Living in Peru : your everyday companion

LivinginPeru.com
Isabel Guerra

If we can fly over the jungle of Madre de Dios and Puno we will see a depressing panorama; thousands of tonnes of soil removed and missing forests, with all the trees already fallen down or buried under the tailings accumulated after years of intensive and illegal gold mining in the Amazon.

The culprit, according to all the experts, is mercury, which is necessary for gold exploitation; mercury is a poison that goes unnoticed and that accumulates progressively.

According to mining engineers and environmentalists, regulating the marketing of mercury and related chemical inputs would help solve the problem of illegal mining and the destruction of forests.

However, mercury is sold without any control on populations that are located around mining areas of Puno and Madre de Dios. Only during the last four years the imports of mercury has almost doubled in the country, from 75,000 kilos to 132,000 last year.

The Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM) argues that this whole import is used primarily by artisanal miners, whose levels of informality reach 90%.

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