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AP: "In Madre de Dios, the informal production (digging for gold) is unrecorded, untaxed and carried out on public lands where claims are awarded by regional officials, many of them grown rich in the process."
AND: "Rather than try to evict the thousands of protesting informal miners, the government decided to work to "formalize" their operations, which have denuded well over 180 square kilometers (70 square miles ) of jungle in Madre de Dios.
"In practice, nothing happened. They moved against a small percentage of dredges that are not necessarily what hurts the environment most," said Pavel Cartagena, an environmental activist who recently returned to Puerto Maldonado, the state capital, after death threats drove him away for a year."
