by Terrence Aym

Created on: January 31, 2011

Ever want to try your hand at being Indiana Jones and get rich doing it?

Well, if you don't mind deadly bugs, reptiles, hostile native tribes, Piranha and assorted other nuisances and death traps you might consider packing up and heading to the Amazon to stake your claim.

That's right, there's a gold rush on in the steaming jungles of the Amazon…a region no Alaskan forty-niner would ever recognize.

This rush for one of the most precious metals on Earth—especially with the commodity price flirting with $1,500 per ounce—is a mean-spirited, lawless, destructive juggernaut into the heart of the once Eden-like Madre de Dios [Mother of God] region of the shadowy Peruvian rainforest.

Guacamayo, one of the biggest gold-mining sites in the world is dirty, noisy and very, very illegal. But some of the prospectors that have staked their claim have brought in huge earth moving machines, private security forces armed to the teeth, and plenty of money for bribes to keep the local officials looking the other way.

Gold mining? We see no stinkin' gold mines, senor.

Right. The area where the earth is being ripped to pieces for the gold is so large an area it can be seen and photographed by the astronauts in space.

Gold is in the mud and the mud is in the swamps. The swamps are filled with all sorts of nasty things, but one of them is gold dust and for men with a hard case of gold fever nothing is too nasty, too dirty, or too dangerous.

The machines suck up the thick, stinking mud from the filthy swamp water and spit it back out again onto man-made carpeted ramps where gold particles are caught and gathered.

The trees have vanished and in their place is a flat vista peppered with shanties and crude lean-to sheds wrapped and strapped with bright blue plastic sheets caked with mud, urine and other unmentionables.

Thousands of miners live there in virtual squalor hoping to leave as millionaires.

What once contained the richest biodiversity on Earth—33,000 square miles of dense, canopied rainforest in south-east Peru—is systematically being destroyed.

Gold fever is what did it. Never mind that plant over there may hold a cure to cancer. Rip it up, Tear it out. Make way for the equipment to dig and scrape and plow for gold!

The Telegraph relates the story of one of the miners named Marco Suarez who's been mining for two years. He had hoped to turn a fast buck and then return home rich enough to buy some land and find a wife.

Against the background of the din, the

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