The Geopolitics of Gold in Northern Amazonia

Recent migration of Brazilian small-scale miners (garimpeiros) through the Amazon region and across the Guyanese border threatens to increase pressures on Makushi and Wapishana territories within Guyana, resulting in the annexation of traditional ancestral lands and potential losses of subsistence and livelihood practices, as well as disturbances to traditional cultures and ways of life. I argue that these migration trends may be part of a larger intraregional geopolitics emerging out of Brazil, wherein development and protection of the northern Amazon frontier was encouraged primarily through regional colonization. Following an historical account of the geopolitical motivations for the evolving legislation, political action, and program and project implementation decisions that impacted the Brazilian Amazon, I trace the specific interventions that caused the garimpeiros to then shift across the border to Guyana, and outline the environmental and social impacts this migration is having upon the places and the peoples of the Rupununi. I conclude by suggesting that the Rupununi is unknowingly enmeshed within the larger geopolitical concerns of the region, and that the migration of Brazilian miners from across the border may be signalling the advent of a larger geopolitical concern: that of the integrity of the Rupununi as a Guyanese territory.