Artisanal gold mining is a human labor activity responsible for most of the anthropic release of metallic mercury into the environment. It is also one of the most discriminated activities in the Pan-Amazon, considered as an activity of self-degrading potential. Artisanal Small Mining (ASM) has suffered major legal restrictions in the process of formalization and environmental licensing by Brazilian environmental agencies. The lack of an official census is a reflection of this high bureaucracy, causing total ignorance about the social group of artisanal gold miners operating in Brazil, especially in the Brazilian Amazon. The ASM inspection and control companies did not quantify how many or where the vast majority of artisanal miners in the Amazon work, this has raised the hypothesis that most of these professionals work informally in the region. Informality has resulted in precarious working conditions due to the impossibility of artisanal mining to obtain financing resources for the acquisition of technological tools that allow the exercise of their activity within the required environmental parameters. Therefore, the robustness of Brazilian environmental and mining legislation has not resulted in the formalization of artisanal mining, nor in the environmentally sound exercise of ASM activity, which contributes to the stigmatization of artisanal mining in the Brazilian Amazon.