Word: serra
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Allowing for the portable radios and the constant shuttle flights from the nearby town of Marabá, Serra Pelada has become a tropical version of the 19th century Klondike. Around the big stike, which is carved up claim block by claim block, the landscape is a jumble of hovels and open bamboo shelters. Young miners in cutoff shorts and sandals throng the dusty alleyways; grizzled oldtimers wearing floppy straw hats lead their pack mules through the maze. Everywhere, anxious men watch drying handfuls of earth for signs of pay dirt. The ground around them flows with a liquid waste, from...
...insisted on barracao (literally the trading post but, in another application, the company store), charging outrageous amounts for food and other necessities. Bottled water cost $3 a liter, eggs 500 apiece. At the same time, roving bands of local ranch hands began to extort gold from the miners. Soon, Serra Pelada was an armed camp...
...literally the trading post but, in another application, the company store), charging outrageous amounts for food and other necessities. Bottled water cost $3 a liter, eggs 50? a piece. At the same time, roving bands of local ranch hands began to extort gold from the miners. Soon, Serra Pelada was an armed camp...
...return for help of this kind, Brasilia demanded only one thing: a monopoly on buying up the treasure of Serra Pelada. The state mining company, Companhia Vale do Rio, opened an office at the site, and miners began to line up to weigh in and sell their gold at prices that stand at about 30% below the international peg. (The largest daily intake by the Serra Pelada so far is close to 327 lbs.) At first, many of the miners would accept only cash; it took officials some time to persuade the garimpeiros to take federally endorsed checks...
Administrators in Brasilia suggest that if illegal gold exports could be stopped and all the country's gold deposits controlled in the same way as Serra Pelada, Brazil could count on an annual yield of 300 tons of the metal. That is 40% of the production in South Africa, one of the world's leading gold diggers...