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Complaints of another kind came from the prospectors. Prices skyrocketed as local landowners insisted on barracao (literally the trading post but, in another application, the company store), charging outrageous amounts for food and other necessities. Bottled water cost $3 a liter, eggs 500 apiece. At the same time, roving bands of local ranch hands began to extort gold from the miners. Soon, Serra Pelada was an armed camp.
Finally the government stepped in. It wanted no trouble, and with a foreign debt of $55 billion, Brasilia had good use for new gold. Last May federal police descended on the site. All miners were registered. Liquor, gambling and the presence of women were forbidden. At the same time, however, the government offered to mediate all claim disputes, set a minimum daily wage ($18) and provided free medical care. Federal experts began to advise the miners on safety precautions and on how to increase output. Before government officials arrived, for example, many of the garimpeiros had been throwing away "black gold," an impure mixture that can be refined to yield ordinary gold and palladium, a valuable metal in its own right, as well as manganese. Says a government mining engineer: "Our job is to orient the garimpeiros. They're individualists. Many were small farmers. They know this is the chance of a lifetime." On yet another level, official price controls wiped out the barracao, with the government trucking in 40 tons of food and other supplies a week. Says one garimpeiro, "This is the cheapest place in the country."
The rush to the mountain has actually been a sprint. Last January, after coming across traces of alluvial gold on his land, Farmer Genésio Ferreira da Silvia 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 Ferreira's property and another 12,000 nearby. Huge nuggets were quickly discovered, the biggest weighing nearly 15 lbs., 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, Genésio'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 Ferreiras was that they staked claims on what turned out to be the richest part of the site.
Complaints of another kind came from the prospectors. Prices skyrocketed as local landowners insisted on barracão (literally the trading post but, in another application, the company store), charging outrageous amounts for food and other necessities. Bottled water cost $3 a liter, eggs 50¢ a piece. At the same time, roving bands of local ranch hands began to extort gold from the miners. Soon, Serra Pelada was an armed camp.