Divided by Gold
YEAR 2020.
Soccer, beers, barbecue, shared sweat, teamwork. Laughter. Nine people with yellow rubber boots and machetes in their hands smile at the camera. Others, as if it were choreographed, weed a section of jungle with their bare hands to set up the field. In the background, a machine turns and cement covers the bricks that will support the construction of a communal house. The roof is made of zinc. Several men raise a wooden pole on which they install an electricity box. All the photographs speak of the joy of shared labor and community.
“Those were our social events, which took place before the Chinese company poisoned the conscience of some residents,” says Patricio Villamil three years later while sending photos through WhatsApp. Villamil is the president of the community of Shiguacocha, a village of 50 families in the rural area of the Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola canton in the province of Napo in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
The company, Terraearth Resources, specializes in gold mining and has a 4,077-acre, small-scale mining concession in the region. Mineral extraction in Napo began more than 25 years ago. But between 2015 and 2023 it expanded by 300 percent.
“If we look back, the first mining companies came to settle in rural areas inhabited by Indigenous communities that did not know what they were coming to do and, in addition, had no education. Some of them did not even speak Spanish,” says Andres Rojas, Ombudsman of Napo.
“The companies arrived offering work, favors, and money. They made the elders put their fingerprints on permits, documents, and contracts, or they bought the land from them at ridiculous prices. The people began to divide between those who benefited from the newly arrived companies and those who witnessed the painful destruction of their land, their water, their habitat.”
This feature is the first of a three-part series (translated from Spanish) by journalist Gabriela Verdezoto Landívar that investigates and offers different points of view on gold mining in the Ecuadorian Amazon’s Napo province, where mining grew 907 percent between 2011 and 2021.
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