Gold fever in la Bulla (I)

Posted by Javier on 31 October 2009

The second Venezuelan project was the Bulla Hoja de Lata. A bulla in Spanish is an agglomeration of people making a lot of noise and scandal, and it is the popular term in Venezuela to describe what happens when someone finds considerable amounts of gold: people from all Venezuela and the neighbor countries come in mass in an uncontrolled and feverish gold rush.

Gold is tremendously important in the Guyana shield, as much as in the Amazon Basin. An Army of thousands of miners are continuously moving along the Northern half of the South American continent in search of the new good gold vein. They are called garimpeiros in most part of the Amazon, and mostly they are tough guys capable of killing or stealing, living in the jungle or the high sierras in dramatic conditions, desperately destroying the jungle and contaminating it with mercury to often just maintain a situation of alcoholism and drug addiction. Sometimes they are just in a continuous search for gold for the mere sake of it. Gold mining is thrilling.

There are some few that manage to escape from the gold fever and save enough money to get a better life doing something else. However almost everyone believes that the next thousands of dollars will be the last ones needed to start a new life, just to discover 30 years later that they are still digging and breathing the burning mercury, living like wild animals and telling everyone who wants to hear that the next thousands of dollars will be enough to start a better life doing something else. Most part of the money disappears in the days after selling the gold to the dealers, by inviting unknown guys to drinks and prostitutes. After 3 days of orgy the work at the gold mine is there still waiting, just another chance to refill the empty pockets or to cancel the game debts till the next lucky strike.

Bulla Hoja de Lata has become a famous place for all these gold miners in the whole continent. It is situated in the heart of the gold region of Venezuela, in the Far East bordering with Guyana. After gold was found in January 2009, an estimated 15000 people came at the same time to the middle of the jungle. Tracks in the mud were rapidly built, and the queue of cars and trucks just to enter and grasp a piece of land turned kilometric. The mine is illegal, informal. It does not have any electricity, water, construction or any other facility. Women and children came in hordes, to dig or to work in improvised restaurants, laundries, brothels or stores.  The lack of police, hospitals, schools and safety measures, together with the greed and violence, soon took its toll. An estimated of 5-6 persons died in average per day, buried alive when the holes collapsed or simply murdered by other mates to steal their gold.

After most part of the superficial gold was extracted many miners looked for greener pastures, leaving only 2000 “true” miners in the few hectares of the Bulla. These are the more experienced and professional ones, those who know that most part of the gold is still there, at more than 30 meters deep. They are extracting important and steady but not spectacular amounts of gold, and they fear that some of the miners will come back to fight again for their space. If another rush would come, blood will run again in the Bulla. But for now it is a relatively peaceful but outstandingly poor piece of destroyed forest, a shame for Venezuela and for all the people who buys gold or invests in the gold market.

24 comments. Tags: Javier, Venezuela, Bulla Hoja de Lata, gold, poverty, deforestation. Location: Puerto Maldonado, Peru