Illegal Gold Creates A Parallel Economy in Podocarpus National Park
Podocarpus National Park was created in 1982 and spans over 146,280 hectares. It’s one of 59 areas in Ecuador’s National System of Protected Areas, but mining has hacked its land into craters and tunnels where illegal miners dig for gold. UNESCO designated the Podocarpus-El Cóndor Biosphere Reserve in 2007. All extractive activities are forbidden, but the greatest concentration of illegal mining lies at the very heart of this reserve.
Over four thousand illegal miners extract gold from holes dug open with picks, chisels and even dynamite. They inhabit a parallel economy. The currency there isn’t money, but gold. Illegal gold. Environmental control has slipped through the Ecuadorian government’s fingers.
“Little Dubai” is in southern Ecuador.
Dollars aren’t used there and everything, absolutely everything, is purchased with grams of gold—with gold from illegal mining.
Four thousand people live in the heart of Podocarpus National Park, which stretches over part of the provinces of Zamora-Chinchipe and Loja, illegally extracting the gold that they use as currency.
Thirty loaves of bread: one gram of gold.
A package of digestive cookies: five tenths of a gram of gold.
A litre of “Siete Pingas” puntas (artisanal distilled spirits): one gram of gold.
A packet of chewing gum: two tenths of a gram of gold.
A two-hour daily Internet package: one gram of gold a month.
One skinned chicken for cooking: one gram of gold.
Need and oblivion converge in this place. So do poverty, luxury, celebration, family, effort, fear, inheritance, risk, wealth, ambition, drugs, football, nature, cold, mercury, dynamite, sun, and power. Everyone knows it but no one talks about it—or almost no one.
On his Facebook page, José used to share the ways in which illegal miners work in the heart of this protected area—that is, until his colleagues warned him to stop implicating them. José wants to be an influencer. It isn’t his real name, of course, and he’s a documentalist, even if he's not aware of it.
“You hardly use money there—it’s all gold. That’s why we say we’re in Little Dubai.”
José says this in a café in the city of Zamora. It’s five in the afternoon. Reggaeton vibrates through the table, the chairs, the wood walls. A car with tinted windows is waiting outside for him during the interview. The voice recorder, two beers and a cup of coffee are on the table. José has been in rehab for drugs and alcohol for a year and three months.
José belongs to a second generation of miners. His father and uncles were miners. First, they worked in Nambija, a large gold mine nearly an hour from Zamora with a gold rush in the eighties and nineties that ended abruptly on Mother’s Day 1993, when the mountain—hollowed out on inside by this point—collapsed and buried over two hundred people. Despite this, says José, mining still goes on there because the gold is excellent in quality. It’s 24 carats. They only find 18-carat gold in other mines.
Both the Constitution and the Mining Law stipulate that these extractive activities are completely forbidden in protected areas. That said, a report from the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) states that around four thousand people mine inside Podocarpus along 222 mining camps on three fronts: San Luis, Aida, and Tres Camas. Through the satellite images provided by Planet and used by the mapping project, you can see camps that look like little plastic houses rising from sticks of wood.
They’re known as ranchitos or small ranches. They're plastic awnings with a wood stove, beds made from timber, and lots of blankets. That’s where the illegal miners sleep. From their ranchitos they keep watch on the mouths of their tunnels, which they go into with picks, chisels, and sledgehammers to pound away at the soil and dig cavities up to fifty metres deep to extract chunks of gold-encrusted rock.
A bundle of wood for cooking in a ranch costs one gram of gold.
“I don’t own a ranch but I can stay anywhere in San Luis,” says José with the self-assurance of one who feels popular. “I stay because they help me, and the people are very good. I have blankets. I have everything. I have friends that tell me, ‘Come and dig up a bit,’ because I’m lucky with gold. I can get some where there’s nothing, even if it’s just a gram.”
According to the Central Bank, a gram of gold equalled 61.45 dollars in September 2023. In Zamora, illegal miners get around 45 dollars.
With Bad Bunny playing in the background, José roguishly recalls when a miner was starting to throw out sand residue left over from the process of washing rocks. José asked if he could use the sand. “There’s nothing left there,” the man answered, laughing, and handed him the remnants of dust. José washed and washed again. “I was able to get one gram and a few tenths of gold. My friend was dumbfounded. I’m just lucky with gold.”
How does one set up a ranch?
“Over in Podocarpus there’s space for everyone,” José continues. “It’s a matter of setting up wherever you like as long as you’re not bothering others. You have to ask around to see if someone already owns this area or that corner where you want to set up, obviously. I have a friend that recently opened a well up there that’s starting to become valuable (he’s extracting gold already).”
José began mining with his father when he was ten. By the time he was 14, he was already going alone to Nambija or San Luis and would gather between four hundred and five hundred grams of gold over twenty days of work, currently worth around $20,000.
“I’d come down to Zamora and what I wanted to do was have fun with my friends. I’d pay for everything. I’d visit the nightclubs. And I’d just ask the woman, ‘How much do you earn a night when you get paid top dollar?’ Let’s say she'd reply that she earned $3,000. Well, I’d pay $10,000 so she'd close the place down just for me and my friends.”
His mother would tell him to save his money, buy land, or buy houses. But, “who's thinking about that when you’re 16?”
José says it’s not easy to take money from illegal mining to the bank, so you have to spend it fast. José has owned houses, plots of land, luxury cars. And weapons and lots of gold. He’s also slept on the streets.
“So, that’s been my life and I’m not ashamed of it,” he reassures himself as he drinks his coffee, which hasn’t cooled down yet thanks to the humid heat in Zamora. “When I saw myself here, in Zamora, sleeping on that bridge with my two dogs,” José points toward the bridge you can see across from the bar, “I told myself: I need to change my life.”
He says that gold obtained through mining is ill-gotten and that it's easy come, easy go; that, just like with his own story, most of the gold extracted in Podocarpus National Park stays right there, spent on liquor, prostitution, and drugs.
José believes that those who earn the most are the vendors in that makeshift Dubai—the shop owners and those that sell drugs and alcohol so that miners can endure the cold over those twenty days they spend in their ranches extracting gold.
This is the deal: people climb up to the illegal mining zone in Podocarpus with food, chickens, wood, medicines, liquor, bread, cookies, clothing, cigarettes, blankets, gas tanks, diesel—anything that the miners might need. They also take down specific orders. They purchase all these products in shops in Zamora every day, in dollars. These informal suppliers load up and then carry the products to this illegal town of four thousand people.
Transporting is also a business.
Some carry everything up from Zamora to Podocarpus for a living. José explains that it costs 30 dollars for every 250 pounds a mule carries down a four-hour stretch of road. Mules can’t go on after that because the trail becomes too narrow. So, the mules’ owners carry between 100 and 120 pounds along six more hours of road, each charging 150 dollars more. Money still works up to this point. Up there, in Podocarpus, miners don’t have dollars—they have gold. So, providers charge in gold, and when they head back down to Zamora, they exchange it for dollars. José gives an example:
“I’m going up in two weeks’ time with a friend that’s new to this. He says he’s going to take two litres of Siete Pingas puntas (it costs 3 dollars per liter in Zamora) and a pair of chickens (each chicken costs 15 dollars).” José does the math: “Two litres of drink are two grams [of gold], two chickens are two grams. With that he’s made four grams already, which are around 180 dollars. If you subtract his investment, my friend will have 144 dollars left over. Of course you earn a bit of money!”
It’s money-laundering of sorts but at a minimal scale.
There are also providers of other services in Podocarpus, such as internet, satellite TV, pool halls, and bars; a giant TV set was even set up in a ranch to watch the 2022 World Cup games. Everything is paid for in gold. Internet costs one gram per month for two hours of use a day, from seven to nine in the evening.
There are also brothels. A sex worker’s services cost one gram of gold.
***
A week after the conversation with José, a regional mining meeting takes place in Loja. Communal landowners from Perú, Ecuador and Bolivia recount their experiences. There are shared factors and connections.
Marisol Zinanyuca is a Peruvian anti-mining activist hailing originally from the province of Espinar in the department of Cusco. Marisol explains that prostitution has increased since the eighties, when most of the large private mining arrived in that area. “There was none of that before; now villages are filled with pink houses, discos, and brothels where miners go to socialize. Many come from other places without their families, and they want to have contact with women,” she goes on.
Cristian Rusel Vargas, a young Peruvian leader from the department of Apurímac, in Peru’s southern Andean region, where the Las Bambas gold project has been in development since 2014, says that mining has led to an increase in brothels. If lands hadn’t been turned over to this activity yet in Ecuador, Cristian warned, it would be best that society prevent it.
Michelle Báez, a political scientist that specializes in mining and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University talks about how the territory of mining has been masculinized, burdening men with high pressures that are then released through intrafamily violence or high demand for sexual services, which in turn encourages human trafficking with those aims. The report on Organized Crime and Illegal Gold Mining from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime confirms Báez’s words.
***
José uploaded over 31 videos to his Facebook page. In them, he’d talk about the life of miners in the higher regions of Podocarpus, almost as if it were a personal diary. He’d show how he’d go deep into the mines he built with his own hands through the blows of a sledgehammer. Another video shows him waiting with two other miners for the baker to arrive. They already have their gram of gold ready to purchase thirty loaves of bread.
In another post, he shows his ranch and how everyone waits their turn to grind into dust hunks of rock extracted from the mines. One of the most-watched videos shows the mining settlement of Aida next to San Luis. José is in the high part of the mountain explaining that the number of miners has grown.
In another video he explains how the infamous chanchas work. Chanchas are horizontal rusted metal barrels with large, heavy steel balls inside. That's where miners deposit the hunks of rock they manage to extract from the earth. The chancha spins with a band that moves with a diesel-powered machine and grinds the rock for around three or four hours.
“Mercury is added to the chancha during the last hour, and it separates the gold from everything else. Then it comes out like dust, and we begin panninf,” José explains. “In other words, the ground rock is placed on wood pans, and it’s swirled around in water and a bit more mercury until the sediment floats and the gold, which is heavier, settles in the bottom.”
Using the chancha anywhere between three and four hours costs one gram of gold.
“In San Luis, everyone is really close. Since there's no police or army, there's a well-organized committee with a president, vice-president, and treasurer. It's all coordinated. They solve any conflicts,” José explains. The car with the tinted windows is still parked outside the bar.
In late 2022, around fifty people called José and asked him to stop implicating them by uploading those videos.
“They accused me of snitching, but everyone knows about this—the authorities, the police, the military. We all know how it works. The only difference is that I record it because I like explaining things,” José justifies himself. Out of precaution, however, he opened a new Facebook account, and now he posts videos for helping beggars.
“I want to show that mining isn't easy work and that it isn't for everyone. We do it because we've always known how to do it, since our grandparents' times. Conditions are hard.”
According to a 2021 report by Fundación Pachamama, South America has around 500,000 artisanal and small-scale miners. In Ecuador, in 2020, between 11,500 and 20,000 people were working directly and indirectly in small-scale gold mining. Ten percent of them were women.
***
The bar is still completely empty. The never-ending reggaeton set is replaced with Amazon rainfall.
“The government would rather get the money, line their pockets and hand it over to a foreign company so they come, they run it, and they do whatever they want with the gold, because we don't have money for the government—that’s the problem! So, we do the mining our own way, in a small way. That doesn't suit the government, so they set the rules. We're fighting anyway, though, we keep fighting. That’s always been a fight in San Luis, for the right to mine. They've thrown us out so many times! Just now they're trying that again and they want to throw us out, but it's always the same—two or three months go by and people start going back up again, because they need it. It's like playing cat and mouse. That's the way it's always been, that's how we fight.”
According to the Escolhas Institute, 77% of the gold leaving Ecuador is illegal. Also, an investigation on illegal gold in Ecuador made by the Department against Transnational Organized Crime (DTOC) determined that illegal miners sell gold at a lower market price to legal concessions and processors with production permits that are near mining zones. Most are in Zaruma, Nambija, Portovelo, all three in the southern part of the country. In turn, these three make gold bars and sell them officially to the Central Bank or export them abroad through shell companies. For example, in 2019 China received over 99% of Ecuador's gold exports, with an official value of 76.6 million dollars. However, that same year China notified in its import records that Ecuador had sold it 339.2 million dollars’ worth of gold.
As he watches his videos again, José laughs once more at his own jokes and original expressions. He says he'll keep on mining. Why? Because it's what he knows how to do, because he says he's lucky at finding gold, because he doesn’t dispute the fact that you can earn quite a bit, even if it's illegal. He says that mining and making videos is what he wants to do for the rest of his life. That he's played Russian roulette too long already. He's made mistakes, like losing all the money he earned from mining on drugs and alcohol, getting involved from a tender age in the violence implicated in any illegal activity, and that all he wants now is to do things right with the single best thing he says he known how to do—mining.
What does the government say?
Mining is linked to other crimes such as human trafficking. Gender violence criss-crosses this piece of everyday life.
Reaching this place takes hours of trekking through dangerous rock. Three mining fronts were detected within Podocarpus with satellite images. According to the MAAP project, just between 2019 and 2021, 24.8 hectares of forest have been affected—a surface comparable to thirty-five professional football fields.
Illegal miners mostly come from the city of Zamora itself, although lately people have also arrived from the provinces of Napo and Imbabura, and even from Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.
The Ministry of the Environment emailed our journalism alliance and reassured us that the greatest interinstitutional eviction operation to take place in this area was carried out in 2010, and that currently, “legal processes haven’t taken place, since personnel entering illegal mining sites are unable to safeguard their integrity.”
The ministry also confirmed that from 2010 onward, eight inspections were carried out from places close to the mining zones where officials could safely take a look at environmental effects, but inspections have been limited due “to violence from illegal miners against our park rangers”. They didn't reply whether there are criminal groups involved or which the final destination is for the gold leaving the protected area.
A poison tree
Pedro (not his real name) has always lived in Zamora-Chinchipe. Everyone knows him and he knows everyone. He made a couple of complaints around ten years ago regarding what was happening in Podocarpus and the province in general. Mining in this jurisdiction represents 67% of all mining in the Ecuadorian Amazon region, according to mapping done by the MapBiomas Ecuador initiative. Most of it is illegal. Pedro received death threats and has chosen to keep a low profile since then.
Pedro knows the names of all governors, prefects, and community presidents by heart. He has many friends who are miners and he always quotes his sources. The friend of a friend of his has over ten chanchas in San Luis; his sister has seven, and his cousin, five. The friend of a friend admitted to him that with his job as a miner in another area in the province, he earned over 3 million dollars.
“Almost everyone here is a miner. I was able to study and get a stable job, but if my children went barefoot, without food or schooling, it's possible that I'd be a miner like them,” Pedro confesses during a balmy evening in another restaurant in Zamora.
He states that one of the problems is that “Ecuador ends in Cuenca; from there downwards, we're the periphery of the periphery. Whatever happens in the south, Quito never hears about.” He adds that even if illegal mining shot up since the pandemic, the authorities do nothing.
Pedro recalls that at some point there were over six hundred backhoe excavators throughout the province for excavating alluvial gold. He says that some municipalities charge for every piece of machinery entering their lands, and also for installing each zeta. A zeta is a zed-shaped metal tower of sorts where minerals are sorted out. It’s where gold is separated in river mining.
This matches up to José's version. There’s a lot of mercury used for gold extraction in Ecuador, despite its prohibition by the Mining Law since 2015. In 2013, Ecuador came in at fourth place for emitting the most mercury among Latin American countries. Prohibitions are useless. Mercury can be found easily in Zamora-Chinchipe. After being used to recover gold in its purest state, mercury is disposed of along with the water from tailings, and it goes out into rivers and water sources.
When fish are exposed to mercury through water or directly—even in minimal quantities—it can lead to health problems. It affects the nervous and immune systems, the skin and the kidneys, with possibly fatal consequences. According to the Pan-American Health Organization, inhaling this metal can also cause tremors, memory loss and neuromuscular damage.
Research published in the Expreso newspaper in 2016 revealed that fifty tons of mercury are let loose into the environment every year in Ecuador. The World Health Organization includes it among the ten most hazardous substances for human life.
In Bolivia, mining polluted several rivers with these heavy metals for decades. It happened with the four communities in Tacana II. Rolan Mejía is the president of four communities that form the Community Central that have demanded 346,000 hectares as ancestral lands, where rivers were polluted through mercury-based mining. Communal landowners wanted to set a project into operation that had a processing plant for paiche fish meat and products. They invested thousands of dollars to build the semi-industrial plant. When everything was ready, they performed a test and the fish had a higher quantity of mercury than allowed. This brought down the entire community project.
Marisol Zinanyuca's mother and sister in Peru have heavy metals in their bodies. Lab exams reveal the presence of cadmium, mercury, arsenic and lead. In 2013, after Peru’s Ministry of the Environment revealed the results of their Participatory Health and Environmental Monitoring, these contamination levels were confirmed. More recently, in 2021, Amnesty International presented another report revealing high levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium and manganese in 117 people out of a sample of 150 taken in Espinar.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), between 5,500 and 8,900 tons of mercury are leaked into the atmosphere each year. Only ten percent is generated naturally. The other ninety percent are the consequence of human activity, primarily small-scale artisanal gold mining.
Pedro explains that putting together a chancha in San Luis, in Podocarpus, costs around $2,500. This includes transportation by mule and assembling the machinery in the mining camp. Earnings can reach around $15,000 every twenty days.
Untreated mercury is poured into the chanchas and then goes directly into the soil, spreading out to the rivers just as other products like gasoline do.
Diesel is also transported on mules towards San Luis. It’s purchased in gas stations and sold at twice the original price.
Pedro is convinced that nothing stays there, just like all the gold produced in Zamora. Alcohol use is rampant and people don't know what to do with so much money, so they end up frittering it away.
Renowned Loja historian Galo Ramón explained during the Regional Mining Summit in Loja that in ancient times, gold had a dimension of ritual and ostentation for the peoples of the region. Extraction methods were artisanal, without mercury, and utilized gold pips from the rivers. Mercury began to be used in 1580.
In Ramón's view, Loja and Zamora were never able to play a role as suppliers of labour or food for colonial mining. Zaruma, another mining village in southern Ecuador, had people arrive from other parts of the country. This is currently happening in Zamora, too.
He also explains that the two large-scale mining companies that are currently operating in southern Ecuador, Mirador and Fruta del Norte, have foreign technicians, and that in Zamora-Chinchipe they only hire cheap labour for “low-level positions,” such as security and cleaning services or working directly in the mines. He also says that they don't consume local products; even catering services come from outside, so “it isn’t surprising that many Zamorans consider it's better to be a miner,” he concludes.
Pink Floyd, hand-written letters, and social pressure before social media
How did over four thousand people end up mining in a protected area? How did it all go out of control?
Five years after the Podocarpus was declared a national park, the government granted a mining concession to Ecuanor, a Dutch-owned company, and then to British-owned Río Tinto Zinc for mining exploration and operations inside the protected zone.
Around the same time, the first environmental movements were beginning in Loja in the eighties. The young members of a group called Arcoíris were listening to music and talking about taking care of nature. Arcoíris founders Arturo Jiménez and Fausto López kicked off a campaign against the mining company in Podocarpus. They began by collecting signatures.
The bar at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL) is packed with students with computers and cell phones. Arturo, a tall, smiling, affable man, remembers right in the middle of the hustle and bustle that he believed he could change the world, too, when he was the same age as these youths. It was then that he joined in Lopez's endeavour of gathering signed petitions and letters demanding that the mining exploration process be stopped before it was too late.
Fausto López used to go to Quito to visit friends who were lawyers. In one of those gatherings, he mentioned his intention of gathering signatures and they offered to help. That’s how the Corporation for the Defense of Life (Cordavi) ended up filing a claim in 1991 on behalf of Arcoíris before the now-defunct Constitutional Tribunal of Guarantees, demanding respect for “the right to live in a pollution-free environment” and for Podocarpus National Park be free from mining. They also complained that extractive activities were prohibited in protected areas.
Smiling, Fausto recalls those days. His profile photo is from Pink Floyd. “We started designing flyers and exhibitions that summed up Podocarpus’s ecological importance and the threat posed by mining. We organized student protests. A few exchange students came to these, and news flew to other countries.”
This was in the nineties. During another visit to Quito with his friends from Cordavi, he delivered several letters supporting the withdrawal of mining concession in Podocarpus. “I was wearing jeans and a Pink Floyd T-shirt. I didn’t think we’d be so well-received. I immediately got calls from newspapers like Hoy and Expresso enquiring about the campaign promoted by Fundación Arcoíris,” he says.
At the time, Arcoíris still didn't have legal status. However, public pressure was so strong during those two years in which they were suing the State for not complying with its obligations toward protected areas, that they obtained recognition as an NGO.
After that, hundreds of letters arrived from Canada and the United States to the Constitutional Tribunal of Guarantees in Quito, along with a group of scientists from Germany, students from England, international NGOs—Arcoíris's fight was published in magazines and articles in Norway.
“There was a lot of pressure,” Arturo recalls. Finally, on March 12, 1993, the Constitutional Tribunal of Guarantees ruled in Arcoíris's favour. A few months earlier, the mining companies had decided to leave the country. The problem was far from over, however. During the years in which foreign companies did their explorations, they detected how much gold there was in the heart of Podocarpus, and they began training a few of the locals.
After the Ecuanor mining company left, Podocarpus National Park suffered its most important mining invasion. It took place in 1993. Around eight hundred miners that had lost their jobs and the Zamorans that had inherited mining knowledge decided to begin mining with picks and shovels and extract gold on their own as a way of making their own money. The first illegal miner invasion had taken place only four years earlier, in 1988, precisely while the exploration was taking place, but they were evicted quickly. This time, the recently created Fundación Arcoíris and twenty-six other organizations put together the Interinstitutional Committee for the Defense of the Podocarpus National Park and managed to reach a peaceful agreement to avoid invasions. The Association of Autonomous Small Miners from San Luis would keep its promise of not invading the ecological park; in exchange, the National Direction of Mining (Dinami) would grant them a concession of 1,200 hectares outside the protected area and the Ecuadorian Institute of Forestry and Natural and Wildlife Areas (Inefan) would dismiss a case against union miners.
But gold kept beckoning. Other mining groups emerged that wanted to take on the Podocarpus, such as the Centinela Miners Association of Ecuador and the San Luis Cooperative. There were also attempts at invasions and new negotiations with these groups. All miners were to go to a zone called Exodus 1 in the neighbouring province of Morona Santiago, where they would be able to work in specific areas. But this never happened. Instead, armed conflict began with Peru, and the military stopped watching that steep entrance with a twelve-hour climb leading to the highest part of Podocarpus, where to this very day miners, mules, carriers and vendors of bread, water, chicken, drugs, alcohol, blankets, diesel, pool tables, chairs and TV sets continue to go.
The Park Rangers
“What can we do? There are thirty-three of us at most,” one of the park rangers says plaintively as he welcomes a group of tourists at the entrance to Podocarpus National Park. It's in the lower area, where you can't see anything and where rain washes away blame and oblivion. And neglect.
He's been working for over ten years here but still tells everything just as passionately: "There are 629 types of birds in Podocarpus National Park. There are many hummingbirds because flowers have special colouring. A unique bird species was discovered 1998. There are also tanagers, toucans and ocellated turkeys. We open all year long. There are between three and four thousand plant species. There are remnants of Cinchona officinalis, known as cascarilla or quinine, the plant used to cure malaria. In colonial times, quinine trees were cut down; they belong to the same family as coffee plants. Quinine is Ecuador's national plant and it’s also on Peru's flag (where the tree is known as quina). They are between 800 and 1000 years old, 35 to 40 meters tall, and 2.5 to 4 meters in diameter. In Podocarpus, 23 thousand hectares are considered to be Ramsar sites. There are 105 lagoons.”
All this biodiversity is in danger.
But then, as we walk under the abundant rainfall that lets us whisper about things that everyone know but nobody talks about, the ranger confesses his feeling of helplessness.
“Even if all thirty-three rangers went, we're nothing compared to the nearly four thousand people mining there,” he says, the spirits of an experienced guide now evaporated.
“What’s the situation right now?”
“This spreads like gunpowder. We've had death threats. It’s out of our hands. We’ve gone to verify, we’ve even managed to see it from afar. We’ve sent warnings, but that’s it. People came here from Buenos Aires, the ‘city of plastic’,” he says, referring to the area in the province of Imbabura where illegal mining groups linked to criminal gangs operate and where the State has been unable to wield control as well.
In Buenos Aires, there are tunnel mines that were emptied by the police in a large operation carried out in 2019 that identified over five thousand illegal miners. Despite these isolated inspections, in late 2022, officers from the Ministry of Energy and Mines confirmed that illegal miners had returned to the “city of plastic”. They presume that the criminal gang Los Lobos is behind this illegal activity.
“There are organized crime gangs up there,” the ranger confirms, referring to Podocarpus again. “I participated in three evictions in 2012. They always return. It increased during the pandemic. In San Luis, there’s human trafficking and prostitution. We’ve been told that a group of five people can extract around four hundred to five hundred grams every fortnight. That they open up the forest with tunnels. That mining is one hundred percent artisanal and there’s no kind of control.”
Other tourists come closer and those softer numbers return: Podocarpus welcomes eight thousand people a year and it’s one of 59 protected areas in Ecuador. Spectacled bears live here.
***
“This is just like drug trafficking, but with gold,” says José later that evening in the café in Zamora. He states that there are specific people that gold must be sold to and pay in cash; nobody takes it to banks, because they know it’s an illegal activity. They know that they’re laundering money through gold: big time, extracting five hundred grams per week; or by consuming smaller amounts, like with those sweet digestive cookies.
Even so, with a sorrowful gesture, José also says there are rumours that organized crime is entering Podocarpus National Park.
Rain never stops in Zamora. When it rains, it’s dangerous. The mouth of the mine becomes damp and the earth softens. “You have to pray as you go in, because the crag can fall on us and crush us, kill us, at any moment. It’s always risky, but death can surprise you anywhere. If you’re going to die crushed in there, that's where you should remain. We never know where we'll die.”
