La frontière ? Quelle frontière ? La dynamique transnationale de l’orpaillage clandestin en Guyane française

The French territory of Guiana is currently exploited illegally by thousands of small-scale artisanal gold miners who extract each year between 5 and 10 tons of gold and smuggle them into Suriname and Brazil. Almost exclusively Brazilian and called garimpeiros, these miners deploy in French Guiana the economic, social and cultural system that makes their specificity in Brazil, and that covers Suriname as well. This system is grounded on a specific territorial logic which articulates all the mining territories of the Brazilian Amazon and of the Guiana plateau in the form of a transnational or, rather, an a-national network in which borders are no more than obstacles that are hardly impossible to overcome. The garimpeiros approach the different territories in function of their own evaluation grid where a region richness in gold or the pressure by authorities to prohibit their activities are much more relevant than the country the area they consider belongs to, thus reducing borders to mere material contingencies. Based on four years of extensive research about illegal gold mining in French Guiana, this paper shows how the “garimpeiro system” is deployed in the French territory and exploits the difficulty of border control, both on rivers and at sea. It also analyzes how this system links illegal mining areas in French Guiana with the ones in Brazil and in Suriname.