In the middle of October, environmental agencies and the Federal Police blew up a total of 121 barges on the Madeira River in the northern Brazilian state of Rondônia. The vessels had been used for wildcat gold mining, which has close links to organized crime and environmental destruction across Brazil’s Amazon region.
These mining bars operate by sucking up water from the river to extract sediment, which is then mixed with mercury that bonds to any fragments of gold within. Once separated, the highly poisonous mercury is then burned away from the gold, and the toxic by-products are…