“They’re digging in the wrong place.”
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Its more than digging in the wrong place - its a deliberate crime.
The environmental damage those people do is horrendous; they often use mercury to recover the gold, sometimes the mercury is recaptured, sometimes not. Fish and animals die along the river - the water is undrinkable. Usually illegal mines are so remote that no one will come and clean up the mess, even if there were money to do it.
5 years in an Indonesian prison is likely a near death sentence. Those places are not the American country club prisons.
I’m not saying it’s not a crime, just that it’s not one easy to pull off. There were 80 people working at a site. That’s hard to hide.