The action emerged from jungle darkness into the white heat of day. A group of men stood waist deep in murky water at the southern edge of Venezuela and used wads of mercury to sift gold from silt - a fortune, however small.

Globe photographer Essdras Suarez and I encountered this moment at the Las Cristinas gold mine six years ago. The families had come to the mine to find a way to survive. As I wrote in the story about life there:
"Pickup trucks shuttled men, women, and children west along a rocky road to the gold mine that they all, remembering the day one high mud wall fell too far too fast, call "Los Cuatro Muertos," The Four Dead.
The mine was conceived as a vast operation, digging deep to tap one of the world's largest gold deposits, and controlled, as is so much in South America, by foreign interests. Crystallex International Corp., a Canadian company, in 2002 obtained long-disputed rights to the Las Cristinas mine, as it is officially known, in hopes of harvesting a half-million ounces of gold a year, beginning in 2006.