Carrying small spears covered with amulets made from blackened palms, GIS map phones, walkietalkies and black and green uniforms, the A’i Cofán appear to have merged with the jungle as they silently march along a path through their land.
The 27member group calls itself an “indigenous guard” and patrols a 630squarekilometer area, stretching from more than 2,500 meters above sea level at the foot of the Andes to the Amazon rainforest, The Guardian reports.
They are on the lookout for alluvial miners who are invading their land with heavy machinery and destroying the banks of their sacred river, the Aguarico. Due to high demand, the international price of a troy ounce of gold a unit of weight in the Troy system used to weigh precious metals and equal to 31.10349 grams rose to around 1,950 dollars (around R$ 9,400), and the value is not fell below 1,500 dollars (approximately R$ 7,200) since the start of the Covid pandemic.
The search for the precious metal reached deep into the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. According to a report by the Organization of American States, illegal mining and gold exports in Ecuador have increased sharply in recent years, “promoted by several factors, including high levels of informality and poverty, the presence of mineral deposits in remote areas, and the… “Existence of illegal mining networks in the neighboring countries of Colombia and Peru.”
“Corruption of officials, particularly at the local level, and inadequate government presence in mining areas also contribute to illegal gold mining,” the OAS added.
In the absence of any government oversight, the A’i Cofán of Sinangoe, a community of 300 people who make a living from hunting, fishing and farming, decided to combat mining in their part of the pristine Amazon. They now police their ancestral lands near the border with Colombia in Sucumbíos province in northern Ecuador under their own laws.
As elsewhere in the Amazon, the boom in destructive illegal gold mining is ravaging rainforest areas and poisoning ecosystems with mercury, a neurotoxin that combines with gold to form an amalgam (the gold is then extracted by vaporizing the mercury).
Sediment washed into waterways from mining is also responsible for polluting 35,000 km of tropical rivers around the world, according to a study published in August in the journal Nature.