B60 Colombia, Madre de Dios PERU 1902

Over the last 40 years, a series of mining and logging booms in Madre de Dios has wrought terrible environmental damage: leaving fetid moonscapes in what used to be virgin forests, along with polluted rivers loaded with tons of mercury.

— Saul Elbein, “Poor Enticed by Gold and Better Life Leave Behind Environmental Ruin,” 2015    

But protecting the tribes’ land might be an unrealistic hope. The governor of Madre de Dios, Luis Otsuka, is the former head of a statewide miners’ association, and he has not changed his loyalties. He has allowed gold miners to strip large sections of jungle, and, a few months before I arrived, he sent bulldozers to begin pushing a road through the forest, which would run along the Madre de Dios River, connecting the gold-mining areas to the regional capital, Puerto Maldonado. It would be, in a sense, the fulfillment of Fitzcarrald’s dream.

— John Lee Anderson, “An Isolated Tribe Emerges from the Rain Forest,” 2016

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