Infrastructures of Informality: mobility and possibility in a remote Amazonian mining region

The social and environmental impact of mining in South America cannot be underestimated, yet the phenomenon is invariably explored as conspicuous activities of transnational mining corporations, relationships with governments, and resistance by local populations firmly connected to administrative centres. Remote informal mining in Amazonia, however, has somehow slipped under the radar despite causing arguably as much devastation as corporate mining. Being located in far-flung locales of the rainforest, prospectors have to devise innovative covert infrastructures that enable the mine’s continued existence.

This paper will consider the understudied phenomenon of so-called ‘wildcat mining’ by paying particular attention to the creation of ‘homemade’ connectivity in regions far removed from states and corporations. The marginal landscapes that prospectors must negotiate in order to reach the mine site consist of unruly forests, raging waterfalls and distant waterways, locales that engineers often struggle to manage in contexts of formal infrastructural development (Harvey and Knox 2012). But it is precisely these environments that allow informal mining to proceed clandestinely in such case, with prospectors devising creative informal infrastructures: extensive trade networks of petrol required to run machinery (outboard motors, water cannons, generators), procurement and movement of paperwork, delayed exchange relationships, verbal communication systems over large distances, and networks of illegality such as mafias. Through prospectors’ activities and daily descriptions of their role in these practices, the paper explores how material and non-material connectivity is enabled through autonomous structure-building over inaccessible and ungoverned spaces.