Barefoot, 10-year-old Martin digs the earth with his 9- and 11-year-old cousins ??in an open-air mine in El Callao, a small landlocked town in southeastern Venezuela where countless “mills” hum and crush the earth. and stones to extract gold.
He can’t read, but he’s already a master at detecting traces of gold. The quest for gold in the camps of this town in the state of Bolivar is at first a game. But it quickly turns into full-time work, compared to exploitation by human rights defenders.
Sitting in puddles of muddy water, dozens of young people dexterously turn large soup plates, searching among the earth for pieces of gold that may have adhered to mercury, a banned pollutant.
“Everything that glitters we put it in a bag and wash it with water. The gold sticks to the quicksilver (mercury),” explains Martin, whose identity has been changed for security reasons.
But, this is only a phase of gold panning and you have to work hard. Due to their small size, it is often children who get into the pits to “chop” the earth.
It softens little by little. This is what they call “the material”: the mud containing the gold that will be put into the mill, a different method than recovering the gold from the plates.
They work squatting, shirtless, covered in mud. Or have to carry, bent under their weight, bags of mud from one hole to another.
Martin lives in El Peru, a hamlet in El Callao. He never went to school. Only one of his cousins, aged 9, receives an education “because his mother forces him to”.
“I prefer to look for gold rather than go to school. My father says that the money is found in work,” he tells AFP. “With what we earn, I buy my little things, shoes, clothes, sometimes sweets.”
Most children say that their “dream” is to become a miner, to have “a mill” when they “grow up”.
Carlos Trapani, general coordinator of the NGO Cecodap, which defends children’s rights, emphasizes that work in the mines takes place in “the worst conditions”.
Author of the report “Dangers and violations of the rights of children and adolescents in border and mining activities”, Mr. Trapani believes that “we have normalized conditions in which children are in danger, not only because of the risks of “accidents and endemic diseases, but also because they are vulnerable to other forms of violence, such as sexual exploitation and abuse”.
A thousand children work in the region’s mines, according to the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB). “The family environment is focused on survival,” says Eumelis Moya of UCAB Guayana.
Illegal mining is growing rapidly in southern Venezuela, areas where the law of might often reigns with the presence of guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug trafficking gangs, who sometimes fight each other.
The state is struggling to enforce the law, as evidenced by the violent clashes between gold miners and the army in recent days in the Yapacana park, the largest nature reserve in the country.
Gustavo sweeps past the El Peru liquor store. He fills three buckets with dirt then goes to the river with his three brothers, aged 8, 11 and 13, to wash them with a pan in the hope of finding gold.
As in the village everything is paid for in gold, they hope that during drunken evenings a few gold miners will have dropped some dust, or even nuggets.
“The other day I picked up a gram (1g = 50 dollars), I give this money to my mother to buy food and sometimes she buys something for us,” says the boy who has been working for age 6.
The mother of Gustavo, 28, who has been a minor since the age of 12, assures that her goal is for them to “return to school” because “in the mines, there are always risks.”
09/20/2023 09:41:22 – El Callao (Venezuela) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
