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Police and troops blew up £12 million worth of heavy machinery on Monday as Peru’s government throttled up a crackdown on illegal gold mining.
The operation was the first such action since a nationwide ban on illicit mining took effect on on April 19.
Around 1,500 security personnel, accompanied by prosecutors, blew up excavators, generators and water pumps in the Huepetuhe district, a mining boomtown dating back to the 1980s.
The illegal mining industry has badly scarred Peru’s south-eastern jungle region of Madre de Dios, which has an estimated 40,000 illegal miners living near the Interoceanic highway linking the Pacific Ocean with Brazil.
They use tons of mercury to bind the gold flecks they dig up and have ravaged forests and poisoned rivers in a region that is home to indigenous tribes.
The government is already confiscating illegal gold at domestic airports and dynamiting illegal gold refineries in the cities of Chala and Nazca.
But miners have resisted, clashing with police and blocking traffic on the Interoceanic highway in recent weeks.
One miner was killed and more than 50 people hurt by gunfire during the confrontations.
Most miners are poor migrants from the Andean highlands.
“People are going to go hungry,” warned illegal miners’ union Fedemin president Luis Otzuka.
He said his group was sending a delegation to the capital Lima to appeal to officials to halt the crackdown.
“In the course of this week there will be strikes,” Mr Otzuka warned.
But a government spokesman said it would invest £21 million in public works projects in the region to offer the miners alternative employment.
“We know we’re not going to do away with illegal mining unless we solve the social problem,” he said.
The government claims sympathy with the miners and says it is more interested in the businesses behind the illegal mining, vowing to identify and prosecute them.
“The people who are illegal are the 50 people financing all this, not the day labourers who do the hard work under dangerous conditions and are poisoned with mercury,” the spokesman said.
