David Cleary

An Introduction to the Amazon Gold Rush

This book is about what in Portuguese is called garimpagem. There is no exact English translation; it is best defined as small scale informal sector mining. In Brazil miners of this type are called garimpeiros: their diggings and the communities which form around them are known as garimpos. Garimpagem has traditionally been associated first and foremost with gold extraction, in Brazil and elsewhere. Brazil has a particularly rich tradition of gold mining: eighteenth-century gold rushes in Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso transformed the Brazilian interior during colonial times, and it was partly the search for gold which drove the frontiers of Brazil so deep into the South American land mass. This book is devoted to a contemporary heir to that long tradition of prospecting and mining in Brazil.

Serra Pelada: The Gold Rush on the National Stage

With this chapter we leave the ethnography of garimpagem and begin to consider it in a wider economic and political context. The garimpo of Serra Pelada has already been mentioned in passing several times in this book and will now be dealt with at greater length. This is only partly because Serra Pelada is the most dramatic and the most visually startling example of the scale and the importance of the gold rush that has taken hold of large parts of Amazonia since 1979. It was also the first garimpo to be taken over by the state, and a knowledge of the history of state intervention in Serra Pelada and its consequences is fundamentally important to the analysis of the relationships between garimpeiros and the state, and between garimpagem and mineral companies in contemporary Amazonia. Serra Pelada redefined those relationships.

The Implications of the Gold Rush

The social and economic consequences that flow from the establishment of garimpagem in a particular region reverberate far beyond the garimpos themselves, but as good a place as any to begin is with the effect the gold rush has on a local economy when it touches an area. Many commentators have noted that garimpagem stimulates local economies, but the richly diverse range of stimuli has neither been described nor fully appreciated. Take the Gurupi in western Maranhao as an example.

Fofoca: The Formation of Garimpos

The formation of a garimpo is a complicated process. It begins with an individual, or a small group of prospectors, and ends with scores, hundreds, thousands and occasionally tens of thousands of garimpeiros working around the area of the original strike. Social relations have to be defined, and space has to be apportioned for people to work. The sequence of events that begins with successful prospecting and ends with the birth of a mature garimpo is usually compressed into a few months, and rarely lasts for more than a year. It is a period of frantic activity, with radical changes following upon one another with bewildering speed. At first glance, all this activity appears chaotic, an expression of the proverbial anarchy and lawlessness of gold mining communities, but beneath the blur of events lie highly structured processes common to the formation of all garimpos, large and small.

Garimpagem, Formal Mining and the State

State regulation of gold mining in Brazil dates from a proclamation issued by the Portuguese crown in 1535, some 50 years before any minerals were actually extracted in the colony. The very word ‘garimpeiro’ was an indirect product of state action. In 1731, almost exactly 250 years before federal intervention in Serra Pelada, the Portuguese crown mounted a military operation to take over the diamond garimpos of Tijuco, Minas Gerais. Patrols sealed off the area, with orders to prevent the entry of anybody not carrying a royal permit. But it seems to have been just as difficult 250 years ago as it is today to keep garimpeiros away from a strike. The records soon began to mention the appearance of garimpeiros, who took their name from grimpas, the foothills and valleys of the highlands of Minas Gerais, where miners hid from the patrols and extracted diamonds clandestinely. It is not difficult to find other echoes of contemporary Amazonia in the eighteenth century. From the 1720s on a series of gold strikes were made around Cuiaba, in Mato Grosso, which for decades to come would be a major administrative headache for the Portuguese authorities. In 1789, for example, gold was discovered at a place called Sapateiro, to the north of Cuiaba, and a disorderly fofoca ensued. The reaction of the Governor in Cuiaba bore an eerie resemblance to events in the Araguaia-Tocantins nearly 200 years later: On the 7th of July the recent discovery of Sapateiro was divided up into datas [an archaic word for barrancos] which were distributed by lot. 400 people owning a total of 2,250 slaves competed in the lottery, together with just over 100 freed slaves who entered as individuals.1

Social Relations in the Garimpo

One of the most confusing things about garimpeiros for the visiting anthropologist is that they seem highly individualistic at one moment and yet insist at another that garimpagem is a collective, cooperative enterprise. As we have seen, the notion of individual freedom of action is central to the social organisation of garimpagem. When constraints on that freedom come from another garimpeiro, such as a dono da fofoca, the position is at best ambiguous: in some situations, like the early stages of a fofoca, donos will consent to one of their number holding authority over them; in others, such as production decisions within the barranco or the later stages of a fofoca, they will not. State intervention provokes a similarly dualistic response. It was resisted by garimpeiros in Rondonia in 1970 and Roraima in the mid 1970s and 1985, but welcomed by them in Serra Pelada in 1980 and Cumaru in 1981. This dualism surfaces again in the conceptions garimpeiros have about the type of life they lead and about the nature of garimpagem itself.

Garimpagem in Maranhão

At first sight garimpagem in Amazonia seems rather spasmodic, with frantic bursts of activity punctuating decades of silence. Gold extraction is obviously linked with fluctuations in the world market price, but this alone does not explain the patchiness that marks the appearance of garimpagem in the historical record. There is also a sense in which garimpagem, and garimpeiros, can be thought of as a hidden social formation. In western Maranhao, and in other parts of Brazil, garimpagem began as a clandestine activity, practised by communities of runaway slaves or by groups of miners evading Portuguese attempts to tax and regulate all mining in Brazil during the colonial period. Garimpagem has been illegal for most of its history, as it is still technically illegal today. It depended for its survival on remaining invisible to the authorities, flourishing most in areas where the political writ of the state did not run, and where as a rule historical documentation leaves something to be desired. Garimpeiros tend not to submit applications for mineral concessions, or leave written records of their activities, and the further back one attempts to trace their activities, the more one has to rely on fleeting references and oblique clues.

The Social Structure of the Gold Rush

At first sight a garimpo appears to be a place where the social stratification that is so much a feature of Brazilian society is largely absent. People mix without apparent distinction in work and at play, and from a distance it is impossible to tell the doctor or the businessman from the smallholder or the building worker. It is not unusual to see a middle or upper class man cooking a meal for illiterate smallholders and ex-shop assistants. But appearances are deceptive, for within a few hours of arrival in a garimpo it becomes obvious that there are social hierarchies; some garimpeiros give instructions, others carry them out.

Economic Life in the Garimpo

Although social life in the garimpo is more than simply the aggregate of a series of economic transactions and relationships, it is impossible to understand it without considering the garimpo as an economic system. People work under several distinct labour regimes, deals are struck, operations are financed, agreements are honoured and broken, proceeds spent and invested in different ways, credit extended and refused, and in the process people get rich, get by, or go bankrupt.