On a small airplane, José Manuyama, a professor, frowns and shakes his head with anguish while thousands of feet below, five dredges operated by illegal miners excavate the Nanay River Basin, in the Loreto region in the Peruvian Amazon. “They are like enormous leeches in the water,” said Manuyama. The plane has begun its second hour of the flyover above the Nanay River and, so far, the people on board have seen about 40 dredges. The Nanay is surrounded by shiny riverbanks with an ochre hue, a result of the mercury used by the illegal miners to separate gold particles from other sediments. River mining is prohibited by Peruvian law. For Manuyama, the president of the Committee for the Defense of the Water of Iquitos, the situation is very disheartening. He says that seven years ago, the Nanay was a clear river, but the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic brought an increase in the mining rafts that have now given the river a milky appearance. Manuyama, a member of the Kukama community, is a social studies professor and is one of the 15 people on the plane, which is now flying over the Napo River. From the air, the orange pipes coming out of four dredges resemble the tentacles of a gigantic animal drilling into the river basin and disturbing the edge of the forest. Along with Manuyama are the prosecutor from the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office in Environmental Matters of Loreto (FEMA Loreto), Bratzon Saboya, and the coordinator of the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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