The city of Zaruma is sitting on top of one of the richest gold deposits in the world. As illegal miners run rampant underground, the city is collapsing into their sinkholes.
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Deep in the lush forests of southern Ecuador, in a cloud-covered village perched on the western edge of the Andes, a hole opened in the Earth one night late last year.
Small at first, it began to slowly expand and, over the course of an hour that evening, proceeded to swallow huge chunks of cobblestone road in the historic center of Zaruma. Panic spread among residents. They fled their homes-grand, early 19th century structures bathed in tropical pastels-and scurried to safety.
Word of the commotion quickly reached Gladis Gomez.
She was across town with her daughter when the phone rang. The voice on the line was frantic. Gomez’s home was in danger. So too was her elderly father’s, right next door. She hit the gas on her Chevy SUV and muscled it up and down Zaruma’s windy mountain roads as fast as she could.
She arrived to find a neighbor carrying her father out of his home just as the sinkhole was closing in. The three of them ducked into a little market down the street, where they watched on in stunned disbelief as his home wobbled and then, in a flash, plunged deep into the Earth.
“At that point,” Gomez says, “I passed out.”
The sinkhole, measuring some 90 feet across and 100 feet down, would consume two other homes that night and leave scores more, including Gomez’s, uninhabitable. It is the product of one thing and one thing only: gold mining. Zaruma is loaded with bullion-rich rock-some of the best in the world-and for over 1,000 years, long before even the Incas arrived, humans have been digging up the Earth to pull it out. There are so many tunnels and branches and offshoots that no one-not even the country’s top engineer on the job, Ivan Nunez-knows where they all go.
But what Nunez, and everyone else in town, does know is this: Ever since the price of gold started to skyrocket early this century, illegal mining has exploded, and as it did, the underground tunnels took on a markedly more precarious feel.
The sableros, or swashbucklers, as they are known to all in Zaruma, pay little attention to structural integrity and lots of attention to tapping into the richest veins around. Even if it means digging right under a school or a hospital or a home. When the sun came up that next day in December, the scope of the problem came into fuller view. The sableros had dug a branch that shot upwards from a horizontal tunnel. The branch came to within 20 feet of Gomez’s house.
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17 сен 2024
