Peru’s Operation Mercury and Bolsonaro’s Brazil: Green Washing and Toxic Assets in Latin America

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About the presentation: This paper examines the gendered and racialized politics of natural resource extraction in Peru and Brazil’s Amazon. In Peru’s region of Madre de Dios, the struggle surrounding the application of quicksilver (liquid mercury) in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) has inspired tropes of “raping the earth” because of the damage done by quicksilver on the environment. The United Nations-sponsored Minamata Convention is a global accord that seeks to eliminate human emissions of mercury. The Peruvian government has undertaken violent evictions of miners in an emergency effort dubbed: “Operation Mercury” in the name of ecological conservation and the Minamata Convention. It is an altogether undemocratic effort, an exercise of State power that fails to acknowledge the lack of alternatives for miners and the global demand for gold (Díaz 2021). The government intervention also creates ecological harm when gasoline, mining equipment and stashes of mercury are bombed in the rainforest. As part of an ongoing collaborative research project with gold miners, Indigenous leaders, and environmental scientists, this paper brings ethnographic findings into conversation with political theory on the “Pink Tide” and what one might term the “Green Wash” in Latin America. The emergence of mercury as a politically charged substance (Rubiano-Galvis 2021) attests to the longstanding political assemblages that involve the violent oppression of laborers and Indigenous dispossession in extractive economies, resulting in toxic assets. Across the border in Brazil, similar of mining practices exist, ones that most noticeably expanded under former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. In response to European leaders who offered to fight wildfires that raged throughout the Amazon Basin in 2019, Bolsonaro famously likened Brazil to a “virgin that every foreign pervert wants.” Known for his vitriolic tirades, Bolsonaro believed European leaders would leverage their assistance for access to Amazonian natural resources, furthering playing a part in the toxic assemblage of Amazonian resource assets. Toxic assets are volatile – mercurial – as potentially lucrative as they are bankrupting – gold in exchange for the rainforest. This paper underscores the role that toxic assets and ecosystem-services play in neoliberal extractivism, where “democratic” governments seek profit and control over who siphons natural resources from the open veins of Latin America (Galeano 1973).

About the presenter:  Ruth Goldstein is an assistant professor of gender & women’s studies @ UW-Madison. Goldstein is broadly interested in the gendered aspects of human and nonhuman health, a quickly heating planet and environmental racism. Her book: Life in Traffic: Women, Plants, and Gold Along South America’s Interoceanic Highway examines the socio-environmental consequences of transnational infrastructure projects and climate change along Latin America’s recently constructed thoroughfare, La Interoceánica, with a particular focus on intersections of race and Indigeneity, cis and trans women’s health and “earth” rights in Brazil and Peru. Her subsequent research on mercury as a global pollutant, analyzes the racialized weight of toxic body burdens and impacts on maternal/fetal health.