On the banks of the Madre de Dios river, dredges work day and night in search of gold, part of a scourge of illegal mining that is slowly devouring the Peruvian Amazon.

Where trees used to stand there are now deep sinkholes flooded with brown water where dredges sift through mountains of rubble for the valuable particles.

"The community can no longer plant their corn, their bananas, their cassava, because this land is practically dead.

In 2022, official data showed Peru produced 96 tons of gold—but exported about 180 tons to Canada, India, Switzerland and the United States.

“Forty-five percent of exports have no production record,” according to an official body tasked with overseeing Peruvian banks and combating money laundering.

Independent studies have named Peru as the largest exporter of illegal gold in South America, with 44 percent of the total, ahead of Colombia with 25 percent and Bolivia with 12 percent, according to the Peruvian Institute of Economics, a think tank.