Informal Mining Camps Declared Illegal In Peru, Miners Add Fear Of Crackdown

They sweat through 28-hour shifts in the malarial jungle of the Madre de Dios region of southeastern Peru, braving the perils of collapsing earth and limb-crushing machinery to come up with a few grams of gold.

Most wildcat miners hail from impoverished highlands communities and barely earn subsistence wages. They chew coca leaf, a mild stimulant, to ward off the fatigue that can lead to fatal accidents.

Life is cheap in the mining camps. Deaths go unrecorded and the mercury they use to bind gold flecks compounds the risks. It doesn't just seep into the food chain. It poisons them and their families, too.

A new threat now looms for the estimated 20,000 wildcat miners who toil in a huge scar of denuded Amazon rainforest known as La Pampa, an area nearly three times the size of Washington, D.C.

Peru's government declared all informal mining illegal on April 19 and began a crackdown. It raided the older boomtown of Huepetuhe, dynamiting backhoes, trucks and generators. Troops even destroyed the outboard motors of canoes used to ferry mining equipment across the Inambari river.

In La Pampa, miners fear they are next. Their gasoline supplies have already been choked by authorities.

Some buried their equipment after the crackdown began only to unearth it days later when no raid came. But come it eventually will, the government says, because no legal mining concessions exist in La Pampa.

People in La Pampa say that if the authorities eradicate their livelihood, it must quickly make good on promises to provide employment alternatives.

"Motors are my life. I'm a mechanic. If the government comes and destroys them, then from what will I and my family live?" said Leoncio Condori.

The 51-year-old, a native of the Andes city of Cuzco, has been fixing motors in La Pampa ever since artisanal gold miners began carving out lawless, ramshackle settlements from Amazon jungle there in 2008.

It's not just miners who are threatened with economic catastrophe from the government's campaign to wipe out illegal mining operations, said a mining camp cook, who identified herself only as Gladis, fearing government retribution.