Oh, come on.
I'm in a remote corner of Venezuela.
I'm travelling the length of the Americas.
The two continents that together form more than a quarter of
Earth's land surface.
And this, right here,
is where I am starting my journey down through South America.
Completely epic South America!
It's a journey of more than 4,000 miles through some of
the world's greatest landscapes.
Encountering spectacular wildlife.
The cat is on the move.
From its iconic cities to the Andes mountains,
it's a continent of dramatic extremes.
Down!
Along the way, I meet the inspiring...
Yolanda!
..and the surprising people...
These guys are Mennonites.
..who make South America so extraordinary.
There's Wi-Fi here.
Nowhere else for miles around, apparently.
We do our own thing.
We're happy here, man.
HE GROANS
HE CHUCKLES
I am not a morning person.
But I can't wait to start today.
Er...
Where's my shoes?
I was beginning my journey down through South America,
in Venezuela, on Mount Roraima,
a place of myth and wonder.
This is...
The only fair description is a lost world, it really is.
It is unlike anywhere I can remember being on planet Earth.
I joined a small team of biologists and explorers who come here to study
this incredible ecosystem above the clouds.
So, this enormous landmass that we're on is called a tepui,
and it is one of the oldest land masses on this planet.
More than a billion years old.
Billon, with a B!
And to put that in context,
Mount Everest is only about 60 million years old.
That's a newcomer on the scene.
And these tepui are spectacular in so many different ways.
Mountains are generally formed by great tectonic plates crashing
together and then forcing upwards.
The tepui weren't formed like that.
They're formed by sediment gathering on ancient seabeds
and gradually rising up.
And then you end up, many, many years later -
oh, my goodness -
with these islands in the sky.
We are around two miles above sea level here.
And I'm a bit short of breath.
But that gifts you... Oh, my goodness.
..the most incredible views!
Almost cut off from the outside world
by vertical cliffs on all sides,
Mount Roraima has long fed and fired the imagination.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a book in the early 1900s
called The Lost World,
with the idea that these tepui were still home to dinosaurs
and Pterodactyls.
And coming here, you can completely imagine that is the case.
Life on Roraima is very different from the world below.
Up to 50% of the plants and animals up here
are found nowhere else on Earth.
Life has been forced to evolve or adapt to survive
the challenging terrain and climate.
Biologist Michelle Castellanos
studies the unique species of Venezuela's tepuis.
What a place. Do you like it?
Yeah, I like it. More than like.
It really feels like somewhere where you need to be careful
with every step, just in case you wipe out a plant
previously unknown to science.
Oh, have you found something? It's very tiny.
Let me go here. What is?
Here, next to the rock. Oh, my goodness!
It is a tiny, tiny frog.
Yeah, it is, like, smaller than your thumb.
THEY LAUGH
A weird species. A weird species, yeah.
And only found here in the tepuis.
Is it going to jump if I... No, actually...
..put my finger too close?
..they don't jump, they walk very slow.
They don't swim, and they don't have tadpoles.
Is it really a frog, then?
No, like, this is a toad, actually, it's not a frog.
It's a toad the size of my thumbnail!
It's curious that each tepui has its own species.
So... So, now you're able to pick it up? Mm-hm.
And this one, from this tepui, has the belly.
Look at that little yellow belly.
So, this is almost - up here, it's a little bit like
the Galapagos islands... Yeah.
..in that it's been cut off from the rest of the planet for ages,
and life has developed and evolved in different ways.
Yeah, exactly.
That's one of our concerns, that they are here before the dinosaurs.
But now, with people coming here,
it may bring a fungus that is spreading all around
the world, and is killing frogs.
And that's why I'm using gloves.
Because of the frog-killing fungus, which also affects toads, as well?
Yeah. Right.
As this, this is only here,
if the fungus come here to the tepui,
maybe this species can disappear.
So, they evolved before us? Mm-hm.
They've survived much longer than us,
and they are now, in a very short space of time,
completely threatened by us? Yeah, exactly.
Around the world, amphibian populations are under attack
from a powerful fungus that's already caused the extinction
of scores of species.
Insolation here should protect the Roraima Toad -
but it's feared backpackers could unwittingly bring the fugus up here,
along with other unwelcome deposits.
Look at this.
This is toilet paper. Mm-hm.
What the hell is that doing here?
Tourists.
It's not only disgusting - these are ways fungus and evasive seeds
could arrive in this fragile world,
on walking boots, in our poo.
What have you seen now?
It's an invasive plant.
An invasive plant? Yeah.
It's very interesting, actually, cos if you look at it,
it is slightly suffocating and smothering...
Around the other one. ..the other plants.
It doesn't belong to here.
Also, with the global warming,
it's made seeds and grain up here,
because they find they have a good temperature.
Because of the warming climate,
plants that could never have survived up here
just a few years ago are now thriving.
It was a stark reminder that we need to be responsible
and protect the environment.
Up here, that can call for some unusual measures.
So, to try and keep this place pristine and free of any seeds
I might unwittingly introduce into the environment,
I've been given a sealable potty.
I'm off to do my business.
If only there was a rock I could hide behind.
Up here, among the clouds, Roraima felt a world away from
the planet and problems below.
There should be few places on Earth more remote and isolated
than a nearly two-billion-year-old rock two miles above sea level.
But I was discovering that our reach and impact is everywhere.
Even life on the tepuis is affected by the march of the humans.
The mountain is at the northern end of one of the most important
geological features on the whole continent.
It's called the Guiana Shield,
an ancient slab of the Earth's crust
with its own distinct geology and climate.
On my journey, I was travelling through the Guiana Shield.
From where I was in Venezuela, through Guiana...
..Suriname...
..French Guiana, and then ultimately into Brazil.
Coming down from the lost world brought me back to Earth
with a bit of a bump.
This is Venezuela, after all - perhaps the most troubled country
in the whole of South America.
It's said to have experienced the single largest economic collapse
outside of war in decades.
Venezuela has been in, is it fair to say, chaos?
Chaos, yeah. Chaos and turmoil?
And anarchy, too. Anarchy?
And Venezuela, more than anywhere else in this hemisphere,
should have the wealth to be safe and stable and secure.
It is a country blessed -
or cursed - with immense oil wealth.
And, of course, that oil wealth should have led to benefits
in health and education for the population.
Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves of any country on Earth.
But years of incompetence, corruption, crime, and also
American sanctions have helped push much of the country
to desperate poverty.
Ah, that's interesting, look at this.
It's abandoned - is it abandoned, this petrol station here? No, no.
It's a working petrol station without petrol.
Without any fuel? Any fuel, yeah.
This is the border.
Just on the right here? This is the border.
That marks the border? Yeah.
But this is now very definitely crossing into Brazil.
I was beginning my South American journey just as Covid
was about to become a global threat,
but before a single case of the virus had been
detected on this continent.
However, for years, long before the Covid pandemic hit hard,
Venezuelans were fleeing their country from crisis,
poverty, hunger, even starvation.
So, this is a reception centre run by UNHCR,
the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
The UN's refugee agency.
All right, Raphael.
Hi, Raphael, Simon Reeve. Nice to meet you. Nice to see you.
Will you show us around a bit? Of course. Please, let's go.
Raphael Levy was heading the UN's response to the migrant
and refugee crisis at this border crossing.
Raphael, how many people are here?
Now, we have approximately 500-600 people
in the shelter at this moment.
And during the night, when people getting their documents
go down here to sleep,
then we will reach 1,000.
We have never witnessed anything in the scale of what we see now.
This is the largest refugee and migrant crisis
in the history of Latin America.
Wow!
It's one of the world's least-known tragedies.
More than six million Venezuelans,
over a fifth of its entire population,
are thought to have fled the country.
Venezuela's indigenous people have been hit particularly hard.
Where have you come from, and why?
What's going on over here? This is the...
Can we have a look? Of course, of course.
The people are being checked here and screened, and then
they go in there for a jab or two?
Or even five. Really? Sometimes, yes.
For the children who have never been vaccinated,
it may get up to five shots in one day.
I suppose it speaks not just of what you're doing here,
but it tells us a lot about the situation in Venezuela -
if children are coming here across the border, who have
never been vaccinated,
that most fundamental of things that a state provides for its people...
Yeah, then Brazilian Government and the United Nations are trying
to support in this way.
Oh, look, there's a littler getting a jab right now.
Aww!
Awww! THEY LAUGH
What happened, guys?
You're smiling - it was a bit more painful for you.
Have you ever had a jab like that before?
No. No.
I don't think he's going to want to have one again.
Is it something you had thought about for a long time?
Was it a difficult decision?
What have you left behind?
Thank you very much for talking with us.
We wish you...
We wish you all the luck in the world.
Its very emotional to hear that, of course.
I mean, who hearing that cannot imagine themselves
in those people's shoes?
What would we do? What would you do?
What would I do?
HE SIGHS
You'd do what's best for your kids.
And sometimes that can involve leaving.
This was just before the start of the Covid pandemic.
Across South America, borders would soon close.
But still, tens of thousands of Venezuelans kept leaving,
crossing frontiers in the dead of night and filtering out
across the continent in search of safety, a job
and a life for their children - as I discover later in my journey.
There's no roads to where we're going next,
so we're going to use wings.
I was heading to a remote area of Guyana,
the next country on this part of my travels.
From up here, I could see just what makes the Guiana Shield
ecosystem so special.
Its home to what remains the most unspoilt area of tropical
rainforest in the world,
and a stunning array of biodiversity.
That is the scene for surely the world's biggest shampoo advert.
Almost a fifth of the world's tropical rainforest is
in the Guiana Shield,
along with a staggering 20% of the world's fresh water.
This is some of the most pristine rainforest left on the planet.
And it's completely mesmerising.
Like a tightly-woven green carpet.
I was heading deep into the heart of the Guiana Shield.
Ooh...straight out into tropical heat.
Well, look at this.
Guyana is the only English-speaking country in South America.
It was a British colony until independence in the 1970s.
Permission to come aboard, Captain?
Permission granted? Yeah.
Guyana has a population the size of Leeds living in a country
the size of Great Britain,
sharing just 500 miles of proper roads
and almost endless waterways.
So, we are now on the river that separates Venezuela on this side
and Guyana on that side.
We're in such a remote part of South America here -
and in such a remote part of planet Earth.
The border here is contested,
but there were no authorities around to enforce
any kind of frontier controls.
The locals don't worry quite as much about the border.
And the desperate situation in Venezuela means they are
coming to this river in quite large numbers to desperately
pan and mine for gold.
The Guiana Shield region holds enormous deposits of gold
in its riverbeds and beneath its forests.
THEY CHEER
Here we are, this is the settlement that we're aiming for.
Now, we're right out in the Wild West here.
So, hopefully, our welcome will be warm.
Ooh...
OK, sir, hurry up. Thank you, Captain.
THEY LAUGH
Oh...
So...
Oh, my goodness.
So, this is Eteringbang.
Eteringbang doesn't really show up on maps.
There's no mayor and no real signs of the state.
It sprung up to service local gold mining -
some of it illegal -
and trade and smuggling from across the river border with Venezuela -
also mostly illegal.
Hiya.
The local store sells everything from tinned tuna, satellite phones
and welding equipment, through to generators and Marmite -
in my view, perhaps one of the better legacies of colonial rule.
God, you have got a bit of everything!
Yes, we also have a pharmacy.
This was the first time I'd been to a chemist that was
also doubling as a bar.
How is your day going?
My day is fine.
You know, I'm a cool dude. I'm always here... Right, OK.
..at the border, beautiful sunshine, nice weather.
Are you living on the edge here?
I'm living, I'm just tripping over.
Are you, tripping over the edge? Yeah. Will you have one?
Er, why not? Thank you very much.
Cheers. Cheers to Guyana and Venezuela.
The two? Yeah, we are brothers.
All right, well, that's good to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
To pay for these beers, I've got to sell a little piece of gold,
you know, that's how we buy here in the world.
He's just pulled out a tiny plastic bag. Yeah. No way!
Yeah, this is gold, you know?
This is what we pay - in metal, man.
There we go. This is 1.1g.
You know when you get a sudden blinding flash of realisation -
is that why these are saying 0.3?
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.15?
This is half point, this is less than a point.
Can I can I hold it? Sure.
What you're looking at, this is called river gold.
Right. This is from the river, it's not from the land.
How much is that worth, in US dollars, do you think?
$75. $75.
So, that's about £60 worth of gold.
What, so you pay in gold and you get it back in paper? Yeah.
So, are you a miner yourself, or are you a trader, or what?
I buy - sometimes I buy diamonds, I buy gold,
I go and I work in the mines also.
We sell our gold and buy more food.
We don't even... We're happy here, man.
We're in the bush, in the interior.
You know? And we love this life, man.
I'm pleased to hear it.
Clearly, this is what's meant by an informal economy.
Gold mining is the biggest game in town, but it's not the only one.
What's in the boats down here? Can we just have a look?
Fuel. From where?
That's, er, Venezuela. This Venezuelan side.
And are you able still to get fuel here, then?
If people are willing to pay the price for it.
Oh, I see, so...
..people need fuel here, no doubt, to work their generators,
to use the machinery to hunt for gold?
Yeah. This is what we do to survive.
And they're prepared to pay more for it on this side of the river...
Yes. ..than they are over there? Yeah.
Legal gold mining in Guyana has helped to offset the country's
declining income from sugar production.
But incomes here are still low.
Guyana is one of the poorer countries in South America -
but that could be about to change.
That could be about to change spectacularly.
Enormous reserves of oil, 5.5 billion barrels,
have recently been discovered off Guyana's coast.
It could make Guyana, with a population of less than a million,
one of the richest countries on Earth.
But many think that's hopelessly optimistic.
Thank you, I won't have that.
I'll have some mango chutney instead.
Ohh!
I sat down with shopkeeper Shavannah.
Her husband, Garbin, had strong views I'd also heard
from others far from the country's capital.
So, I was looking at the fuel down there,
and I was just thinking how much change is coming to Guyana.
Are you all going to get rich?
Yes, if we become politicians.
SIMON LAUGHS
You're sceptical.
No, I'm sure if I become a politician, I will get rich,
I won't be sceptical there.
That's a fact? That's a fact.
But you're sceptical that people in Guyana will benefit?
Absolutely, there's nothing for the man in the street,
absolutely no benefit.
So, the... Our politicians are completely corrupt,
from top to bottom.
You're convinced? Totally, completely.
The experience of other countries that have newly acquired oil wealth
do not entirely bode well.
And you only have to look across the bank to Venezuela to see
what can go spectacularly wrong.
They call it the "resource curse",
where a country is apparently blessed with an amazing gift,
a treasure - oil wealth, incredible reserves of gold -
but the money from that is just snaffled by a leadership,
by corrupt politicians, kleptomaniac leaders.
And the money doesn't flow down to the people.
Let's hope that that doesn't happen here in Guyana.
All right, it's time to leave, time to head on.
I travelled on to the next country on my journey through
the Guiana Shield, Suriname.
I've arrived into Suriname, which I think is generally seen
as a fairly sleepy corner of South America.
This used to be a Dutch colony.
They still speak Dutch here in Suriname.
And they have some impossibly Dutch buildings.
Look at that one over there.
Just like the Brits in neighbouring Guyana,
the Dutch came to the Guiana Shield to grow sugar, coffee, and cotton
using African slave labour.
The abuse was industrial in scale and depraved.
Vast numbers of slaves died,
but thousands managed to escape deep into the forests and form
their own isolated communities.
The country eventually became independent in 1975.
Like so many ex-colonies,
it was left with a legacy of conflict and civil war.
I met up with Ronnie Brunswijk,
a former leader of a group of rebel fighters who's now a politician,
and a huge figure in Suriname.
He'd agreed to take me to his base deep in the jungle.
We're going to Bravo Camp.
Ronnie's been an elite paratrooper,
a president's bodyguard, and a wanted bank robber.
He's now a popular politician
and one of the country's wealthiest businessmen.
Oh, bloody hell!
Ronnie's flying the plane.
He also owns and sometimes plays for the biggest football club.
Playing against him is said to carry risks.
During one match, he was accused of threatening opposing players
with a handgun - something he's denied.
Ronnie says his money comes from owning Suriname's biggest
gold-mining concession.
My concession starts here, it begins, just begins, and...
..70,000 hectares, goes like this, round here.
Welcome to Bravo Camp.
Thank you, Ronnie.
Ronnie has his own approach to political campaigning.
He's once said to have flown a helicopter over a village
and then showered the locals with cash.
I suppose that's one way of getting votes!
He's reputed to have more than 50 children.
It's definitely an unusual way of building an electoral base.
All right. Thank you, Ronnie. Yes.
This is... Bravo Camp.
..Bravo Camp? Yes.
So, this is effectively your base...
Yes. ..in the jungle? Yes.
When I come here, I come like this. Yeah.
When I'm here, so I go in my...
..garimpo.
Garimpo? Garimpo. Is it going to change? Yes.
So, we're very definitely in Ronnie's hands here, and...
..very much under his control.
This is his turf and territory.
Since the 1980s,
Ronnie's been a leader of the long-suffering Maroon people,
the descendants of African slaves.
He led a rebel army called the Jungle Commandos
during the civil war that followed independence.
You sit there. Can I come on there with you?
Yes, you come with me.
You sit there. OK.
After the civil war ended,
Ronnie managed to obtain a huge land concession
and went into gold mining on an industrial scale.
So, where are we going?
We're going in the concession, to the place where the gold is.
Right. So, they mine in one area and then they move on?
No, we have...about ten sets.
And so, one here, one there, and one north. Right.
Over an enormous area of what was once untouched rainforest,
more than 900 people now work at Ronnie's gold concession.
So, Ronnie, what is this place?
This is one set.
So, this is one of the forward mining areas? Yes.
This is a, sort of, post-apocalyptic
little hellhole, frankly.
But it is also a fully-functioning little community, by the look of it.
You've got places where people are living here.
You've got the washing over there.
This is, I guess, a restaurant hut of some type.
There's a big shed over there with chickens in.
Just look around.
A full 360, just to give you
a sense of this gouge and scar
in the jungle, in the Guiana Shield.
The price of gold has increased by more than 500% since the year 2000.
So, the financial incentives for any kind of gold mining are staggering.
Illegal gold mining is now thought to be an even more lucrative
business in South America than the cocaine trade,
so scenes like this are now replicated across the Guiana Shield
and into the vast Amazon basin,
as men, women, and children tear into the earth in the hunt
for the lustrous yellow metal.
Bloody hell.
It's an astonishing scene.
And gold might be shiny - but here, it ain't bloody pretty.
Do these guys work directly for you, or are they paying you money
for the right to mine here?
They pay me 10%.
10%? A tenth of what they find.
Of the find, right. Yes.
If they find one kilo, I have 100 gram.
You know? But if you find good gold,
say, "Aye, this is good, the high grade is here" -
so then I say, "OK, thank you".
So, then you turn up and take it?
Yes! It's my concession. SIMON GASPS
And this necklace here - is this Suriname gold?
Which one? This.
Yes, that is gold from my new camp.
Can we see? Yes, you can see this.
Oh, that's a heavy necklace.
Ronnie, can you tell us, how have you got rich?
First time I go to do the gold,
I buy one excavator.
One excavator? Yes, one like this.
And the first place we go,
we dig, we make 40 kilo.
40 kilos of gold?
Like this, that's how we start.
After that, we make more kilo, make more kilo...
You smile at the memory.
..and that's it. Yeah. That's the beginning of, er,
the money history of Mr Brunswijk.
SIMON LAUGHS
Now, I have to ask, so the Dutch Government, though,
says you trafficked cocaine to Europe.
No, I never do that.
Nobody in my... I have a clean hand. Nobody can tell me that.
Every month, I can find 20 kilos.
And 20 kilos in my forest, $800,000 US.
Why am I going to do, doing drugs? 20 kilos? Yes!
And I don't interest in that.
I can make clean money.
It's said both sides in the civil war financed
the conflict with cocaine.
Ronnie Brunswijk denies it all,
but a Dutch court has convicted him in absentia of running
a cocaine-smuggling ring.
So, just to try and quickly explain what's going on -
it begins with the guy in the excavator down there.
He moves great chunks of the rock over to the guys with
the high-pressure hoses down there,
and they turn that into silty soil that can be sucked up by the guy
here with the water pump.
So, that - he's sucking it up that pipe to the top here,
and then it runs down over this ledge.
The filthy, dirty water runs down over here,
and the gold that is hopefully down there,
hopefully for them, gets trapped on these beds.
And then, all over this place.
It's so tiny, it's like stardust or something. Fairy dust.
There's another one here, you see here.
There you are, look, there it is. Yes.
Gathered and smelted into a kilo,
that fairy dust can be worth £50,000.
But mercury is often used in the process.
It can cause huge damage to workers' health,
pollutes the environment and kills wildlife.
From there to here, we make five kilos.
The other one there was two-and-a-half kilo,
another part. And I think this part, we're going to make three.
Do you feel that the destruction
of the forest, has it been...?
Can you justify it to yourself?
Every piece of land you destroy is,
you know, it's very painful. Mm.
But you have to have a job.
And we know, er, what we do.
Mm. And we have...to survive.
We're leaving an environment here that has been completely devastated.
And yet it's not the case that you can just fill these holes in
and everything will be fine,
because the topsoil often has been ripped and torn away
and then fundamentally polluted with toxic chemicals.
So, it's a total disaster... it's a total disaster zone.
But it's the only work in the area.
So, people do whatever they can, whatever they have to.
The Dutch might have wanted Ronnie Brunswijk in jail,
but to many in Suriname, he's a Robin Hood-type hero.
After I left, they elected him Vice President of the Country.
Despite the worst efforts of miners,
loggers, gold-diggers and developers,
Suriname is still more than 90% forested -
that's the highest rate in the world -
a stunning achievement.
But annual deforestation has increased three-fold this century.
Excellent, here we are.
I think that might be Monique.
Monique?
I'd come to meet Monique Pool, who runs a sanctuary for animals
that have lost their forest to chainsaws and excavators.
Monique. Simon Reeve, nice to see you.
Hi, nice to meet you, Simon.
Look at the scale of what you've got here.
This whole centre is something you've had to fund
and build in recent years.
Yes, but I had a lot of help.
This is the animal kitchen, Monique is pointing out,
in this converted shipping container.
Shall I take one or leave it? Yeah, you can take one.
From small, almost accidental beginnings,
Monique has become of the leading conservationists in the country,
raising thousands of pounds in donations to protect wildlife,
particularly for one iconic animal - the sloth.
Who's in here?
This is Renatus. It's an orphan.
Renatus, look at you there.
And this is Stevie. Stevie?
Stevie's a bit bigger, but also an orphan.
Over the last decade, Monique has rescued, rehabilitated
and released more than 1,000 sloths.
And this is little Ball.
Is it safe to look up, or am I going to get wee'd on?
No. SHE CHUCKLES
They don't like to sit in the tree from above, when they poop.
They don't poop from on high? That, I've never seen it.
They come down once every week to poop and pee.
And they lose, like, a third
of their weight when they do that.
That's a massive poop! Yes.
That'd be like me doing 30kg.
Yes. What a horrific thought!
SHE LAUGHS
It seems to have tickled Monique. LAUGHTER CONTINUES
The reputation is they're a bit dim.
They're not dim.
They're not dim, but they're just slow.
And that's because they're so smart that they conserve their energy,
because the food they eat is low in nutrition.
And they are, you know, like, one of the oldest mammals on Earth.
And they're very South American, I'm very proud of them.
So, what is your plan for Stevie and the other orphan?
Yeah, the plan for these animals are they're going to be released,
because they don't belong in these enclosures.
Our goal is really to let them go.
Living in a country with the world's highest forest cover
doesn't mean that sloths are safe here.
So, Monique's had a phone call - a sloth has been rescued,
it's in bad shape, and she's heading back into town to have a look at it.
Sloths live in the coastal part of the Guiana Shield.
Perhaps inevitably, that's also where the vast majority
of the human population live.
You see that forest fragment there?
Yeah. That would be the perfect sloth habitat.
If you look at the vines and everything,
they love to hide under it.
This is good for them.
But now we're out into shrubby farmland.
Yeah, there will be maybe small pockets where they can survive
until that last tree gets cut,
and then they don't have anything left. Right.
Suriname's economy relies heavily on mining and logging.
Most of its exported timber ends up in India and China.
So, these are exactly the machines that do this type of deforestation.
They push the trees.
Oh, I see, so they use the bucket on the front,
just to knock the trees down?
Yes. This machine is so powerful.
It will clear six-seven hectares of forest in one day.
In one day?! Yeah.
And with all the animals that are in it, and the sloths are slowest,
so they're staying behind.
Sloths are also endangered for another reason -
they're worth a fortune when sold as exotic pets.
Monique called in local vet Audrey to look at the injured sloth.
It's a male and he is... He was very weak then.
So, he was hydrated.
Oh, my goodness. Er, but it was clear that his eyes are...
..that he may be blind.
So, I'm just going to take him out here.
Simon, could you hold the pole for me here? Of course.
I don't think that he's seeing a whole lot. No.
It looks like he's at least got an infection.
And his eyes are going suddenly like that.
Yeah. He sees everything spinning around. Ah.
It's sort of a fundamental disorientation?
Yes. Yeah. Shall we check his nails?
Somebody tried to cut it.
So, he may have been, for a long time, with people.
So, somebody was keeping him as a pet? Yeah.
Oh, poor thing, he's just... Head right ducked down. Yeah.
He looks desperate. Yeah.
This is horrible. I mean, humans did it.
Humans caused him to be in this state. Mm.
OK. Audrey, do you think he has a chance?
If we don't get his eyes to heal, erm...
..no, to return to the wild is not a good decision for us to take.
So, we have to decide whether we're going to
keep on treating him for a while,
to see whether there is an improvement.
So, what are you putting into him?
Antibiotics. Right, Monique? Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, he is, he's off the ground.
Sloth internet videos drive demand for them as pets...
Come on, then.
..but they have an appalling survival rate.
It's thought 80-90% of trafficked sloths die in captivity.
Still trappers hunt them, because the international exotic
animal trade is obscenely lucrative.
Worth around £15 billion a year,
it's contributing to mass extinction.
Well, we wish Sergio all the very best.
Sergio's injuries were overwhelming.
Sadly, despite the best efforts of Monique and her vet,
a few days later, Sergio had to be put to sleep.
I headed on towards what I think is
the weirdest country in South America.
It's got nuclear weapons, a rather good line in fine wines,
and the world's sixth-largest economy.
So, here we are.
We've arrived at the border with French Guiana.
I was heading to France.
22 Euros?
Euros. Bit weird, we're paying in euros here.
French Guiana is on the euro.
Look, bottom-left there.
In fact, I'll tell you what - it's more part of the European Union now
than this island here.
Merci, merci, monsieur!
I crossed the Maroni River that forms the border between Suriname
and French Guiana.
I've arrived in France.
Unlike the British and the Dutch,
the French never gave up their South American colony.
This is not an independent nation.
It's literally part of France.
It IS France.
Kourou is its second-biggest town.
Don't judge me, OK? I was really terrible at school.
Bonjour. Er...
..un croissant et un pain au chocolat, s'il vous plait.
Ensemble? Ensemble. Voila, voila.
Apart from a rather wonderful boulangerie,
this town hasn't got a whole lot going for it.
It's not the most attractive place, in truth,
it's not the most beautiful French town.
But the town has grown and blossomed for one main reason.
This is Europe's spaceport.
Out here in the middle of one of the world's greatest rainforests
is the launch platform for rockets sent into space
by the European Space Agency.
Where are we going?
We're going to the Jupiter Control Room.
Here we go.
So, I'm just going to phone the...
This might be the passenger we're waiting for.
Yeah, he's getting a call.
PHONE RINGS Is that Hugh? This is Hugh.
The Director of Operations. Oui, bonjour.
From here, they launch rockets and satellites for Europe
and a host of other countries.
Is that Hugh over there? Was he on the phone?
Yeah, he was on the phone. That's him, yeah.
He is the Mission Controller?
Is that what you said, Mission Controller?
Erm, I think his official title is Launch Range Manager.
J'sais que tu dois partir un bientot. Salut. Salut.
Hugh, do you speak better English than I do? Almost certainly.
Good morning. Good morning, sir, enchante.
You've got the mock-ups of the rockets here.
Ariane 6 is going to be good,
because we can initiate the last stage many times.
That means that we can put two or three satellites at different
positions, so this one is going to be the best one to do that.
Ariane 6 is the future?
It is our future. Your future, OK. Our future.
Your ambition, then, is to be the best launchpad
for sending satellites into space, presumably?
We are, er, we are always the best.
THEY CHUCKLE
Where are we going?
They're letting us into the control centre.
In this hall, our mission is to put satellite into orbit
while answering our sovereign mission.
Right. That means that we will never take off if there is any risk.
You're the guy who does the countdown? Exactly.
As Launch Range Operations Manager,
Hugh oversees an average of one rocket launch every month.
It's a personal question, but where are you from?
Are you from here, or are you from France-France,
or somewhere else?
I would say that I am French. HE LAUGHS
I am French, but I came here to do an internship for my school.
You came here? Yeah, to do my internship.
To be - you were an intern? Yeah, exactly.
in charge of air-conditioning system for here.
So... No, come on.
You were an intern in charge of air conditioning,
and now, you sit in the big seat?
What is the problem? It is feasible.
It's brilliant!
That's wonderful! Yes, it is.
That gives us all...
A lot of young people out there hope for the future.
Having a piece of the European Union sitting so near to the Equator
helps make this the world's premier launch site for satellites.
My favourite factoid about this whole base is the fact that,
at launch time, they have to clear a safety corridor at sea
and in the air, extending out in an arc almost to the coast
of West Africa, just in case something goes spectacularly wrong,
and no plane or ship should be underneath.
Like those of its neighbours,
the jungle in French Guiana is targeted by drug smugglers,
miners, and poachers.
But here, it's defended by
one of the world's most famous armed units.
French Guiana is a base for the French Foreign Legion,
and we're heading out with them.
The Legion was allowing us along on a heavily-armed operation.
The French Foreign Legion has an enormous amount
of mystique about it.
The image, I suppose, is of troubled,
and often haunted men from everywhere fighting on behalf
of France anywhere.
Well, its 6.30 on a Friday evening,
and we're arriving at their forward base.
Bonsoir. Bonsoir.
Soldiers from 138 countries serve in the Legion.
They can apply for French citizenship after
serving for three years.
Corporal, sir, I was going to ask, where is everybody from?
He's from Belarus.
Belarus, OK. He's from Nepal, I'm from Nepal,
and he's from France.
La Reunion. Reunion? Yes.
The jungles of the Guiana Shield region have been known in the past
by soldiers and prisoners here as the Green Hell.
Because you've got all this kit and equipment, an old attachment
of the French Foreign Legion to look after you, it can be.
Sleeping bag, sleeping bag liner,
inflatable pillow.
Total luxury.
The Legion has been tasked with tackling an increasing threat
to the whole Guiana Shield.
The scourge of illegal gold mining.
We're up at dawn,
and our journey took us through an extraordinary landscape.
We're on a lake that was created by a hydroelectric dam.
So, the dam was built,
and the water levels started to rise and submerge the trees that...
The dead trees you can see around us.
It's quite eerily, spookily beautiful.
Here in French Guiana,
there are thought to be up to 10,000 illegal goldminers.
Mining gold has become a vast industry across South America,
from the forest of the Guiana Shield, in the Amazon,
to the Andes Mountains of Peru and Bolivia.
It can provide jobs and income,
but often at a terrible price for the environment -
as I've already seen on my journey.
There's also a huge illegal trade thought to be worth
£7 billion a year globally,
which can involve organised crime, and even forced labour.
Yet it can still be hard to confirm where our gold jewellery comes from.
We're trying to find, you know, a good...
A way through? Yeah, a way through, yeah.
The areas here are just slightly ridiculous, in truth,
because the Legion and the Gendarmes,
they're operating in a region the size of Ireland
with very few roads.
Very difficult to get into these heavily-forested areas.
It's really hard, you know, the water has really gone down, so.
And the goldminers, they have people, guards, watching.
There are a lot of people watching, you know,
right through here, and they can hear the sound, you know?
Yeah. The motor, yeah. So, it's quite obvious.
So, it's possible they are watching us now?
Er, if they are, you know, working, then yes.
So, if there's mining going on... Yeah, going on.
..they'll be looking out? Definitely, yes.
You can see there's something now. OK.
There could be some activity ahead, but the miners are very careful
to hide any trace of their presence.
I mean, you could hide an army in the forest here,
and you'd never know. Yeah.
Did you see that there is a...? Yeah, yeah, yeah, look.
Where canoes have come in.
Do you see that? That's a trace.
That's a trace, that's not ours.
That's a trace there - that means something is there,
you know, maybe the boat, they landed here maybe, you know?
And that looks quite fresh, doesn't it? Yes. That's not ours.
Footsteps over here. Yeah, that's not ours.
We're going to check out a little bit further. We're going to go
inside a bit further, you know? All right.
If there's something going on. So, what's quite possible is that
the miners have come in on boats,
and been dropped off,
and moved inside the forest here,
and then, the boats have left.
Look at the footsteps - that's fresh, you know?
That's a fresh footstep.
There's a bag of rubble with stones on,
potentially gold-bearing.
Hidden here in the hope they can then come and pick it up.
So, this is a very fresh dig here.
And look, they've built their own little railway here,
Look!
Look at this one.
Its all from the basic tools.
It's not like they are professional.
It's a mineshaft that goes down, I would guess, 20-25 metres,
20 metres maybe?
I mean, it's astonishing they've managed to do this.
The miners had disappeared.
They often work under the cover of darkness.
So, some precise GPS coordinates are taken.
We can't go in, because that's against our law, you know?
We can't go in. We do not have the rights to go in, the military.
Because mines collapse.
Last year, there had been an exchange in order,
I don't know if three people died, you know?
Three military died, you know?
So, that's the simple reason that we don't go inside, you know?
The Legionnaires are accompanying Gendarmes who are authorised
to break-up some of the props above ground.
But they aren't allowed to simply lob a grenade down
the shaft to destroy the mine.
This is...this is France, there are rules,
there are regulations, there's human rights laws.
We've been told that the miners take their nuggets,
and its very quickly turned into jewellery.
Not just because that's easy to transport,
but because, under French law,
if the Gendarmes find somebody with raw gold,
an illegal miner with raw gold,
they can confiscate that gold.
But if the miner, even if it's an illegal miner,
has jewellery with them,
that's counted as personal items, and that can't be confiscated.
So, the miners are able to take their gold and leave French Guiana.
It's thought more than £400 million worth of illegally-mined gold
is extracted from French Guiana each year.
It seems France, with all its vast resources
and the presence of the Legion, is doing little better than
its neighbours in countering the trade.
There are now so many illegal gold-mining operations across
South America that in some areas of the highest biodiversity,
they've been a greater cause of deforestation
than logging and farming.
I do think, when you're up here,
you start to realise the scale
of these supposedly little mines.
Even though this is just one small operation,
they have ultimately carved and gouged out a huge area
of the forest here.
And this is replicated hundreds,
perhaps thousands of times across the south of French Guiana,
and throughout the Guiana Shield.
And the cumulative damage is astonishing.
All in the hunt for gold.
I'd come to the end of this first leg of my journey
through South America, through the Guiana Shield.
This little-known still relatively unspoilt
part of our planet.
It certainly faces many threats,
but there is still time to protect it from
the ravages of deforestation.
It is still a vast, glorious, green wilderness.
Next time...
..in Brazil, I meet the guardians of the forest...
..and travel on to one of the greatest cities on Earth.
Welcome to Rio!