PICTURES

COMMENTARY

Images of Cayenne

VO1

The tropical city of Cayenne looks very familiar.  A gendarmerie, a boulangerie, prices in Euros.  This is French Guyana in South America, administratively part of France, even though it is 4,000 miles away from the boulevards of Paris.

PTC

It is said you can tell the colonial legacy of a place by the breakfast they serve.  Here it is the croissant.  And in the morning papers the story is all about the gold rush on the Brazilian border.

Paper -

Man with gold necklace

Driving shots in car

VO3

Gold is big news here.  More than 4 tonnes of it is exported every year - much of it illegally mined.

To find out more, I took a ride to the French-Brazilian border, and then set off up the Oiapoque river that acts as the frontier between Brazil on the one side and Europe on the other

The problem is that almost all the clandestine miners are poor Brazilians. The other passengers were just some of the thousands who have flocked to this river to cross over and mine in what is part of the EU, and so creating Europe's hidden environmental tragedy.

There are an estimated 15,000 Brazilian miners in these jungles.

After a  precarious journey we finally reach a settlement which isn't on any map.

PTC

We have just arrived here, it's been about 6 hours in the boats, at a place they call the Ilha, the Island, which is the kind of base camp for all the garimperos to go into France.

Night to day

Shots of Ilha

VO6

A ramshackle support town for the mines, it is home to a floating population of about a thousand people, with boats coming and going constantly.

With no police, running water, infrastructure, it's every man for himself.  But what's most striking is the currency here is gold.

Shopkeeper

Chat with shopkeeper.

Petroleros

VO7

Ilha is also a major depot for petrol. Men called Petroleros carry a constant supply through the jungle on crude backpacks like these to feed the motors that excavate the gold.

PTC

Alex trying on petrol barrel.

PTC

Gold teeth

Shots of prostitutes

VO8

Where miners go, prostitutes follow.  There are ten brothels with dozens of sex workers here in Ilha: the cost is three grams a trick.

Chat with prostitute

Alex chat with prostitute.

Shots of garimperos, and river patrols

River shots etc.

VO9

For all the lure of riches, Ilha is a place that lives on its nerves - with constant patrols by French police and the foreign legion..

After some persuading the garimperos only agreed to take us to a mine if we promised not to reveal its location.

PTC

We're almost here...

Walking through jungle

VO11

Even though I knew what to expect, the devastation of the mine was shocking.

First the rainforest is burnt down to clear space for the dig. Then the earth is hosed down, opening a giant crater, and the muddy gold ore pumped up to a makeshift sluice.  It's a lot of destruction for not much gold. This site only produces about 15 grams a day - worth just under £200.

Even so, it is still worth it for these men - for whom this is their best chance of a wage.

PTC

When you buy gold in the high streets of London or Paris it could have come from a place like this.

Gold miners

VO12

But these men get very little from this, they share just a third of what is found after the rest is given to the motor's owner.

But their impact on the environment is huge.  The ecosystem here is being steadily wrecked.  While the miners themselves live with the daily threat of malaria, violence and for them - worse still - French raids where all their equipment is destroyed. 

But this does not put them off.

Garimpero

They will never be able to stop it because the jungle is so big and we are so tenacious.

Shots of Camopi

VO13

Further up the  Oiapoque on the French side is Camopi, an Indian settlement  with a French post office - and three Gendarmes.

The  bulk of their work is protecting 14,000 sq km of jungle from the Brazilian miners. It is an uphill struggle. 

Gendarme

One worry, sadly, is that the forest is immense and so after our raids we don't have any way to take the miners out, like on a road or anything that could take a bus. So, the workers who are found on site, they just have to be left there.

Oiapoque GVs

VO15

We headed back down river to the Brazilian town of Oiapoque, where  the illegally mined gold from the region ends up. There are over a dozen gold shops - all doing a brisk trade.

Gold shots

VO16

This raw gold arrived from Ilha this morning.  Here they melt it down, turn it into bars, and weigh it.  This piece is worth about £1000.

Alex PTC

I have just asked him where it ends up - he says most of it goes abroad.

Shots of Hatton Gardens

VO17

And so, the gold leaves the heart of Amazon and enters the global supply chain.

GVs of Hatton Gardens

VO18

London's Hatton Garden sees more than a few nuggets of the 2,000 or so  tonnes of gold produced globally every year, but as expert Tim Green says, its impossible to say whether this gold has come from a legal source or not.

Tim Green

Gold is something where you get a bar of gold - you mix with scrap - all mixed in together and that's what you get in your pot of gold.

PTC

VO19 And this is the crux of the problem - how can you regulate an industry if the origins are untraceable.  With the price of the gold at an almost record high, and with many tonnes left in the ground of French Guyana, the trade in illicit gold is likely to continue for some time to come.