Prospectors Under the Golden Spell of El Dorado

Visions of wild riches are bubbling again in this hardscrabble Amazon mining town.

But so are the conflicts that usually accompany a gold strike.

The fight here is between thousands of struggling prospectors who have held on since the last boom went bust six years ago and a government mining company that says it has found a new lode.

For Jose Francisco Assis, a gaunt, toothless miner who heads the Serra Pelada prospectors co-operative, it’s a struggle between David and Goliath.

“They’re the richest mining company in the world and we’re nobodies. Just because it’s the biggest gold mine in the world, they want to take it away from us,” he says.

Holding a sheaf of official-looking documents he cannot read, Assis says the papers grant the prospectors legal right to the gold.

The government contends the find by its Companhia Vale do Rio Doce is a mile from the former Serra Pelada lode, so the prospectors have no claim on it.

The miners have kept employees of the mining concern, which is known as Vale, from working at the new site while the argument rages.

In muddy streets winding past unpainted, slapped-together shacks, bars and brothels, the people of Serra Pelada are dreaming once more of becoming “El Dorado,” the legendary city of gold.

For many, that’s what Serra Pelada--Portuguese for Bare Mountain--became after gold was discovered in January 1980. Within two months, 25,000 prospectors had flocked to this tract of rain forest 1,200 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, and it soon grew into a town with 30,000 houses and 1,000 businesses.

At the mine, men swarmed like ants, hauling bags of gold-rich dirt slung over their backs and reducing the hill to a 330-foot-deep pit.

In town, the atmosphere was reminiscent of the Wild West.

“It was full of fights and robberies--the kinds of things you get on rich earth,” recalls Antonio Carlos Pedroso Bittencourt, who arrived 12 years ago.

By some estimates, 10,000 miners earned at least $6,000 each and 3,000 others made nearly $40,000--a fortune in a country where the minimum wage is the equivalent of about $110 a month.

At its peak, there were 100,000 prospectors pulling 57 pounds of gold a day from the mine--40 tons in all. The luckiest was Julio de Deus Filho, who found a 136-pound nugget--reputedly the third-largest piece of gold ever discovered.

But the boom ended in 1990 when the miners hit water, unleashing a flood that turned the pit into a lake almost overnight. Many miners drowned, and with them went the hopes of many more.

Today, barely 6,000 miners are left. Some dig halfheartedly in a small pit, while others check the dirt extracted earlier for gold missed the first time around.

“There’s nothing here but suffering,” says Maria Elza Ribeiro Sousa, who runs a roadside bar. Like many fortune hunters, she came to the Amazon from Brazil’s arid northeast.

“If it were up to me, I would go back, but my husband still dreams of striking it rich,” she says, a smile revealing elaborate gold inlays in her front teeth.

Those dreams got fever hot in February, when President Fernando Henrique Cardoso announced that Vale had discovered a 150-ton gold deposit. If the geologists are right, it would be the largest gold mine in South America.

The prospectors say the gold is rightfully theirs and they will do whatever it takes to get it. In May, they blocked Vale surveyors from the area. A month later, they briefly took 13 Vale employees prisoner, then seized a bus with 20 people and held them overnight.

“I’ve spent 16 years of my life here, and I’m not going to give up the gold for anything,” says Assis, the co-op leader.

Vale, which says that at 1,200 feet below the surface the gold cannot be reached without sophisticated equipment, is trying to negotiate a financial settlement with the prospectors. It has offered $6,000 for their houses and the possibility of a job elsewhere.

“We realize that there is a social question,” said a Vale spokeswoman, Almeida Clarice. “People have been in the area 10 to 15 years so they think they have a right to the gold, which leaves a mining company to resolve a social problem that it didn’t create.”

Some prospectors have accepted the offer, but most say they will hold out for nothing less than 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of gold --worth about $400,000--for each of 20,000 registered prospectors. It isn’t clear how they settled on that figure.

“We are in a struggle, but the gold is down there,” says Antonio Sampaio Rodrigues, one of the prospectors. Pointing into a small, muddy pit, he adds: “When we get to it, it’s going to be a great party.”

But until the party starts, most of the men hang out on the main street. At 5 p.m., they hoist the Brazilian flag and sing the national anthem, then sit down to review the news of the day and stoke each other’s dreams of riches.