areas.”

Peru21 published an interview with Pablo Zavala, the local priest in the Madre de Dios region. The priest reiterated a claim that illegal miners from the area gave President Ollanta Humala 17 kg of gold in 2010, when he was campaigning for the presidency. Zavala explained that the local are frustrated because they feel that they have received no support from the government. According to Zavala, Humala had promised to formalize the miners, but this never happened, and now the government is punishing them for operating illegally. The priest claimed that the descriptions of environmental devastation are just myths and stories invented by the government to help auction off Peruvian land to multinational corporations. He added that the forests will regrow, and that the earth’s riches are there to be consumed.