Serra Pelada: The Gold Rush on the National Stage

With this chapter we leave the ethnography of garimpagem and begin to consider it in a wider economic and political context. The garimpo of Serra Pelada has already been mentioned in passing several times in this book and will now be dealt with at greater length. This is only partly because Serra Pelada is the most dramatic and the most visually startling example of the scale and the importance of the gold rush that has taken hold of large parts of Amazonia since 1979. It was also the first garimpo to be taken over by the state, and a knowledge of the history of state intervention in Serra Pelada and its consequences is fundamentally important to the analysis of the relationships between garimpeiros and the state, and between garimpagem and mineral companies in contemporary Amazonia. Serra Pelada redefined those relationships. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.