San Joaquin, Mexico (AP) – The drill echoes through a narrow tunnel at a deep mountain, where Miner Hugo Flores searched for one of the most toxic elements of the earth on foot.
Buried in red mineral stripes lit with its front lamp, is mercury.
Here, in pine-covered mountains known as Sierra Gorda-one of the most biologically consequences of Mexican sections-Mercury Boom is executed.
The rapidly rising international gold prices increase the price of Mercury, a toxic metal key in illegal gold extraction to the heights of all time. Although demand causes mining in central Mexico, maintaining thousands of mines and their families, it also reveals them and the fragile poisoning of mercury. At the same time, this Mexican mercury promotes illegal gold mining in the Amazon, contaminating large areas and damaging both humans and the environment.
The global efforts to ban mercury mining from this centuries -old craftsmen’s mines were even desired.
“It’s a lifestyle,” Flores said.
In cities such as San Joaquin in the northern-central state of Queretar, the Mercury price has increased by more than ten times over the last 15 years, jumping from $ 20 per kilogram (£ 2.2) to 2011. Up to $ 240 up to $ 350.
“For the first time in my life, Mercury is worth something, and miner says, ‘It’s worth poisoning if I earn something,” said Fernando Díaz-Barriga, a medical researcher who has long studied Mercury’s mines in central Mexico.
Mercury’s “Kojota”
Mountains follow the cinnabar-rods holding mercury, veins like ants through a narrow tunnel zig-zagging deep below the mountain. They are a carved rock and stone bags attached to their back to the surface.
The rock is poured into the wood -fired brick stoves, where the mercury heats up into gas and separates from other minerals. The gas then cooled into the silver liquid droplets, which slowly drip the pipe, which needs to be assembled into small plastic Coca-Cola bottles, each sold for about $ 1800. A tonne rock is needed to make a kilogram of mercury.
According to the United Nations estimates, Mexico is the second largest manufacturer of mercury after China.
Buyers come from all over the world to get Mercury cheap from artisanal miners.
“They come and buy Mercury for 500 pesos and then sells Peru for 5,000,” said Carlos Martínez, one of the San Joaquin mines. “Kojots, as we call them, are those who make money at the expense of others.”
Illegal gold mining
Mercury mining in cities, marking the Gorda region of Mexico, has been dated for centuries. Metal was used in everything, from thermometers to cosmetics, and is legally transported to South America up to several years, when many countries around the world have banned its use. Today, most of the Mexican mercury is transferred to Colombia, Bolivia and Peru and distributed throughout the Amazon Basin.
In the Amazon, metal is used to extract gold from river soil by performing illegal gold mining operations, which are increasingly controlled by criminal groups. Mining ruined rivers that bring life to the region.
In July The Peruvian authorities seized a record four-ton-high half a million dollars-jerk-juniper-hidden bags inside the Mexican to Bolivia, hidden.
In July Environmental Research Agencies, a non -profit -seeker on duty investigating an environmental crime, July. The report stated that some mercury mining operations were involved in the new generation cartel cartel cartel cartel cartels. However, miners, investigators and local officials say they are not involved in the cartel, and say that the vulnerable workers have otherwise criminalized.
“What we do is not a crime,” said Martínez, 44. – We just work.
The demand for gold is expected to continue as investors seek their tangible safety at a time when JP Morgan and other banks partially caused the Trump’s administration rates. Mountains say they expect the same to Mercury.
“The demand for mercury all over the world will only continue,” Martínez said. “It won’t go away.”
My or migrates
In San Joaquin, where government data shows that almost half of the 8,000 inhabitants live in poverty, generations have come across a vivid choice: transferring to the US or working in mercury mine.
Flores, a cashier who used a drill in the tunnels, said it was the choice with the family when they migrated to the United States when he was a baby.
When he was rejected by a green card for 24 years, he returned to Mexico to work in Minnes, just like his grandfather.
Now, with the rise of mercury prices, he watched more and more young men return from the United States to work in mines.
“We forget the Mexican government,” Flores, 39, said. “With the opportunity to get a job here … You can barely deal with the tip.”
About 3,000 people in the region live outside the mines or in their recycled material, said Isarelly Rosillo, a lawyer and investigator at the autonomous University of Queretar. She spent so much time with mining in the last 12 years that she was diagnosed with mercury herself.
“Mercury has been caught in a wave of development in the region,” she said. “Although this is with additional damage.”
The money from the mine allowed Flores to send their five children to school and buy better clothes, better food and school supplies.
He even saved enough money to return to school if his mercury tunnels were closed, though he said two of his teenagers started working in the mines.
“Would I recommend it? Not my kids, certainly not,” he said. “But you also want to make money.”
“Poisoned” region
Díaz-Barriga, a doctor specialized in toxic substances, said that although the authorities did not fully examine the deep mercury poisoning, the initial tests of scientists show a dangerously high level of chemical in the environment and to employees.
Mountains eat stew and sip on tequila smoke emanating from mercury oven. They pushed excess rock into a nearby riverbed that enters the region’s streams when it rains. After work, they return home to their families with toxic dust on their clothes. In rainy months, mines often make their own home in their homes.
“We have seen huge contamination for children, women, children, many microorganisms.” -Daid Díaz-Barriga. “These are in sediments, in trees. Basically, this place is scratched by mercury.”
Researchers said they monitored the health of miners and their families as they show some of the worst symptoms of mercury intoxication, including tremors, neurological decline, vision and hearing loss, delay in children’s development and more. Rosillo, a lawyer whose blood test returned with mercury 12 times higher than normal, said it suffered from inflammation of the brain, hearing loss in one ear, depression, aspen and more.
Mountains suffering from trembling and blurred language often require that they did not feel negative long -term effects. Instead, they attribute the downturn they have seen in their colleagues in the mountains, with Parkinson’s disease that many studies have linked to the mercury exposition.
At the age of 18, Samuel Ledesma, who started working in Minnes at the age of 12, said his whole body began to tremble and gradually become ill. After blood tests, doctors told him he was poisoned by mercury. He said the blood transfusion rounds helped little, and his body still trembles while talking.
“I eventually have a lifetime,” a 75-year-old said. Nevertheless, it has caused doubts about the effects of toxin on the health of mining.
And it may take a year before the whole injury has been felt, Díaz-Barriga said.
United Nations scientists, environmentalists and authorities are also worried that metal will destroy the environment in one of the various protected areas of Mexico: Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve.
The mines are buried inside and adjacent to the reserve, which includes dense jungle and high -height forest.
It is considered a hot spot for endangered species, including Jaguar, Macaw Macaw, Mexico Black Bear and hundreds of other species that scientists say can be affected if mining is not stopped and cleaned by authorities.
The area around the mines “is the most contaminated place in Mexico,” said Díaz Barriga. “This region is not just contaminated. It is poisoned.”
“This will be the black market”
International efforts to stop mining and international mercury trade have led to criticism that this is merely determined by the demand for Mercury in Mexico and helped the mountains to the cross -bodies of organized crime.
2017 Mexico was among the 152 countries that signed the UN Convention prohibiting mercury mining and carrying out all the mineral exports illegal. This gave smaller artisan mines such as Queretaro until 2032, to close the door, directing mines to a certain legal gray area.
When the world’s largest mercury mines have been closed in recent years, the Sierra Gorda miner says more buyers have approached Mexico as a source.
2021 Mexico and UN have created a fund that will provide employees with resources and training for new industries, but after a year, the mining says they have not received money – and any alternative work will not match what they earn from mercury.
In a written statement, the Mexican Environmental Agency stated that it had conducted the main research on the program to cross Merkuri and that it was actively trying to “fight illegal trade”. However, she refused to comment on the accusations that she failed to help the Mountains.
The UN Environment Program in a statement acknowledged that many challenges, including “security risk in some areas of mining”, “caused delays and frustration to the affected communities”. However, she added that the authorities are seeking to speed up the implementation.
When they face economic instability, the mining are worried that the Mercury Boom would even more attract the attention of criminal groups.
Their concerns arise when drug cartels are increasingly pushed to Queretar-Region, which was mostly a past from drugs directed to the border and essentially avoided violence using neighboring states.
“It is easy for the Mexican government to say, ‘We will close the mine and we are going to wash your hands,” Flores said. “That’s when organized crime will happen, because then it will be a black market.”
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