The extraction of little gold needs many more soils. According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project group (MAAP), gold mining has decimated the equivalent of more than 34,000 football fields in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest just in two years from 2017 to 2019.
The Peruvian government launched Operation Mercury, a series of highly-coordinated military interventions that apprehended illegal gold miners and destroyed the mining camps. The operation was named after the mercury from the gold-extraction process. To extract gold from muddy water, the same amount of mercury is needed. The massive mercury poured in the water causes serious pollution in local rivers and even enters the food chain, affecting people's health.