Blood gold

Day or night? It makes no difference in the Amazon gold rush. The clatter of the hundreds of engines that pump water in search of the precious metal never stops. By day, enormous trucks move the earth where forests once stood; by night, the soil is washed with hundreds of cubic metres of water to extract the gold. Informal mining camps extend into Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Brazil, destroying the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world and poisoning the land inhabited by hundreds of indigenous peoples with mercury. Huge tracts of tropical rainforest have become graveyards for trees, drenched in the toxic metal.