Hundreds of Orpairers’ boats have been giving up for several days on the Rio Madeira, in the Amazon, benefiting from impunity powered by the Brazilian power.
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From the sky, it looks like a gigantic armada. By hundreds, wood boats go up the Rio Madeira, aligned with quasi-military training and occupying the entire width of the watercourse. Dragues, surmounted by colored houses, paced with generators, cables, pulleys and long pipes, slowly move on the river with muddy tones. A typical fleet of Garimpeiros, Amazon’s orpalers.
These disturbing images have made the Tour du Brazil in recent days. Three hundred to six hundred boats, some two thousand orpalers, according to the specialists, would currently vogue on the river in search of gold at the heart of the Great Forest. Their date of arrival is uncertain; According to locals, she would go back to a dozen days. This staggering concentration of boats quickly qualified as “neighborhood” or “floating condominium”. Some evoke the madness of a Mad Max and all film predict an environmental cataclysm.
Originally, as often in the Amazon, there is a rumor: that of a monumental “vein” of precious metal, discovered at the mouth of the Rio Madeira. “There, they are a gram of gold per hour!”, Racks an orpaker, in an audio recording broadcast on the social networks of the region and obtained by the daily O Estado de S. Paulo. Quick, barges are loaded with food, gasoline and men. En route for gold rush.
The activity is conducted in broad daylight. It is completely illegal and devastating. In order to extract the precious metal, the orpairs plunge long pipes at 20 or 30 meters below the surface, aspiring everything that is at the bottom of the watercourse. The sludge thus drawn are filtered and cleansed with mercury to isolate the gold of algae, earth and pebbles. “Waste” are rejected in the river, then ransacked and polluted.
Records
Orppification is far from a novelty on the Rio Madeira, this huge 3,300-kilometer watercourse that finds its source in Bolivia. The activity is practiced on a large scale in this part of Brazil since the 1980s. “But the economic crisis and the explosion of poverty, with in parallel the outbreak of the price of gold [increase of 52% of the price of the price of the price. Gram in three years on the New York Stock Exchange], earlier to convince new candidates for orppling to embark on the adventure “, details François-Michel Le Roupeau, geographer at the CNRS and specialist of gold panning.
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