PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru - Record gold prices are claiming an unlikely victim: the lush, spectacularly biodiverse rainforests of the Peruvian Amazon. Since the global economy fell off the edge of a cliff in 2008, sending investors scrambling to put their money into the ultimate safe haven, gold, thousands of illegal miners have flooded into the Madre de Dios region of central Peru. Now they are ravaging its pristine tropical rainforests and river systems, including some of Peru's most important nature reserves, using primitive mining techniques to churn through vast quantities of the region's rich, sandy soils, sparkling with specks of the precious metal. As the do so, they poison the water table with mercury and carve out vast, toxic holes in the virgin jungle. "It is a disaster zone," says Jorge Herrera, director of the southern Amazon program for the Peruvian branch of the World Wildlife Fund. "The environmental cost is extremely high. That is partly due to the techniques used, but also to the irreplaceable biodiversity that this region harbors." Since the global financial crisis in 2008, investor capital has fled to a standard haven: gold. Prices for the yellow metal reached record highs this year, raising the incentive to get the gold out of the ground. Impoverished people in rural areas became artisanal miners. Companies sprang up with new machinery, and governments tapped in, too. In Latin America, everyone is finding a way to get in on the scramble. Estimates of the number of miners in Madre de Dios range between 40,000 and 50,000. According to the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law, which is known by its Spanish initials, SPDA, just 3 percent of them are legal, working formal concessions with environmental permits and approved equipment. These miners produce roughly one fifth of Peru's annual total of 175 metric tons of gold. They are also responsible for destroying more than 70 square miles of tropical rainforest s

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