Last Saturday night, I was laying in bed and going down another YouTube rabbit hole when I stumbled upon a Vice video titled “The Most Dangerous Black Market You’ve Never Heard of”. I clicked on it, not knowing what to expect and it’s safe to say the title was right. I had never heard that this was an existing black market and I did not know the substance in question was illegal in the first place. The substance? Mercury. The stuff that used to be in thermometers. But what has created this whole black market for mercury? Gold. 

In countries where gold is produced, there is a high demand for mercury because of its use in gold mining. When a miner finds gold, the gold does not appear in a bar solid bar. It is simply dust. The miners then take the mercury, pour it onto the gold dust, and wait for it to mix to have a liquid solution (a mercury-gold combination). After that, one person on the mining team takes a blow torch to heat the combo to burn the mercury off and leaves solid gold. Once the whole process is complete, the gold can be sold, bought, or traded in either small trading stores or massive supply chains. 

Although some of the largest gold production enterprises are located in countries such as China, South Africa, Russia, and Australia, this video took its focus to two much smaller countries. Guyana and Suriname. These two countries are the center of the gold mining-mercury trade. Guyana is the size of the US state of Indiana and may have only about 100,000 people, but it is extremely economically dependent on gold mining. This dependence is reflected in the fact that even though the rest of the world banned the export, import, and trade in mercury in 2008, it remains legal in Guyana. Because the Guyanese have kept the mercury trade legal, there are black market cartels (usually involved in the drug trade) that have set up shop in Guyana, smuggling mercury into neighboring Suriname and then into the rest of South America (Brazil and Peru especially). 

Given the dangers that come with handling mercury and smuggling it, this situation has created a lucrative and potentially deadly market for everyone involved.