Rodrigo Cruz

Photographer
      
The everyday life of the Illegal miners in the Peruvian Amazon.
Public Project
The everyday life of the Illegal miners in the Peruvian Amazon.
Copyright Rodrigo Cruz 2024
Date of Work Jun 2017 - Ongoing
Updated Jul 2020
Location Boca Colorado
Topics Climate Change, Conservation, Documentary, Editorial, Environment, Landscape, Latin America, Photography, Photojournalism
The amazon is the largest tropical forest in the world. It is considered that its extension reaches the 2,300,000 square miles of which Peru and Brazil have the largest extension. Peruvian Amazon has one of the most biodiverse natural reserves in the world and it has started to become a desert.  Most of this environmental disaster is due to illegal mining, besides other reasons.  Large landscapes are deforested, existing vegetation and trees are burned, and dangerous quantities of mercury are released into the environment.  Mercury is used to extracting gold, and a large proportion pollutes rivers. This poisons those people engaged in this activity and nearby populations, as many locals depend on freshwater fish for a protein source, this release has become a public health issue.

I want to continue my project about mining in the Amazon, this time through the everyday life of the miners and one of the priests.  Pablo Zabala, 70 years old, first traveled to the Amazon in 1978 as a young biologist collecting butterflies and condors for his university's museum in Spain. He returned to Peru years after to work in the Amazon, this time as a priest. He has lived in the Amazon for 24 years now and spent the last 10 running a Catholic parish that works with the people of many mining camps, mostly men from poor villages who search mercury-laced rivers for a pebble of gold. In an interview with Zabala, he affirmed that there are around 85,000 families that have to survive by mining gold in the Amazon because the main problem  for these communities is the lack of opportunities in the region and the extreme poverty in which they live. I want to go back and spend time in these communities, in order to construct a visual narrative about their everyday life and also about the impact on the environment that their activities create. I also would like to register the advance of the environmental devastation.
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The everyday life of the Illegal miners in the Peruvian Amazon. by Rodrigo Cruz
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