Eldorado

Red mud bubbles out of the earth. Like a bleeding forest. Craters everywhere, a landscape like an alien planet. "Get away from the edge," shouts a man as I step into a 20 metre deep pit, at the bottom of which gold diggers are standing in the mud: ants, small and helpless. Suddenly there is thunder. A landslide. The surrounding gold pits crack and rumble, the workers tear up the earth, the craters are supposed to get bigger and bigger. "Every now and then, someone gets knocked out," says the man. "Most recently... that must have been a fortnight ago". Tibúrcio, 47, was a lumberjack in his first life, sawed off three fingers on his left hand at some point and learnt how to play the guitar with two fingers. In 2006, four vagrants found some nuggets on the Rio Juma, one of them blabbed in the nearest village bar, saying: "I'm swimming in gold." The sentence echoed through newspapers, radio and television, awakening hope and greed, and around 10,000 fortune hunters rushed to Juma, caught up in the Amazonian dream: from gold panner to millionaire. It was the biggest gold rush since the 1980s, when 80,000 Garimpeiros flocked to the Serra Pelada. In Juma, too, the hopefuls turned the rainforest into a feverish hell, with thousands falling ill with malaria and diarrhoea and only the bush pilots, traders and whores earning money. Six months later, the gold mine was exhausted. Those who could afford it disappeared. The others are still stuck in El Dorado today: 30 children, 60 women, 400 gold seekers, a church. Every day, the prospectors preach the myths of that time: of the farmer who is said to have found 36 kilos in a week, of the beggar who now owns a villa, of the priest who keeps a big lump hidden under his bed. Together with four others, he rinses the earth with water hoses, filters the mud, swirls the mud distillate in a pan, adds a few drops of mercury, some grains turn silvery in colour. The mercury is vaporised over a fire and the grains shimmer. oro, says Tibúrcio, gold! And yet he only has a pinch of dust in his hand. In the evening, Tibúrcio distributes the crumbs, each member of his team receives two grams worth the equivalent of 56 euros. In the gold rush, a woman cost up to 120 grams for a night," says Tibúrcio, "but today it's only four or five." In the evening, we sit with the other garimpeiros in front of his hut, he plays the guitar with two fingers and we drink schnapps. Will the forest reclaim the lunar landscape one day? "A potato will never grow here again," says Tibúrcio, but he doesn't really care what happens. "A vida é agora," he says. Life is now.