Digging Into a Toxic Trade: Illegal Mining in Amazon Tri-Border Regions
Date of Publication
1-1-2023 12:00 AM
Security Theme
Illegal Mining
Keywords
Illegal Mining, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Environmental crime, Amazon, Tri-Border Regions, indigenous communities, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Fist Capital Command (PCC), National Liberation Army (ELN)
Description
Illegal mining is by far the most widespread and insidious environmental crime occurring in the Amazon’s tri-border regions.In the early 1980s, prospectors began ravaging Amazon’s tri-border lands in search of gold. Since then, poor, desperate people and Indigenous communities have become a ready labor force for prospectors. They work for sophisticated and structured illegal mining operations that provide them digging and dredging machinery and pay them in small amounts of gold. On the Colombian and Venezuelan sides, mining activities and businesses that have sprung up around the sites are taxed by criminals, ranging from a few gunmen to factions of Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs). The latter include the ex-FARC, made up of dissident groups of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC), which demobilized in 2017, and units from Colombia’s last remaining guerrilla force, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN). Brazil’s most powerful mafia, the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC), also appears to be making inroads into the illegal gold trade.An extensive entrepreneurial criminal network launders the gold. Using fleets of small planes, air transport companies shuttle supplies in and gold out. In Brazil, owners of these firms have come under investigation for actively facilitating illegal mining and laundering gold.In Colombia and Brazil, traders openly buy illegal gold, from individual prospectors up to owners of mining operations. Businessmen with webs of companies profit up and down the illegal gold chain.When the gold is ultimately smelted, its illegal origins melt away.
Digging Into a Toxic Trade: Illegal Mining in Amazon Tri-Border Regions
Illegal mining is by far the most widespread and insidious environmental crime occurring in the Amazon’s tri-border regions.In the early 1980s, prospectors began ravaging Amazon’s tri-border lands in search of gold. Since then, poor, desperate people and Indigenous communities have become a ready labor force for prospectors. They work for sophisticated and structured illegal mining operations that provide them digging and dredging machinery and pay them in small amounts of gold. On the Colombian and Venezuelan sides, mining activities and businesses that have sprung up around the sites are taxed by criminals, ranging from a few gunmen to factions of Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs). The latter include the ex-FARC, made up of dissident groups of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC), which demobilized in 2017, and units from Colombia’s last remaining guerrilla force, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN). Brazil’s most powerful mafia, the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC), also appears to be making inroads into the illegal gold trade.An extensive entrepreneurial criminal network launders the gold. Using fleets of small planes, air transport companies shuttle supplies in and gold out. In Brazil, owners of these firms have come under investigation for actively facilitating illegal mining and laundering gold.In Colombia and Brazil, traders openly buy illegal gold, from individual prospectors up to owners of mining operations. Businessmen with webs of companies profit up and down the illegal gold chain.When the gold is ultimately smelted, its illegal origins melt away.
