I'm John Betts with my friend and colleague Ernesto Urge, a former Foreign Minister of

the Republic of Brazil, commenting on the meeting of the eight states who are charged

with caring for and worrying about and funding and cooperating with the Amazon.

It's called the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization.

It's meeting this week in these next hours, and it has a huge agenda.

I'm going to go to one specific part of it, gold.

Now here to four Ernesto and Joseph Umar and I have discussed the gold exploitation

in the Venezuelan part of the Amazon.

This is a vast area, seven million square kilometers, 390 billion trees.

So the Amazon is not one thing.

The gold exploitation in Venezuela by failed state.

It's impossible to imagine imposing any order on Venezuela.

It's linked with the bad actress of the earth.

But Peru is a country in turmoil with a vice president who's now President Polarty looking

to elections, but also jailing a former president, a Castillo.

And I learned from the Reuters report that the southeastern Peru's Madre de Deos region

has 46,000 miners searching for gold along the river banks in the epicenter of a small scale

mining operation. These miners are part of the larger story of exploiting all of the Amazon.

Gold mining is very straightforward Ernesto.

Everybody can imagine it.

There are many movies made of it.

Is there any policing of these gold miners?

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