Illegal Mining in the Amazon, with Manuela Andreoni

Notable Quotes

• Illegal mining operations pollute the environment with mercury: “That’s … the biggest environmental problem … because both the mercury that they discard accidentally and the mercury that evaporates and later falls as rain goes through the rivers and is eaten by fish. People eat this fish, and they get intoxicated with mercury … It affects fetal development, it makes people blind, it gives you cardiovascular problems … And it doesn’t go away, because it’s an element. It’s going to be there for hundreds of years. You can’t get rid of it. The more you pump in, it’s just going to stay there.” (9:01)
• Gold and its supply chain: “[G]old from Indigenous lands in Brazil has gone through to Teslas, Google phones, Starbucks coffee machines—through these super complicated supply chains that have several steps. We know this because they report which refiners and smelters they’re buying their gold from, and we know from police investigations and some corporate documents where these smelters are buying gold from.” (13:05)
• Putting a price on the Amazon rainforest: “Not only with illegal mining, but with all sorts of environmental crimes happening in the Amazon, there aren’t that many economically powerful people on the environment side. We haven’t, as a society—and I’m not just talking about Brazil, I’m talking about the world—figured out how to make this standing forest be worth a lot of money. We can make it worth a little money. But a lot of money, like money you can make selling gold? We haven’t gotten there yet.” (21:10)

Top of the Stack

• “The Illegal Airstrips Bringing Toxic Mining to Brazil’s Indigenous Land” by Manuela Andreoni, Blacki Migliozzi, Pablo Robles, and Denise Lu
• The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert
• Ideas to Postpone the End of the World by Ailton Krenak
• Burden of Dreams documentary film

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi.

Today, we talk with Manuela Andreoni, a climate reporter at the New York Times. A few weeks ago, Manuela and several colleagues published a fascinating and disturbing piece in the Times on illegal mining in the Brazilian Amazon. In today's conversation, Manuela will help us understand why wildcat mining has proliferated in recent years, how the mining is affecting the local environment and Indigenous people, and how these mine materials may be ending up in the products that we use every day. Stay with us.

Manuela Andreoni, welcome to Resources Radio.

Manuela Andreoni: Thank you for having me. Very glad to be here.

Daniel Raimi: Manuela, we're going to talk today about a fascinating article that you published in the New York Times a few weeks ago, and the article documented illegal mining operations in the Brazilian Amazon. It's a fascinating piece of work. I'm sure many of our listeners have already seen it.

But before we talk about that, we always ask our guests how they got interested in working on environmental issues in the first place—whether you've been interested in this stuff your whole life or you've come to it more recently. What's steered you into working on this topic or other mining or natural resource topics?

Manuela Andreoni: I've always been a general interest–type person, but I fell in love with reporting on the environment because, as a reporter in Brazil, Amazon reporting has become a bigger and bigger issue. The destruction of the Amazon has become such a huge part of what we talk about.

I grew up in Rio, where I live right now, and we are surrounded by forests and hills. I grew up having a lot of contact with nature, doing hikes, and seeing how much our tropical forests and our rainforest was destroyed. When I started reporting about the Amazon, looking at that forest—that still feels so mighty and so rich and so intact.

I fell in love with telling stories about it and calling attention to its importance and how it's being destroyed. That's how it happened.

Daniel Raimi: How about this particular article? What drew your attention to illegal mining in the Amazon, and how did you end up working on it? I think you also worked with a partnership called the Rainforest Investigations Network. Can you tell us about how the origins of this story came about?

Manuela Andreoni: In 2021, I joined the Rainforest Investigations Network, which is a reporting project the Pulitzer Center put together that has people from several countries that have rainforests. And this reporter who also joined from Brazil, Hyury Potter, had this project to investigate airships connected to mining. He had been reporting about illegal mining for many years here in Brazil. I looked at his project, and I asked, "Can we collaborate?" Because I love it. I think it's such an important issue and so hard to look at through different lenses. He said yes, and that's how we started working together on it.

Daniel Raimi: You mentioned airstrips and mining. Can you help our listeners understand, for those who haven't read the article? What's the connection? Why is there a connection between airstrips and the Amazon and mining?

Manuela Andreoni: Mining in the Amazon happens a lot of the time in these really remote corners of the forest. It's typically done on riverbeds and often in protected lands and indigenous lands that are very hard to get to. We're talking about places that don't have roads and that, though they have rivers going there by boat, can take several days to reach or not be passable at all because of waterfalls and so on.

The only way to get to these places in an efficient manner is to fly. And this restriction, if we think about it, was supposed to be a deterrent, right? If it's so hard to get there, it shouldn't be widely done. But what we found is that's not a deterrent at all. In fact, it's more of an obstacle to police mining than it is for miners to work. Because while miners have dozens, hundreds of planes at their disposal, the federal police in Brazil only has one helicopter that can take troops to the forest.

So there's this huge problem. There are tens of thousands of miners in these remote corners of the forest that are sometimes inhabited by Indigenous people that live in relative isolation, that can't speak Portuguese, that don't have a lot of knowledge about how a society works. And there are thousands of them.

Prosecutors and law enforcement are like, "We can't arrest 10,000 or 30,000 people in the middle of the forest. How do we even get them to jail?" What law enforcement would like to do is just block them from getting there. If you block the planes, then you block their food supply, their supply to fuel, their supply to workers.

It's a really smart way to tackle this immense problem, and that's why we thought it was a good idea to show this connection and show the missed opportunities to deal with this problem.

Daniel Raimi: I want to come back to that issue of public policies in a few minutes, but first I'd love to ask you a few questions about the actual mining process itself and some of its environmental consequences.

First, a very basic question: what are people mining for? What are they looking for? And when they mine the materials, where are they ending up? What are the markets for the mine materials?

Manuela Andreoni: They're mining for lots of things, but mainly they're mining for gold and tin ore, which is used to make electronic equipment. Because the price of gold has grown a lot in recent years, especially as the economy becomes less stable, people rush to get gold because that's never going to get old.

So they're mainly looking for gold, which they find, in most cases, mixed with the sand in riverbeds. Once they extract much of that sand, what's often left underneath is tin ore mixed with other stuff. They start off as gold mines, but then they become tin ore mining. It's only possible because tin ore is so valuable right now, because it's ridiculously heavy. You take a little tiny bag of it and raise a ton. It’s super heavy. You can imagine flying with a 1970s plane full of that stuff. It's dangerous. It needs to be really valuable for it to be worth it.

They're basically mining for these two things, mostly on the rivers, which means that sometimes they have to divert the course of the river and destroy the ecosystem around it. But one of the biggest problems, especially with gold, is that they get these diesel pumps and pump strong streams of water on the mud to loosen it, and then they extract that mud with another pump. They get mud mixed with gold; later on, they're going to get this mud and put mercury in it because the particles of gold are going to connect with the mercury.

Then they're going to burn that mercury. That's where the biggest environmental problem is, really, because both the mercury that they discard accidentally and the mercury that evaporates and later falls as rain goes through the rivers and is eaten by fish. People eat this fish, and they get intoxicated with mercury, which can cause so many problems. I can't even list them all, but it affects fetal development, it makes people blind, it gives you cardiovascular problems. It is a vast array of things.

And it doesn't go away, because it's an element. It's going to be there for hundreds of years. You can't get rid of it. The more you pump in, it’s just going to stay there. That's that's the main concern in terms of health.

Daniel Raimi: You document, in the story, some shockingly high levels of mercury in local water supplies. Can you tell us about those levels?

Manuela Andreoni: In this one, I think it was five rivers. The federal police just did this analysis of water in five rivers in the Yanomami Indigenous land and found levels of mercury 8,600 percent above acceptable levels for human consumption. There hasn't been a lot of research about this that is very recent, but research from six years ago in villages in the Yanomami Indigenous land found that over 90 percent of people living in those villages had high concentrations of mercury in their blood. That is also true in other Indigenous lands in Brazil, like the Munduruku Indigenous land, where the Tapajos River goes through. Police did a similar analysis and found that it was a huge dam of mining.

I don't know if you remember that Vale, the mining company, had a big dam break here that killed hundreds of people. They were mining for tin ore, but the police found that the dam was breaking in that river in the middle of the Amazon once every five or 10 years. The sediment from illegal mining was so large.

So this is not only affecting this river in the Yanomami land; it's affecting several different rivers in the Amazon and making thousands of Indigenous people who live close to these mines very sick.

Daniel Raimi: I want to ask you about the public policy angle in one second, but first, a markets question. Can you tell us about where, ultimately, these tin and gold products are being consumed and whether there's a potential role for purchasers of these products to exert pressure or look more closely into their supply chains to try to lessen this extreme environmental degradation?

Manuela Andreoni: What we know is very disturbing, but we know very little about what happens to this golden tin ore.

We know that gold goes to jewelry stores, tech companies, and banks. Tech companies are a minority of the buyers, but because they're more transparent (given that they have to report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission where they're buying their minerals), we know a lot more about where they're buying their gold from. We know from Reuters stories and Associated Press stories that were published recently, for example, that gold from Indigenous lands in Brazil has gone through to Teslas, Google phones, Starbucks coffee machines—through these super complicated supply chains that have several steps. We know this because they report which refiners and smelters they're buying their gold from, and we know from police investigations and some corporate documents where these smelters are buying gold from.

For tin ore, we know very little about it. My sources in law enforcement say that there are tech companies outside Brazil that are buying this tin ore, but I don't know yet. I'm very eager to find out, but I don't know yet where it's going. And I think, very importantly, a lot of this gold—going back to gold for a second—a lot of researchers believe that this gold goes to banks across the world to just give our money value.

And banks just don't tell us where they're buying gold, right? The Fed or the central banks around the world are getting gold from somewhere to put in their coffers to make their money worth something. But we've known very little about where they're buying this gold from because they don't tell us what their suppliers are. And researchers told me that a huge amount of the gold that comes out of Brazil and other countries is actually going to these banks. It's a big unknown there.

There is a lot of opportunity for developed countries to pressure banks and technology companies and jewelmakers to give us information about which smelters they're buying their gold from, and to pressure the countries where these smelters are located to release information about where they're buying their gold from. Because you can't stop at the smelters. They're not actually the ones that are deep in the forest mining for this gold.

The documentation linking the two is sometimes hundreds of pieces of paper. At least in Brazil, they're not even digitized. You can't imagine how hard it is for police and law enforcement to look through these for fraud, which abounds. There's a lot of opportunity to improve how these things work.

Daniel Raimi: It sounds like it. Let's talk now about federal-level policy in Brazil and how that might be contributing to the problem. You talk in the story about President Bolsonaro of Brazil and how some of the policies his government has implemented seem to be contributing to the proliferation of these wildcat or illegal mines. Can you talk about those policies?

Manuela Andreoni: Bolsonaro always spoke in favor of wildcat miners. That alone helps them out a lot because you've got a promise, almost, from the highest ranking officer in the country saying, "We're not going to go after you." And he has visited an illegal mine in an Indigenous land; he is just saying, "I'm on your side." There were operations from the police that sought to crack down on illegal mining where people who participated on these operations were then fired from their jobs. So the biggest policy is boycotting law enforcement.

Then Bolsonaro tries to enact legislation to make mining in protected lands legal. The pressure to do that has increased a lot, but they haven't been able to do that yet. It's been more of a threat than anything else. There are these two things: weakening law enforcement, which is the biggest contribution to the growth of the illegal mining industry; and then trying to change legislation, which they haven't been successful in doing.

Daniel Raimi: When it comes to weakening law enforcement and regulatory enforcement, how reversible do you think those trends are, if a new government were to take power that had more of an interest in protecting these lands and in reducing the environmental degradation? You talk a little bit in the article about how the miners will often make it impossible for other planes to land at their remote landing strips, which made me wonder, If a new government came into power and really wanted to crack down on this stuff, how simple or straightforward would it be?

Manuela Andreoni: That's a good question. It's possible, but it's going to take a lot of work because these institutions were dismantled. You're going to have to hire a bunch of people. You're going to have to invest a bunch of money that the country doesn't have, and you're going to have to dismantle increasingly organized criminal activities in corners of the forest that are more and more remote.

While it is possible, it's going to take money, and it's going to take a lot of work. But it's been done in the past. It's important to remember that in the '80s, a similar gold rush sent tens of thousands of miners to these places in the Amazon to look for gold, and the government did a yearlong operation to get them out.

Then the military, which right now isn't doing much to fight illegal mining, did a lot. They closed the airspace. They had planes with raiders looking for illegal planes. There are some resources to do that.

Though it may be expensive, political will will go a long way in getting Brazil to a better place. Of course, it's not very hard to be better than it is right now. But just political will will get to a much better place than it is now. Then the government is going to have to make it a priority and hire more people and put more money into rebuilding these institutions to protect the Amazon.

Daniel Raimi: That makes me think of a political economy question. Who are the interests that really want to see this mining continue, and how much power do they exert over political actors in the Brazilian government, whether it's in the legislature or in the executive branch?

Manuela Andreoni: Not only with illegal mining, but with all sorts of environmental crimes happening in the Amazon, there aren't that many economically powerful people on the environment side. We haven't, as a society—and I'm not just talking about Brazil, I'm talking about the world—figured out how to make this standing forest be worth a lot of money. We can make it worth a little money. But a lot of money, like money you can make selling gold? We haven't gotten there yet. That's a really difficult problem to solve that I think we don't have the answer for, and I don't see that much work by governments going into making solutions scalable.

Bolsonaro supporters always complain that everyone blames Bolsonaro for destroying the Amazon, and it's not like that because it started way before that. To some extent they're right, because past governments were much better at protecting the forest: strengthening those law enforcement agencies and so on. But in terms of building up an economy that isn't reliant on illegal activity like illegal mining, no one has been able to do that.

That's the biggest problem because the people who have money to do political campaigns in these places very often are connected to these illegal activities, right? The guy in our story, the businessman who's suspected of running a logistics operation to support illegal mining in the Yanomami land, is running a very expensive campaign for Congress. And he might be elected because there aren't a lot of people who have that kind of money there to run this campaign.

Not having the economic pillars there to support a standing forest makes the fight a lot weaker because you don't have very powerful people on the environment side. You don't have people making money from a healthy environment. And that's a huge problem.

Daniel Raimi: That's a great point. It is one of the main reasons for the existence of Resources for the Future (RFF), our organization. We try to understand the value to society of natural resources like forests and clean water and clean air. Of course, we don't have the political power of some of the other folks that you mentioned, but this is such a fascinating conversation, and I'd like to ask you just one more question before we go to our Top of the Stack segment.

You've referred to the Yanomami communities several times in our conversation. I was fascinated by a couple points you make in the story about how some of these mining activities have led to division and conflict within some of those communities. Can you talk about those dynamics for a few minutes?

Manuela Andreoni: In some ways, I think that's the saddest part. You can imagine these miners, coming from this city with cell phones and packaged foods and liquor, going into these communities that live in a completely different world, that speak a different language, that have access to different technologies, let's say.

What often happens is that they stoke divisions by giving packaged foods to Indigenous people and telling them, "Hey, you don't need to grow food anymore. Here you go." Or forcing women into prostitution, giving Indigenous people access to the internet through their cell phones, which they wouldn't have without the miners; or giving them guns to solve problems that they would've solved in some other way if they didn't have guns. This has really destroyed the soul of some communities.

We focus on one mine in our story, showing all the illegal airships and how mining has grown there. A few months ago, there was an episode where Indigenous people that had guns supplied by miners attacked another community that was against the miners, and people died. You're destroying the social fabric that holds these people together. And this is something that's going to be very hard to get back. I think it's the saddest part of it all.

Davi Kopenawa, who's an Indigenous leader in the Yanomami land, has written a book called The Falling Sky, which is all about the cosmological vision of the Yanomami indigenous people, their beliefs, and how they see nature and how white men, white people are coming to destroy—the way they put it in their culture is quite interesting. They say white people are digging up the disease that the gods had buried called xawara. In digging for gold, they're digging out this big monster-type creature that is making the world sick.

It's a big book, but I recommend it to learn more about how Indigenous people view these issues, how much they can teach us about the value of our natural resources, and how we are really destroying that knowledge in destroying their communities. And we really need it.

Daniel Raimi: There are so many more questions I would love to ask you and could ask you about this, but we're reaching the end of our time. So, I'm going to ask you to recommend something that you think our listeners might enjoy, something that might be at the top of your literal reading stack or your metaphorical reading stack.

I'll give a really quick recommendation because we're talking about the Amazon today. The film that always comes to mind for me, when I think about the Amazon, is this documentary called Burden of Dreams. It's actually a documentary about the making of a film. That film is called Fitzcarraldo, and the documentary is about the filmmaker, Werner Herzog, trying to make this movie in the middle of the Amazon. And one of the things they have to do in the movie is literally pull a boat over a mountain.

It's bizarre and hilarious and kind of beautiful and weird all at once. It's one of my favorite films, and it's got lots of wonderful footage of beautiful places in the Amazon, including some Indigenous peoples. I don't know what affiliation they are, but it's really a great film.

But how about you? Can you recommend something that's at the top of your stack for our listeners?

Manuela Andreoni: There’s this very tiny book called Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, which was written by Ailton Krenak, who's an Indigenous leader here. It's all about how the Western concept of humanity has created the environmental crisis and what the Indigenous way of living can teach us to tackle this crisis. It's a good book to have on your bedside sometimes. So I recommend that one.

Daniel Raimi: Thank you. One more time, Manuela Andreoni, thank you so much for joining us today, telling us about your fascinating work, and thank you for coming out to Resources Radio.

Manuela Andreoni: Thank you for having me.

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