How illegal gold mining in Amazon fuels mercury boom in Mexico

Hello and welcome to the AP Climate Watch newsletter. We are Teresa de Miguel, a video producer for AP’s Climate and Environment team, and Megan Janetsky, a correspondent covering Mexico and Central America. Today we’ll talk about the mercury boom in Mexico that’s being bolstered by illegal miners in the Amazon who use the toxic metal to mine gold.

At the end of July, news broke that Peruvian authorities had seized a huge shipment of illegal mercury from Mexico that was destined for illegal gold mines in the Amazon. The bust caught our attention, as we saw it as one link in a chain of cascading human and environmental consequences. 

In the Amazon, miners use this toxic metal to extract gold from river sediment, causing widespread environmental and human health devastation. The impacts of mercury there have been studied and reported on for years, but little is known about one of the main sources of this chemical: Mexico's Sierra Gorda. 

We set out to investigate how mercury is produced, why international efforts to curb mercury mining aren’t working here, and how mercury makes its way from beneath the central Mexican mountains to the South American rainforest. 

After numerous interviews with experts, environmentalists and locals, we realized that visiting the mercury mines in Mexico would not be easy. The miners were furious because the national and international press was citing a report that organized crime had taken control of some of the mines.  

After weeks of trying, we were able to travel with a source who opened the doors to a small mine buried in the mountains near the mining town of San Joaquin accessible only by off-road vehicle. We traveled with AP photographer Fernando Llano, who helped us visually capture Mexico’s mercury boom. Miners – some of whose families have been working in the mines for generations – said they are not criminals. Rather, they were workers simply trying to make ends meet by mining one of the most toxic substances on the planet. 

With safety gear of little more than a helmet with a flashlight, the miners climb into tunnels and descend with the help of ropes dozens of meters deep into the mountain to drill for cinnabar, the ore containing mercury. 

They haul the stone on their backs right back up to the surface. A brick wood-fired oven heats the stone until the mercury evaporates and falls as a liquid into containers where it is stored until Saturdays, when middlemen known as “coyotes” come to buy it.  

Many of the middlemen are locals. Others come from as far as Colombia and Peru. 

Getting the mercury has serious impacts on the health of miners and their families, environmental lawyer Izarelly Rosillo told us. Miners often return home with their work clothes covered in toxic dust. Sometimes, on rainy days, they burn the mercury in furnaces in their backyards. 

The lawyer knows the health impacts of mercury firsthand: After working more than a decade around the mines, she herself became poisoned, losing 70% of her hearing in her left ear and suffering from tremors and nausea, among other symptoms. 

It’s not just the miners affected by the mercury. It has a huge environmental impact both at its source and at its destination. In the Amazon, gold miners mix mercury with ore and then burn it off to release gold – while also sending toxic vapor into the air.  When sludge from the process gets dumped, mercury often flows into rivers, poisoning the water, fish and communities who depend on them. 

One example: high levels of mercury in river dolphins that swim the Amazon. Scientists and volunteers in Colombia have taken samples that showed mercury in the dolphins many times above the level considered safe. They found it in themselves, too, as AP’s Steven Grattan, Fernando Vergara and Cesar Olmos reported. 

It’s the same story back in Mexico. Fernando Díaz-Barriga, a medical researcher who has long studied mercury mines there, said tests by scientists show dangerously high levels of the chemical in the environment and workers. “It’s in the sediment, in the trees. Basically, this place is steeped in mercury.” 

Mexico has joined international efforts to ban mercury mining by 2032. In the meantime, it has revoked the licenses of artisanal mines operating in the Sierra Gorda, but that’s left miners in limbo. What Rosillo and many of the miners are asking for is a government plan to support them in leaving mining to find a new way of living. 

Meanwhile, as the price of gold continues to rise, mercury miners have few alternatives to the work they’ve been doing for generations. And one that pays better every day. 

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Here’s what else you need to know

Well-preserved Amazon rainforest on Indigenous lands can protect people from diseases, study finds 

Wind and solar power fuel over one-third of Brazil’s electricity for first time 

Court rules Europe can call nuclear and natural gas sustainable investments for its green transition

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✅Climate Solutions 

In LA port, bobbing blue floats are turning wave power into clean energy 

At the Port of Los Angeles, on a site that once housed oil tanks, seven steel structures that look like small blue boats are lowered into the ocean, where they gently bob up and down with the waves to generate power. It's the first onshore wave energy site in the United States. Eco Wave Power installed its technology on an unused wharf where it will generate a small amount of electricity. The goal is to show it works well enough to build it out along 8 miles of breakwater to make enough power for about 60,000 homes. Experts say the technology being officially unveiled this week can be scaled up to tap the immense wave energy off America's coasts and help meet the country's growing energy needs.   

Check out all of AP’s climate and environment coverage here. 

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