An uncontrolled gold rush turns into a government project
Deep in Brazil's Amazon jungle, thousands of dust-covered laborers swarm over a mountain of red earth, using their pickaxes and shovels to carve its surface into a bizarre landscape. It is a scene that could belong to an outlandish biblical epic movie or a sinister labor camp. It is neither. Serra Pelada (Bald Mountain), 270 miles south of the mouth of the Amazon River, is the site of one of the biggest gold rushes in modern Brazilian history. It is also an experiment by Brazil's debt-ridden government to harness the skills of the country's hardy garimpeiros—nomadic prospectors who roam the vast backwoods. TIME Buenos Aires Bureau Chief George Russell recently visited Serra Pelada. His report:
Allowing for the portable radios and the constant shuttle flights from the nearby town of Marabá, Serra Pelada has become a tropical version of the 19th century Klondike. Around the big stike, which is carved up claim block by claim block, the landscape is a jumble of hovels and open bamboo shelters. Young miners in cutoff shorts and sandals throng the dusty alleyways; grizzled oldtimers wearing floppy straw hats lead their pack mules through the maze. Everywhere, anxious men watch drying handfuls of earth for signs of pay dirt. The ground around them flows with a liquid waste, from the panning and sluicing, that is the color of oxblood. The methods may be crude and oldfashioned, but they are productive: Serre Pelada is turning out gold at the rate of a metric ton per month, three times as much as the next biggest mine in Brazil.
by up els for the and the 19th come watch a their Young maze. and waste, around town big wearing claim signs of constant Allowing sluicing, pack open alleyways; of from them sandals drying century miners for landscape block that pay the tropical floppy in strike, is mules by the is a flows Maraba, shuttle bamboo Everywhere, throng the grizzled dirt. straw which they are productive: Sierra Pelada is turning out gold at the rate of a metric ton per month, three times as much as the next biggest mine in Brazil.
The rush to the mountain has actually been a sprint. Last January, after coming across traces of alluvial gold on his land, Farmer Genesio Ferreira da Silva hired a geologist to investigate whether there was a larger deposit. Word leaked out, and within a week 1,000 prospectors had descended on the farm. Five weeks later, there were 10,000 on Fer-reira's property and another 12,000 near by. Huge nuggets were quickly discovered, the biggest weighing nearly 15 Ibs., worth more than $108,000 at the current market price. "If we could have only kept the secret, we would have been rich forever," says Osvaldo Ferreira, Genesio's son. Not likely under Brazilian law. Though virtually anyone is free to prospect with "rudimentary" equipment, mineral rights belong to the government, and landowners receive a small royalty fee. The main consolation for the Fer-reiras was that they staked claims on what turned out to be the richest part of the site.