Rumors of gold have led speculators to clog a major Amazon tributary with hundreds of dredging boats in Brazil, Greenpeace said on Wednesday.
Brazilian police were preparing an operation to stop the more than 300 vessels — the environmental group said that the number could be much higher — engaged in illegal mining in the Madeira River, the Estadao newspaper reported, citing Ministry of Justice sources.
Images provided by Greenpeace show lines of boats arranged side by side across the Madeira River, following rumors that gold was discovered in the nearby area around the community of Rosarinho, in Brazil’s northwest.
Photo: Reuters
While clandestine gold mining is commonplace in the Amazon, the “atypical” operation about 100km from the city of Manaus has attracted attention, said Greenpeace, which demanded greater speed from the authorities to stop what it called an “environmental crime.”
Greenpeace said the images show that the garimpeiros, as illegal miners are known in Brazil, are dominating the area and operating “without fear.”
The police superintendent of Amazonas State told Estadao that officials are discussing a plan of action.
Audio published by the newspaper features apparent garimpeiros indicating that the dredging teams were aware of a planned police operation, and that the illegal miners were readying a “wall” of rafts to prevent a police takeover.
A report released in July by the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s Office showed that just 34 percent of the 158 tonnes of gold exploited in Brazil between 2019 and last year were legal.
Environmentalists have accused Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s government of pursuing policies that have weakened protections.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees