• Mongabay Latam traveled along 38 kilometers (24 miles) of Peru’s Cenepa River, near the border with Ecuador, where illegal mining dredges run around the clock in search of gold, hemming in seven Indigenous Awajún communities.
• The constant mining activity and presence of the miners has brought violence, crime and sexual exploitation to the Awajún communities and wrought widespread environmental destruction that shows no signs of slowing.
• Police and environmental defense leaders conducted raids in early October, but the lack of permanent enforcement in this part of the Amazon has allowed the dredging rafts to returned and once again churn up the river basin.

Drenched up to his thighs, while crouching at the end of our small boat as it cuts through a dizzying collection of waves, our boat captain lifts his hands and shouted a warning: “No more photos — they’re watching us.” Along the left bank of the Cenepa River in the Peruvian Amazon, motors roar from underneath plastic roofs on dredging rafts. Enormous suction tubes penetrate the riverbed from these rafts. There are at least eight dredges that groups of between 15 and 20 illegal miners are using to extract gold, day and night, from the shores of the Indigenous community of Pagki, here in the Peruvian department of Amazonas.

We’re almost halfway down the 38 kilometers (24 miles) of the river that shares a name with the jurisdiction that it passes through, El Cenepa, to the border with Ecuador. It’s not the stretch with the most dredges in the entire river basin, but it is the most dangerous. “Don’t even try to look at them; we just have to pass through very quickly,” the captain instructs us.

The greenish shade of the river changes to an intense ochre color on the side where the dredging rafts are rattling away. With his body half underwater, a man appears to hurriedly direct the operation of one of the dredges. He swims, waves his arms and signals his approval to another man at the base of a handmade ramp installed on the eroded riverbanks of Pagki.

All the material that’s sucked from the bottom of the river will end up in a structure like this, where rocks and mud are deposited onto a carpet before being processed to extract specks of gold. To gather the gold and separate it from the mud, the illegal miners use large amounts of mercury, a heavy metal that now contaminates the Cenepa River. This endless contamination has given the river a swamp-like appearance in several places. This process is repeated at all the points along the shore where the rafts are found.

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