Illegal gold is booming in South America

Deep in Venezuela’s southern savannah, Las Rajas is a textbook example of an illegal gold mine. When your correspondent visited it last year, miners stood around a muddy crater in flip-flops and shorts. Workers blasted its walls with high-pressure hoses to dislodge specks of minerals, and used mercury to separate metal from ore. In 2016 Nicolás Maduro, the country’s autocrat, decreed that swathes of forest should be turned into the Orinoco Mining Arc, a territory larger than Portugal. Since then, illegal “wildcat” mining has surged. Dirty gold makes up between 70-90% of nationwide output, according to the local branch of Transparency International, an anti-corruption monitor.