An artisanal miner shows mercury used for processing gold on a handkerchief at El Corpus in July in the mountains of southern Honduras, one of Central America’s poorest nations, where hundreds of small-scale miners are scraping out tiny quantities of increasingly precious gold. Their fervor could be threatening their lives and the environment. The miners, wielding pickaxes, use diesel generators to illuminate narrow mine-shafts and many then use dangerous amounts of toxic mercury to extract the metal from the rocks they chip out. (REUTERS/Edgard Garrido)