Gunshots in the Night: The Amazon Gold Rush

And why I lied about telling people’s stories

Riding along the empty streets of Puerto Maldonado, a sleepy Peruvian river port, I felt like I was leaving some post-apocalyptic town. Half-broken, makeshift barricades stood at corners and main streets. Garbage, broken glass, and burnt tires were strewn all over the place. Windows were boarded up, some scribbled with graffiti. The silence was deafening.

Just outside the town, I encountered one last blockade guarded by a large group of locals. Spotting me, the protesters sprang to their feet. Some held machetes and sticks; “La selva no se vende,” (“the jungle isn’t for sale”), a few of them yelled, shaking their fists. My heart pounded in my chest, and I could hear my blood thumping in my ears. Should I try and ride through, hoping they would let me pass – or was this a really, really bad idea?

The group was getting bigger, spreading out across the road. There was no way around or through the protesters; more and more people seemed to join the swelling crowd, and they were angry.

Jungle World

I’d arrived in Puerto Maldonado just a week before, hoping to leave the bike behind for a few days and head out into the Amazon rainforest by boat and foot. The Rio Madre de Dios region is a treasure trove of jungle hikes in the wilderness teeming with wildlife; it also happens to be the hotspot of Peru’s gold rush - and that year, the prices were spiking.

Surrounded by white colonial buildings, the main square of Puerto Maldonado looked sunny and cheerful. Schoolgirls in neatly pressed uniforms, with bright ribbons in their hair, giggled and shared bubblegum under the lofty dark green trees lining the square. Music played in cafes and restaurants, shopkeepers stood in doorways chatting and greeting passers-by, women sold eggs and sandwiches on the corners; down at the port, barge captains offered river tours and piranha fishing. Local guides in khaki shorts and hats hustled for business, and in a small riverbank café, boatmen drank whiskey and listened to Jamaican music, the moist jungle heat rising and engulfing the whole town.

Luis, the owner of the small hostel where I was staying, offered three-day jungle trips, and I booked one that same day. He looked like a young, heartbroken Che Guevara: dark-haired and broody, Luis wore a dreamy, tortured look and a dark green beret with a red star. I wasn’t sure whether his intentions were purely poetic, or if it was just good business: Luis succeeded in selling his tours and hooking up with blonde, doe-eyed American girls at an alarming rate. In my mind, I called him “Dozen Talents”: he ran the hostel and the tours, worked for a local travel agency, and was building his own jungle lodge, all with a feverish impatience to make it big and leave for something better and further away.

Led by Dozen Talents, I left for the jungle trip together with three American students, a French couple, and a lone German backpacker. Boarding an old wooden barge, we headed down river racing along its muddy waters. From time to time, we’d spot a small settlement in the rainforest: kids swimming in the brown waters, women swaying gently in hammocks strung across bamboo porches, men fishing from small dugout canoes. The barge deposited us on a muddy bank and, following Dozen Talents, we hiked along a sticky jungle trail for hours, sweating and panting as the dark green forest around us glistened with moisture, dew dripping off leaves and vines, the earth soft and soggy under our feet. Heavy vines hung down between the trees like curtains; colorful birds and small monkeys watched us carefully from the branches.

We spent two days at Lago Sandoval, a rich, vast lake hidden away in the dense rainforest staying with a local family in their bamboo huts, sleeping in hammocks,  going on jungle walks to spot howler monkeys and tarantulas, lunching on termites, and watching river otters. The sleepy lush rainforest swallowed us whole, and I felt like I was daydreaming on some distant green planet where life itself crept, curled, and crawled everywhere in vines, and the world had fallen away.

The Mother of God at War

When we returned from the jungle four days later, Puerto Maldonado had changed.

Gone were the giggly schoolgirls and the large, wide-hipped women selling food. Cafes, restaurants, and shops were closed down, the windows boarded up with pieces of cardboard, sheets of tin, and bits of wood. Rusted wire, bricks, tires, and garbage were strewn across the main streets. The traffic had vanished, and the city resembled some ghost town where, one day, the inhabitants had just gotten up and disappeared.

“La selva no se vende!” The black and red graffiti sprawled across the walls of houses everywhere announced. “The jungle is not for sale!”

“It’s the strike,” Dozen Talents said, shaking his head. “The gold miners’ strike from Mazuco has spread. Stay in the hostel. Don’t go out alone,” he warned us.

Puerto Maldonado was now swarming with military and police personnel. “No hay paso,” I heard again and again when I asked soldiers in the street whether the main road was closed. “No passage. The road is closed. No bus, no taxi, no car. You cannot leave. No hay paso,” they kept repeating, hands on their rifles, anxious, wiping the sweat off their brows.

The town was paralyzed; the airport was overrun. Some ten thousand gold miners had seized the city, and no one could come in or leave. While the main square and the few surrounding streets were considered safe, the soldiers told us not to venture outside the center. “Protesters throw stones. They have sticks. They are angry. No hay paso!”

Bewildered, we spent hours huddled together in the lobby of the hostel, trying to figure out what to do. The German backpacker was panicking. His flight home was in three days, and if he didn’t make it to Lima in time, he’d miss his plane. The American girls seemed terrified. I was in no rush to be anywhere, but the situation did not bode well. I pondered attempting to sneak out of Puerto Maldonado – on a bike, I figured, it might just be possible.

On the other hand, if the road was blocked further ahead, too, I would be stuck in no man’s land, and no help would come.

We spent two restless days like this, trying to tune in to the news - except there was no news. The whole city was in a complete shutdown, but in the media, Puerto Maldonado did not even rate a mention.

Dozen Talents had vanished. The receptionist, a short, slight, black-haired woman, looked exhausted, her eyes red from crying. “They wouldn’t allow us to go to work,” she said, quietly. “If you are not with the protesters, they think you’re against them. That’s why all the shops are closed... people are afraid to have their windows broken or worse, if the gold miners think they are betraying the protest.”

The town was running low on fuel and supplies; no car, truck, or tuktuk could come or leave – the miners had blocked all access, and the army was gearing up for a clash.

On the third morning, I walked down to the riverbank to talk to the barge captains. The Rio Madre de Dios was now the only way out of Puerto Maldonado; I figured I could put the bike on a boat and leave by the river, but I wasn’t the only one, and the boatmen were cashing in: the journey that used to cost fifty soles, or about twenty dollars US, was now going for two thousand soles, close to six hundred American dollars. Even if I’d been desperate to escape, this was too much money.

On the fourth night, I woke up to what sounded like fireworks. As I got my bearings, I realized the pop-pop-pop meant something else: it was gunfire, echoing across the city.

There was still nothing on the news.

The Gold Rush

Talking to the locals, I pieced together what was going on.

Peru is one of the major gold producers in the world, but while the government is happy to hand out mining concessions to large multinational corporations, locals can’t afford licenses or proper equipment.

Out of poverty and desperation, illegal mining operations spring up everywhere along Rio Madre De Dios; thousands of hectares of forest are being cut down and burned every day to make room for the mining pits and machinery. Hidden away in the near-impenetrable rainforest, illegal gold miners set up temporary camps, pumping water from the river to strip the soil away. Then, mercury is added to bind the gold dust and nuggets. The leftovers go straight back into the Amazonian waterways; fish and other river wildlife are infused with mercury, and inevitably, over time, domestic animals and people get contaminated, especially the indigenous communities that depend on the Rio Madre de Dios.

The River of the Mother of God had become poisonous, and the Peruvian government was attempting to stop the illegal gold mining once and for all, destroying the miners’ camps and equipment. Protests, riots, and clashes erupted: for poor, mostly indigenous Peruvians who earned thirty dollars a month, gold mining was the only way to make ends meet.

“When a local cuts down a carefully selected, old tree for a boat or firewood, or hunts spider monkeys for food, he gets punished, but when a large Western or Chinese company destroys an entire section of the forest, our politicians applaud progress and investment. Tell me, is this fair?” Dozen Talents asked me.

He had finally reappeared and taken his usual place at the reception desk, looking more broody and forlorn than ever, his Che Guevara beret sitting solemnly atop his dark head. “The multinational companies destroy the trees, the soil, and take whatever they want,” he spat. “They make a multimillion-dollar profit, and the politicians stuff their pockets as a reward for arranging the deal. Is it any wonder that the people are protesting?”

It wasn’t. Restless, I waited for another day to pass; Easter was just around the corner. More and more people seemed to be out and about, and the policemen and soldiers in the plaza looked a little less tense. “Tranquilo, todo tranquilo hoy dia,” a police officer told me, leaning on his riot shield. It’s quiet today.

I decided to take my chances, packing the bike and aiming for the road to Mazuko.

Facing the crowd at the roadblock on the outskirts of the town, I stopped and took my helmet off.

“Can I please pass?” I asked the man who approached me. He was tall and grave-looking, wearing tatty flip flops and a red shirt. “No hay paso. La selva no se vende!” he shouted, defiantly. “No hay paso!”

Slowly, the crowd had surrounded me.

I fished out my old press pass out of my wallet. “Periodista”, I explained. I’m a journalist. “Look, I know you have a cause. I understand. I will write about it, okay?” I pleaded. “I will tell your story.”

The man pondered the idea, then turned back to consult others.

Adrenaline cursing through my veins, I stood there trying to look calm. There was no telling whether the mood of the crowd would change; people looked at me with weary glances, and some were still holding machetes, rocks, and sticks.

But the worst part was, I was lying to them.

I wouldn’t write about it.

I wouldn’t tell their story, because the world wasn’t interested. The world didn’t care that the man in the red shirt hadn’t been able to find work since the gold mining camp was destroyed two months back, and that his wife had cooked their last chicken days ago; that the woman who was shaking her fist in the air had a sick father and four kids and a brother who was in hospital, both of his legs broken by the police; that the little old man sitting on the side of the road had lost his son in an accident when an open pit collapsed; and that they were all being slowly poisoned by the mercury and cyanide used in the mines, and that tens of thousands of square kilometers of rainforest around the Rio Madre de Dios were being razed to the ground.

Eventually, they let me pass.

“It’s not your fight,” the man in the red shirt sighed.

I thanked him and nodded, put my helmet back on, waved, and left, picking my way carefully through people, burning tires, and broken glass on the road. All the way to Mazuko, I saw remnants of other barricades, tires still smoldering, people sitting dejectedly by the roadside. Nobody tried to stop me.

Mazuko was quiet, too. Soon, I passed the last police checkpoint. The road wound back up into the mountains and towards Cuzco; here, life went on as it always had.

President Ollanta Humala and a few politicians had made appearances and pledges. There were some speeches and promises.

The Associated Press and the BBC covered the Puerto Maldonado protests in two short paragraphs, tallying up the dead (3) and wounded (15).

Then, the subject was forgotten like a mudslide in Rio Madre De Dios, the murky waters already closing over the sinkhole.