Illicit mercury is poisoning the Amazon

Illicit mercury is poisoning the Amazon

One of the deadliest chemicals on Earth is being smuggled across Latin America – and is poisoning the environment along the way.Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin and its use is banned or heavily restricted throughout the world. But it's "essential" to illegal gold mining, one of the Amazon's "most destructive criminal economies", said The Associated Press,Once extracted from the Earth's crust, mercury "persists in the environment indefinitely", s…