A Glimpse into Brazil’s Gold Fever
I recently stumbled across Gold by Sebastião Salgado at a book sale. The cover photo immediately jumped out and impressed me. As the book was wrapped in cellophane, I could only get a good look at it at home.
This Taschen book, designed by Lélia Wanick Salgado, contains impressive black-and-white photographs of the gold rush in Serra Pelada, Brazil. You see masses of people as well as close-ups of workers. Frankly, after opening it, it was a bit disappointing. After the first five powerful photos, the next 50 seem mostly variations on the same theme: all black and white, all crowds of people, all the same kind of work.
Still, because it is all quite recent, the book gives an interesting glimpse into the past. And it proves just how important a good book cover is.
At first I thought it was about a gold rush from the beginning of the last century, around 1910 or 1920. That would explain the manual work, although I thought the pictures were very sharp for the time. Later, I read the brief description at the front – with a summary by E.Y. – and found that it was much more recent: Salgado was there in 1986, and the gold rush began in 1979 when gold was found in a nearby stream. That surprised me. How could such intense manual work be so recent? The photos show large groups of people in extreme situations and/or close-ups of workers. It must have been a lot of misery, accidents and exploitation, as the brief content shows.
Salgado describes Serra Pelada as a huge hole, 200 metres wide and deep, full of tens of thousands of half-dressed men. Some carried heavy 40-kilo bags over wooden ladders, others slid through the mud. It looked like chaos, but it was organised: more than 50,000 workers, divided into plot owners, investors (‘capitalistas’) and day labourers. Remarkably, people from all backgrounds worked together here, with gold as the sole motivation. The day labourers did the hardest work: digging, filling bags, and carrying them up narrow paths and ladders, their bodies red with iron ore. It was dangerous, but they did not stop, even in the rainy season. ‘The thirst for gold was stronger than the fear for their lives,’ Salgado writes.
The government sent federal police – guns, alcohol and women were banned. A state bank bought the gold at 15 per cent below the London Metal Exchange price. They worked from 7am to 6pm, except Sundays. By 1992, when the mine went back to the state (CVRD, now Vale), 30 tonnes of gold had been extracted, worth about $400 million. Some got rich, others lost everything.
The environment paid a price: a devastated landscape with a 200-metre-deep lake where the mine was, and further down the Amazon damage from deforestation and mercury pollution. Salgado ends with: ‘Gold fever keeps them working, but it is also gold fever that keeps them poor.’ Now the area is poor again, a legend with ‘a few happy memories, many painful regrets – and pictures.’
