A gendarme from the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN) was shot dead in Guyana while taking part in an operation to combat illegal gold panning, we learned on Saturday March 25 from a source. close to the file, which confirms site information News17. The 35-year-old soldier was in operation on the gold panning site of Dorlin, in central Guyana, where this illegal activity is the source of significant pollution. The Elysée clarified that this gendarmerie non-commissioned officer was on a joint mission with the French army in Maripasoula, in the Amazonian park of Guyana.
Emmanuel Macron expressed “his great emotion” after the policeman’s murder. The head of state “Salutes the courage and the memory of this non-commissioned officer, fallen under fire, engaged since 2009 within the national gendarmerie and who served at the GIGN antenna in Cayenne since 2019”, wrote the Presidency of the Republic in a press release. The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, expressed her “sadness” and addressed his “condolences to his family, his loved ones, his comrades and all the gendarmerie”. “Faced with thugs, we should perhaps adapt by being like them”reacted for his part the former deputy of Guyana Lénaïck Adam (La République en Marche).
In 2012, two soldiers were killed and two gendarmes seriously injured by bullets during a joint operation by the army and the gendarmerie against illegal gold diggers, already on the Dorlin site.
Every year, 10 tonnes of gold illegally mined
The army and the gendarmerie regularly carry out major operations to dismantle illegal gold panning sites as part of Operation “Harpie”, launched in 2008 by Nicolas Sarkozy. From the end of October to the beginning of December 2022, up to 500 soldiers were mobilized for seven weeks in order to “neutralize” the main clandestine gold mining sites.
Fifty tons of equipment and various foodstuffs, 30,000 liters of fuel, 12 kilometers of site pipes, six crushers, ninety generators, thirty-seven quads, fifteen canoes and their engines had been seized. That is a financial loss of around 4 million euros, according to the prefecture, for the prospectorsa term for illegal Brazilian gold miners in Guyana.
According to figures from a parliamentary report published in July 2021, the Guyana gendarmerie estimates the number of illegal minors at around 8,600, “in irregular situation on the territory” essentially. In 2022, the French authorities carried out more than a thousand patrols in the forest against illegal gold panning, seizing 59 kilos of mercury and 5 kilos of gold, according to a report from the prefecture. According to local mining operators, 10 tonnes of gold are illegally extracted from Guyana each year by prospectors.
To separate the gold from the ore, clandestine miners also use a large quantity of mercury, a toxic metal that pollutes soils and waterways, and promotes deforestation. The fight against this phenomenon is also complicated by its cross-border nature, with artisanal gold miners operating on either side of the Oyapock and Maroni rivers, borders between the French department and, respectively, Brazil and Suriname.