Takeaways on illegal gold mining and illicit financial flows: from the Amazon basin to destination countries

Speakers: Julia Yansura, Programme Director, Environmental Crime and Illicit Finance, FACT Coalition, and Isidoro Hazbun, Policy Fellow, Environmental Crime and Illicit Finance, FACT Coalition.

• Illegal mining poses an imminent threat to ecosystems and communities in the Amazon region. Between 2017 and 2020, deforestation from illegal mining grew by more than 90 percent in the Brazilian Amazon, with especially devastating effects in Indigenous territories, where illegal mining has grown over 600 percent in the past decade. Beyond environmental destruction, such practices expose communities to violence, abuse, and forced eviction.
• In countries such as Colombia and Peru, revenue from illegal gold exceeds that from the drug trade. Gold’s portability, stable value, and perceived legitimacy make it a low-risk, high-reward commodity for criminal networks, which exploit the trade to generate wealth, launder money, evade sanctions, and conceal illicit proceeds. Armed groups and criminal organizations control key nodes along the gold value chain. At least seventeen criminal groups operate across the Amazon Basin, financing their activities through illegal gold mining and other environmental crimes. They exert control over extraction, transport, and export, linking environmental crime to organized violence and corruption.
• In Colombia, an estimated 80 percent of gold exports are estimated to be illegally sourced, and much of the mining takes place in protected areas.
• Laundering mechanisms further obscure the gold’s illegal origin. Illegal gold is integrated into formal markets through false export declarations, shell companies, and complicit refineries in destinations such as the United States, Switzerland, and Dubai. Ports, airports, and private aircraft facilitate these movements, often exploiting legal gaps and a lack of transparency regarding ownership and financial flows. Gold concentrate is another emerging method of exporting illicit gold through maritime ports that remains poorly understood by most authorities.
• Destination countries have leverage to disrupt these illicit flows. By recognizing illegal gold mining as a predicate offense for money laundering, strengthening beneficial ownership disclosure, monitoring shipments through ports and private aircraft, and enhancing due diligence by financial institutions, central banks, and refineries, they can significantly reduce the profitability of this criminal economy, challenging the perception that illegal gold is “low risk, high reward.” International cooperation, improved information sharing, and investment in traceability science, such as gold “DNA,” can further curb these flows.
• Illegal gold mining is not merely an environmental crime, it is a financial one. Addressing these flows at their financial endpoints, in destination countries as much as at the source, is key to reducing the social, environmental, and economic harms caused by this rapidly expanding illicit economy.

Useful Resources:

Addressing Illegal Gold Mining in the Western Hemisphere: New Approaches for U.S. Policy.

Takeaways on the US role in illicit financial flows related to environmental crimes in the Amazon.

Dirty Money and the Destruction of the Amazon: Uncovering the U.S. Role in Illicit Financial Flows from Environmental Crimes in Peru and Colombia

The full recording of the October 15 presentation is available here. To enable English subtitles, please click the 'CC' button on the video: