A fever of oro has collected hundreds of dredging ponds from illegal miners on the Madeira River, a major tributary of the Amazon, as state and federal authorities debate who is responsible for stopping them.
The pump-equipped rafts are moored together in lines that stretch across the vast Madeira, and a Reuters witness saw slag-dropping feathers indicating they are sucking up the riverbed in search of gold.
“We have counted no less than 300 rafts. They have been there for at least two weeks and the government has not done anything, ”said Greenpeace Brasil activist Danicley Aguiar.
The gold rush began when world leaders met at a United Nations climate conference in Glasgow (COP26), where Brazil promised to step up protection of the Amazon rainforest.
However, the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro He has weakened enforcement of environmental regulations since he took office in 2019, turning a blind eye to invasions of public and protected indigenous lands by illegal loggers, ranchers and illegal gold miners.
The Madeira flows some 3,300 kilometers from its source in Bolivia through the tropical forest in Brazil and in the Amazon river.
The dredging rafts have floated downstream from the Humaitá area, where there has been an increase in illegal gold mining, and were last seen some 650 kilometers away in Autazes, a municipal district southeast of Manaus.
A spokesperson for the Brazilian environmental protection agency Ibama said that illegal dredging in the Madeira river was not the responsibility of the federal government, but of the state of Amazonas and its environmental agency IPAAM.
The head of IPAAM, Juliano Valente, said that his agency has instructed the state security forces to act, but insisted that the river is federal jurisdiction and that, therefore, the application of the law must correspond to the federal police and the National Mining Agency (ANM).
Federal police and the ANM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It is a pitched battle. None of the authorities is doing anything to stop illegal mining, which has become an epidemic in the Amazon, ”Aguiar said.
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