In February of 2019, the then president of Peru, Martín Vizcarra, launched the so-called Operation Mercurio, an “unprecedented operation” to eradicate illegal mining and restore the authority of the State in the Peruvian Amazon.
After the The construction of the Interoceanic Route, the highway that connects Brazil with the coast of Peru, triggered the clandestine business of gold extraction in protected areas of the Department of Madre de Dios.
Crowds of outsiders began to settle in an area, until then an inaccessible natural paradise , attracted by the gold that is abundant in the area. Entire cities, such as La Pampa, were formed in the area and around mining, human trafficking and even sexual exploitation also flourished.
The gold rush devastated tens of thousands of hectares of Amazon rainforest.
Operation Mercury was born to put an end to that devastation and a woman, the prosecutor specializing in environmental crimes Karina Garay, was at the forefront of that fight.
Now, the documentary “The Adventures of Wonder Woman. Inside the war against illegal mining in the Peruvian Amazon ”, directed by Max Baring, Dan Collyns and Anastasia Moloney, tells his story. Shortly before the documentary is tackled at the Hay Festival in Arequipa, BBC Mundo spoke with the prosecutor.
“The defense of something from everyone”
Born in Cusco ago 36 years in a family of lawyers, Karina chose to specialize in the fight against environmental crimes because “when you defend the environment you defend something that belongs to everyone. ”
Already in his time in Cusco he dedicated himself to prosecuting crimes such as illegal cutting of trees and the policemen with whom he worked gave him the nickname Wonder Woman, because, like the comic book character, “I was not afraid to get into dangerous places to fulfill my mission.”
But what was found In Madre de Dios it was very different.
Almost daily, I went out with police and army troops to tour the jungle in search of clandestine mining operations with the aim of capturing as many s responsible and destroy the machines with which they extracted the gold. By boat on the Madre de Dios and Malinwski rivers, or by truck through the jungle, Prosecutor Garay became the miners’ nightmare.
Single mother, assuming the challenge forced her to separate from her son, He is now 9 years old.
“I was going to face the mining mafias and I didn’t want to put him in danger because of that, so I left him with my mother in Cusco and went to see him every other weeks. ”
Reconciling her duties as mother and prosecutor was not easy. “He always needs me to sing a song for him before he goes to sleep, and sometimes he had to do it over the phone from the boat where we were going to operate on the river.”
“I knew he was doing something for me country, but it was hard for me to know that I had to do my job as a mother. ”
Hers was a dangerous job. The official groups sometimes fell into ambushes and, according to account, the military had to respond to the shots of the hitmen who protect the mines.
On one occasion, one of the quads in which they were fording one of the rivers capsized, causing everyone who followed it to fall. “We almost all drowned there.”
But the worst was the day a miner died in clashes with the public forces.
“People were enraged. The stones rained first and then the bullets, and they ended up setting fire to the truck they thought I was in ”, he recalls.
“We were not reaching heads”
Deforestation is not the only damage that illegal mining causes in the environment.
The miners use mercury to separate and extract the gold from the rocks in which it is found, and ends up contaminating the water and the food chain.
But mining is for many in this area a way of life, sometimes the only one possible. And it is difficult to convince them to renounce it, even if it causes damage to the environment.
“Most of them are people from the Sierra that comes to this area in looking for something to feed his family because in the countryside they cannot find a way ”, recalls the prosecutor.
For many, the lack of expectations in the field outweighed the risk of being arrested for a crime for which they could be sentenced to several years in prison.
“ They work out of necessity and in subhuman conditions . Morning, afternoon and night exposed to mercury in totally contaminated water. ”
“ We never got to the heads of the business ” , laments the prosecutor, whose persecuting zeal was met with the incomprehension, if not hostility, of those who made a living from mining.
“The problem is the mafias, which often have the help of people who are in the institutions. ”
“ It was usual that before an operation in the mines or brothels they received the notice that we were going to go and we found that they had hidden everything ” .
According to account, the deployment of means of Operation Mercury managed to end this dynamic and the interventions of the security forces and the Prosecutor’s Office became more effective.
The data support its reading. According to the Andean Amazon Monitoring Project, deforestation in the La Pampa area decreased by 92%.
Mission accomplished then?
Sleeping pills
The miners weren’t the only ones who didn’t They understood Karina’s work.
“ Sometimes my superiors did not value our operations because there were no detainees. They did not understand that it was very easy for the miners to escape by running through the jungle. ”
But, even if there were no arrests, the military destroyed the machines with explosives, eliminating the exploitations.
Karina assures that they did not work with the appropriate means. “We did not have the appropriate protective equipment and we were in contact with mercury.”
By the end of 2020, Operation Mercury money ran out and the plan was abandoned.
“There are almost no operations and the miners have returned to the place “.
Tired of being away from her son, the prosecutor returned to Cusco and assumed an administrative position.
But what she experienced in Madre de Dios haunted her.
“People from there called me to tell me what they were thinking and that affected my health. I suffered stress and ended up taking sleeping pills, so I decided not to hear from there “.
Deforestation has accelerated again, but Karina can now take care of her son and enjoy her great hobbies: writing and dancing.
Although sometimes she feels “ frustrated ”and wants to return to a position like the one she had in Madre de Dios, her struggle is not over. “Soon I will be working again on something related to the defense of the environment.”
Word of Wonder Woman.
This article is part of the Hay Festival Arequipa digital, a meeting of writers and thinkers that takes place from November 1 to 7, 2021.
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