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, Conservación Amazónica, found.

The gold rush is also poisoning its waterways. Illegal miners use dredges – floating machines that chew up and spit out riverbeds – leaving the toxic mercury used to extract gold from sediment in their wake.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/08/gold-mining-deforestation-peru-amazon