Ann: Key Exploration Update Juma East, page-15

It's true.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/11/brazil.mainsection

Brazilian goldminers flock to 'new Eldorado'

• Rumours spark mass rush to small Amazon outpost
• Fears of environmental ruin, crime and disease

Tom Phillips Rio de Janeiro
Thursday 11 January 2007 20.47 AEDT
Thousands of impoverished Brazilian workers are flocking to a tiny Amazon outpost after rumours of the discovery of a "new Eldorado", sparking a desperate rush for gold and fears for the environment. Reports in local newspapers claim that at least 3,000 Brazilians have arrived in the small town of Apui, in the state of Amazonas, since the new year, when traces of gold were found on the banks of the Juma river, 50 miles north of the town.

Ivani Valentim da Silva, a local teacher who has visited the illegal gold mine, said: "The excitement [at the mine] is so great they think Saddam Hussein is still alive."

Paulo Sergio, a representative of Apui Air Taxis, a local airline based in the state capital, Manaus, said the company's flights to Apui had been packed for weeks as goldminers scrambled to the region.


"At the moment Eldorado do Juma is occupied by carpenters, businessmen, farmers, drivers, teachers, bankers, evangelical pastors and professionals from every imaginable field," he wrote on the website Portal Apui this week.

During the 1980s, tens of thousands of Brazilians from all over the country made for remote gold mines in the Amazon jungle in search of a quick buck. In wild west-style Amazonian outposts, where gunslinging and child prostitution was rife, the rush created hundreds of instant millionaires with nicknames like Rambo and the White Panther.

Most of these mines have long since been abandoned, leaving virtual ghost towns in the middle of the forest, accessible only by boat or light aircraft.

Today around 500,000 miners are thought to work in the Amazon's "garimpos", or gold mines. Most are impoverished men from the north-eastern state of Maranhao who slave away in hand-dug pits, often armed only with spades, electric pumps, a pair of flip-flops and a bottle of potent cachaca liquor.

"Some months you can make 500 reais [£120] , some months you make nothing," a 45-year-old wildcat miner known as Edwin do Garimpo or Gold Mine Edwin, told the Guardian during a recent visit to the Esperanca III gold mine in Para. "But that's life, that's what the garimpo is like."

Antonio Roque Longo, the mayor of Apui, told a newspaper that despite the sudden financial boom, the locals feared the invasion would bring an epidemic of prostitution, violence and disease. "The hotels are full, which should be good for the municipality, but residents are scared," he said.