It was 10 years ago – the end of 2014 – when I first said goodbye to the Amazon. Since May 2013, I’d been spending most of my time in Ecuadorian indigenous communities in the forest, as part of fieldwork for a Latin American Studies program.
The longest stint in the forest was four months straight. It was strange to come back to “the world” after that. Looking in a mirror was disconcerting. Sitting on a toilet felt bizarre. Catching up on world news was like reading a thriller.
The first week out there was always tough. I’d sleep on a hiking mat on the floor under a mosquito net. All the water came from nearby creeks and all the food came from cultivated plots of plantain and cassava in the forest.
There were moments of beauty – hiking along ridgelines, pulling catfish out from under stones in streams – but they were the exception. Generally, life was gritty and taxing.
Most indigenous villages in Amazonia are former missions. The missionaries convinced people to live in towns in exchange for metal tools and the promise of literacy, a kind of white man’s magic.
Unfortunately, the missionaries had God and the civilizing mission more to the fore of their minds than sanitation or economics. People gained epidemic diseases and lost easy access to the forest, having to hike to their dispersed forest gardens and struggling to find any game to hunt in the vicinity of the new towns.
Even so, the next generation did learn to read, write and speak Spanish or Portuguese. They won the capacity to hold their own in interactions with the world outside Amazonia.
From people to people, and in some cases town by town, Amazonians have made different choices about what to make of these interactions. Back in 2013-2014, the people I lived with wanted little to do with outsiders. They raised and sold cattle to buy their children’s school supplies, and that was about it.
So heading back out there in 2022 required plenty of mental preparation. Camp supplies were organised. An auto-reply to my email was in place. My girlfriend wrote a poetic Instagram post to let friends know that she’d be back in touch in a few months. The vibe was, “See you on the other side.”
The first thing we noticed was the new bridge. Before, you had to ride in the back of a truck to a tiny riverside slum town, then hitch a canoe ride in any way you could. Now, the bus rolled straight into the old mission town.
We wandered over to the house of some friends where I’d lived in 2014. I found myself completely disoriented. The wooden plank bridge had been replaced by a gravel road and culvert. In place of the little hut made of loose boards stood a seven-room concrete compound, including a hardware store in the front and three utes parked out front.
After the hugs and greetings, the story soon came out before long: they’d rented their patch of the riverfront to wildcat gold miners. The 20% cut came to millions of dollars. It was the same story all around town: concrete houses, satellite internet, four-wheel drives.
Plenty of people blew it. They spent months travelling around the country staying in hotels and eating at restaurants. One young guy lent $30,000 to a friend who then decided he’d rather keep the money than the friendship. Two brothers built a nightclub by the river, only to see it destroyed in floods a few months later.
Others made better decisions. Some of the young people were paid through university. The cash fuelled more than a few political campaigns, which have since translated into official positions and a salary. Some bought property in nearby towns and make a subsistence income through rent.
My favourite were those who became rich but lived much the same. There were millionaires who’d still sit out in hunting ambushes getting eaten alive by mosquitos because they preferred forest meat to commercial animals. I know one gent who’d return home with game before dawn and pay a female neighbour to butcher it for him, so that he didn’t have to wake up his wife to do it.
Then there were others who, through lack of land, saw the gold rush skip over them completely. They still live in huts, still scrape a living selling plantains or timber.
All in all, it made for a messy situation, but you couldn’t blame them. Few people anywhere would turn down that kind of money, let alone folks who had next to nothing, financially speaking, to start with.
The situation I witnessed is unusual in that the indigenous owners of the land were able to exert enough control over the territory to profit. But alluvial mining in and of itself is becoming more and more common as an effect of the rising gold price. A recent review in Nature found an average 23% of large-river length is impacted by mining excavation across 30 countries.
There is no shortage of analysis lamenting this development or talking around it. Some researchers are critical of even discussing the issue, preferring to “amplify” narratives that highlight an ecological core to Global South cosmologies, whether that is true in the case in question or not.
The less unrealistic ones talk about alternatives for development or better controls on illegal mineral exports. But let’s be honest: gold is a transhistorical force. It’s never been stopped before.
For my part, I wonder about this impulse from writers and researchers to claim to have the answer or the best politico-ethical line. There’s a kind of hubris in hoping to compel the correct moral course that isn’t so far from that of the missionaries.
Sometimes, wildly unexpected things happen. Sometimes, a story is just a story.
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