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Peru is losing a battle against illegal gold mining in its rainforests
As a military helicopter roared overhead and soldiers fired the first warning shots, six wildcat miners rushed onto a boat and tore downriver. Another plunged into the water and swam after them, leaving behind a makeshift camp that would soon go up in flames.
The scene in a dense, remote jungle south of the Amazon was part of an operation by Peruvian troops to blow up as many engines and fuel supplies as possible. The aim was to disrupt illegal gold mines growing out of control as the precious metal’s high prices create fresh demand.
At best, this type of mission can slow the pace of deforestation and pollution. Halting it is another story. Even when operations go according to plan, it’s only a matter of days — or even hours — before miners return with new equipment, said Ronal Ramón Flores, a federal prosecutor involved in the operations.
“Mining is winning,” he said. While raids in and around Tambopata National Reserve happen only sporadically, miners work around the clock, every hour, every day of the year, he said.
“They have the upper hand because it’s almost impossible to stop them.”
Weaving around muddy pits carved throughout the Tambopata National Reserve, some soldiers used machetes to take apart the wooden structures miners use to sift gold from dirt. Others tore down the blue plastic sheets tied to trees that serve as walls and roofs at the camps and brothels propelling one of the region’s fastest-growing illicit economies.
From downriver, the fleeing miners must have seen the black curtains of smoke rising from what had been their beds and gas stoves, where a headless lizard lay ready to be cooked. Clothes hung from trunks and piles of smuggled Brazilian beer cans littered the sandy ground.
Similar scenes played out at the dozens of mining camps raided inside the reserve that day in August. Some even had bar counters and volleyball courts, signs of an entrenched and resilient population.
The surroundings of the Tambopata National Reserve have long been a hotspot for informal and illegal gold mining near Bolivia and Brazil. But today wildcat miners are plundering this supposedly protected area like never before.
As wealthy people and governments seek refuge in gold from inflation, wars and geopolitical instability, the heyday of the precious metal has turned mining into such a magnet that, since last year, illegal miners have deforested an area equivalent to roughly 700 soccer fields within Tambopata, digging up dirty gold potentially worth millions of dollars.
“It’s easy money,” said Navy Lieutenant Commander Renato Mandiola. Some workers at Tambopata’s illegal mines can make up to $5,000 a month, he added. That’s five times the base salary of a Navy member. “Who wouldn’t go mining for that money?”
Overnight setback
Mandiola had sent 70 of his strong men deep into the jungle as part of an operation led by the Public Prosecutor’s Office with support from US-based nonprofit Global Conservation in a bid to step up the fight against wildcatters. On the first day of the operation, in which Bloomberg embedded, the military destroyed nearly $1.7 million worth of mining equipment inside the reserve.
“It was a success,” Mandiola said.
But as the last light slipped between the jungle canopy, something started to feel wrong.
One patrol didn’t make it back to the base where soldiers were supposed to spend the night before resuming operations the next day. The group had disappeared beyond radio range. They were carrying a new Starlink device but had forgotten to set it up.
“There was a breakdown in coordination,” said Flores, Provisional Deputy Supreme Prosecutor at the Prosecutor General’s Office. He was among the missing group, along with about 15 special forces soldiers, Global Conservation’s regional head and an international photojournalist.
They slept outside by the river that night, cold and hungry, Flores said, waiting to be rescued. “It can happen.”
The group was found the next morning. Days later, Flores said he could not rule out that someone linked to the operation had deliberately failed to pick them up “as a form of warning or intimidation.”
When Flores and the missing group were found the next morning, they were also with a 20-year-old woman and her one-year-old son. Her name was Liz Compi. She had gone to the mining site the night before with a group of miners to check on the damage to their equipment. When the men spotted the soldiers, they fled, leaving her and her son behind — something military officials said often happens to women and children during raids.
Authorities later let her go. They said they could not tell whether she was collaborating with the illegal mining network or had been trafficked into it. The same thing happened with a 30-year-old woman who also said she cooked for another group of gold diggers. During the four-day operation, no one was arrested.
Compi had arrived in the regional capital of Puerto Maldonado from Cusco just weeks earlier, she said. She had not gotten into the university where she wanted to study education and, as a single mother, needed money. So she answered an ad for a cook and ended up making beans and other meals for illegal miners. She hoped to make about $450 a month.
“That’s pretty good money,” she said. According to Mandiola, other workers at illegal camps can make that much in a single day.
The roadblocks
While Peru is best known for its massive copper mines, it is also South America’s No. 1 gold producer. Mining accounts for 60% of the nation’s exports, with the formal industry increasingly battling for control of mineral-rich territory with informal and illegal actors.
Illegal gold exports from the country topped an estimated $11.5 billion in 2025, according to the Lima-based think tank Peruvian Institute of Economics. That’s more than six times the level a decade ago and 55% higher than the previous year.
Around the Tambopata National Reserve, the latest illegal mining boom has roots in the late 2000s, as the global financial crisis drove up gold prices and a new highway attracted miners and opened easier routes to neighboring countries. Illegal miners have been inside the reserve for at least a decade, but deforestation has never reached the levels seen today.
Some of Tambopata’s dirty gold is smuggled out through the borders with Bolivia and Brazil, while some of it enters the legal trade, Flores said. In the latter case, a controversial certification system called Reinfo is part of the problem. It was designed to bring informal miners into the legal economy but, according to its critics, ended up creating a way to simply launder illegal mining into the legal market.
In downtown Puerto Maldonado, entire streets are geared toward this underground economy. Shops sell the same engines, generators, and blue plastic sheeting that miners use at their camps. Nearby are money-exchange shops whose names include the word “gold” in Spanish, English or Quechua, and buy illegally mined gold. Everyone there knows whether the price of the metal is going up or down, and whether the military is carrying out operations in the jungle.
Over the past decade, Peru’s relentless presidential turnover has made it hard to sustain a coordinated, long-term strategy against illegal mining. Corruption has made things worse. Just last month, police officers and a former prosecutor who worked in the Tambopata region of Madre de Dios were arrested for allegedly tipping off illegal miners about raids, helping them keep their operations running.
Budget is another big problem. Authorities are fighting a thriving illegal industry while struggling to pay for even the basics.
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office does not have a single dollar in its budget” for tackling illegal mining, Flores said, wearing a uniform he had to buy himself. “It is shameful that we have to scrape together money just to feed the armed forces.”
Newly inaugurated President Keiko Fujimori has promised to put more resources into fighting organized crime and insecurity, and a bigger role for the armed forces. She has said the military will lead operations in areas under states of emergency, in place for crime in Tambopata until earlier this month, and dozens of other districts nationwide.
But Fujimori has laid out no concrete plan to tackle illegal mining so far. Her critics remain skeptical, pointing to her influential party’s efforts in recent years to court small-scale miners in Congress, backing repeated extensions of Reinfo that allows them to operate without full environmental or operating permits.
“There is not much trust,” said Julio Cusuriche, an Indigenous leader from Madre de Dios, adding that military actions will never be enough without sustainable economic alternatives for locals. As long as illegal miners operate unchecked, he warned, communities surrounding Tambopata will remain exposed to mercury pollution as diggers use the toxic metal as the cheapest way to separate gold from ore.
Fujimori’s team didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Back from last week’s operation, prosecutor Flores was blunt: the hit was “almost nothing” compared with the scale of illegal mining within the national reserve. To retake control of the area, operations “must be permanent and destroy absolutely everything,” he said.
“Otherwise, it will be nothing more than a show of state presence, and that is completely insufficient.”
(By Carla Samon Ros)
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