#illegal-mining

#illegal-mining

An illegal gold rush has cleared 140,000 hectares of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon and is accelerating as foreign, armed groups move into the region to profit from record gold prices, according to a report. About 540 square miles of land have been cleared for mining in the South American country since 1984, and the environmental destruction is spreading rapidly across the country, Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) and its Peruvian partner organisation, Conservacion Amazonica, found.

Nearly 1,000 undocumented migrants working illegally at the Sheba Gold Mine in South Africa were arrested as part of Operation Vala Umgodi targeting illegal mining and immigration violations.