Gold mining has been a feature of the Andean Amazon since pre-Colombian times and, along with silver, it was the cornerstone of the economy in the colonial and republican periods. In Brazil, gold mining was a source of wealth for the Portuguese crown and a major diver in the colonization of Mato Grosso and Rondônia during the eighteenth century. Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana all experienced nineteenth-century gold rushes, as did Venezuela in the first decades of the twentieth century. These historical events, however, have been dwarfed by the gold rushes of the modern era, all of which occurred after the United States ended the convertibility of the dollar in 1971. The decision to untether international gold markets coincided with a decade marked by inflation that triggered an exponential increase in the price of gold. Coincidentally, Amazonian countries adopted policies to open their forest hinterlands to migration and development (see Chapter 6). The intent was to catalyze the expansion of the national economy via agricultural and mineral development. Structural obstacles and hubris doomed many initiatives, at least at first, but tens of thousands of families responded by migrating to the Amazon. Many headed for the recently discovered gold fields in Carajás, Tapajós, Roraima, Madre de Dios and the Guiana Coast. These wildcat miners soon became adept at discovering alluvial gold, which they exploited with the full support of their governments. Corporate miners eventually followed, armed with information from high-quality geological surveys published by national mining ministries. Those technical documents disseminate…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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