AME Roundup: AuRORA discovery marks beginning of “exploration success story” in central BC, says Amarc
AuRORA discovery is within the prolific Toodoggone-Kemess porphyry disctrict of central British Columbia.
The sun had just barely broken over the horizon when Benildo Rodrigues took off that morning. His single-propeller Cessna plane was loaded with more than 100 pounds of gold that had been extracted from deep inside the Amazon. The haul, worth more than $4 million at today’s prices, had been pulled out of the rainforest illegally.
Police were already monitoring the plane when Rodrigues left Itaituba, the place locals affectionately call Nugget City that’s become the unofficial capital of Brazil’s illegal gold trade. The town sits just on the edge of the jungle — the gateway between hundreds of illegal mining operations and the merchants, traders and smugglers that move the precious metal into regional and international markets.
He landed the Cessna in Manaus, the capital of neighboring Amazonas state. Rodrigues was picked up at the airport by the owner of the plane, who was driving a white Volkswagen Gol. Their plan was to eventually transport the gold all the way to the US, according to law enforcement officials.
Within minutes, two vehicles pulled up on Rodrigues and opened fire. It was an ambush by one of Brazil’s most notorious drug gangs.
The showdown from roughly a year ago lays bare the rise of the Narco gold diggers. Wildcat miners, known as the garimpeiros, have existed for the better part of a century, deforesting the land and dirtying the waters. But now, a federal crackdown on environmental crimes and a gold rally that’s sent prices to record highs has driven the industry into further darkness.
Visits by Bloomberg News to mining sites, along with dozens of interviews with miners, experts, locals and officials, unveil a world that is becoming increasingly lethal as a decades-old industry comes under the influence of drug gangs.
“The criminal organizations that have been dedicated to drug trafficking for a long time have discovered a new market,” said Andre Luiz Porreca Ferreira Cunha, a federal prosecutor assigned to illegal mining investigations across the Amazon, including the Rodrigues case. “They are creating parallel states in the middle of the Amazon. It’s terrifying.”
Across the globe, if you buy gold, there’s a growing chance that you’re bankrolling bad actors.
About 20% of the world’s bullion output comes from informal, small-scale mining. The producers are sometimes called “artisanal miners,” but it’s an industry that’s typically illegal, untaxed and often in violation of environmental and other regulations. In Brazil, the miners are a major factor in the destruction of the Amazon. And globally, the sector is the planet’s single biggest source of global mercury contamination, exceeding even coal-fired power plants, according to a study from the United Nations.
Gold – often dubbed the world’s oldest currency – has for millennia attracted underworld characters. But that has been supercharged by a historic rally, which gives illegal miners greater incentive to dig it up any way they can. Spot prices jumped 27% in 2024. The metal reached an all-time high of $2,790.10 an ounce in late October and has more than doubled since the end of 2018.
In Brazil, illegal mining began rising to another level under the administration of the previous president, Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right, pro-garimpeiro leader who slashed funding to combat environmental crimes and fueled rain forest destruction in the interest of economic growth. When his leftist rival President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva then took the reins in 2023, he launched a weaponized campaign against the wildcatters, with militarized, sometimes deadly, police raids.
“The lack of oversight” during the previous administration “provided an opportunity for drug traffickers and factions to move into the Amazon and occupy this space,” Marta Machado, Brazil’s national secretary for drug affairs, said in an interview.
While the raids have caused some illegal operations to shut down, they’ve driven others deeper into the black market, where hardened criminals and drug traffickers are undeterred by the increased oversight.
Rodrigo Chagas, a social sciences professor at Roraima’s Federal University, has been interviewing garimpeiros for years as part of his research on crime in the Amazon. As recently as 2019, he didn’t hear much at all about gang members in the mining camps, but by the end of 2022 “it was full of narcotraffickers,” he said. The mining by the drug gangs mostly happens on Indigenous lands in remote parts of the Amazon, he said.
The first indisputable evidence of this development was in 2021 at the indigenous settlement of Palimiu on the the Uraricoera River. The town came under attack from garimpeiros associated with the First Capital Command, Brazil’s most efficient and organized drug-trafficking group that’s known as the PCC. The next day the same gangsters opened fire on federal police officers who arrived to secure the hamlet.
“From that moment on, it became evident that a faction of the PCC was wildcatting,” Chagas said. “The impression is that this has exploded.”
By backing bullion operations, the gangs not only profit off of the mining revenue, they use the gold itself as an untraceable currency and can also launder cocaine cash through the precious-metals market.
Northern Mexico, where entire regions are controlled by cartels, serves as a warning for what could happen to parts of Brazil’s Amazon if drug trafficking and associated criminal activity goes unchecked.
The clearest confirmation of the interconnections between Brazil’s gangs and gold comes during shootouts that authorities report on — like the one that Rodrigues was caught in on the roads in Manaus.
Rodrigues and his companion both suffered gunshot wounds and fled their vehicle to seek shelter in nearby businesses. Federal police, who were tracking the flight as part of the crackdown against illegal mining, arrived on the scene within a few minutes and seized the gold stash.
The attackers had just enough time to take off in a getaway car. They left a van behind along with a Glock pistol, ammunition, camouflage outfits and tire-puncture spikes. They are linked to the transnational crime group called Red Command that originated in Rio de Janeiro, according to Adriano Sombra, a federal police chief for Amazonas state who has arrested suspects in the case.
Authorities who took Rodrigues and his associate into custody are still trying to figure out which criminal gang they work for. But officials say that the size the bullion hoard, the largest gold seizure in the history of Amazonas state, makes it clear that a sophisticated organization with plenty of funding must have been involved.
“The large quantity seized reveal that the carriers were involved in a much larger criminal operation, with a clear structure and division of labor, probably an organized crime group,” Federal Judge Marcelo Pires Soares wrote in a decision related to the case.
Rodrigues and his associate were convicted in March and received a three-year non-custodial sentence and additional fines. (The maximum sentences for illegally transporting gold are relatively lax in Brazil.) Before that Rodrigues spent nearly four months at prison healthcare facilities. A bullet caused bone damage in one of his arms and he had to undergo surgery to avoid losing the limb, according to his lawyer, Leandro Rebelo de Paula.
Rodrigues declined to be interviewed out of fear for his personal safety, Rebelo de Paula said. Public prosecutors and the defense have both submitted appeals that are before a court. Authorities sold the illegally mined gold at auction for 16.6 million reais (about $2.8 million), the court in Amazonas state that is handling the case said in a response to questions.
The city of Itaituba took off in the 1950s with the discovery of gold-rich stream beds, and it still cherishes its culture of wildcatting. Most locals descend from settlers who were urged by military governments in the 20th century to mine and clear forests. The municipal hymn is an ode to the gold diggers, and a statue of a garimpeiro panning for metal nuggets is the most prominent landmark on the riverfront boardwalk. It’s similar to how California still celebrates the 1849 gold rush by calling itself the Golden State, or Denver’s Nuggets basketball team, which is named for the ore-rich mountains nearby.
From 2015 through 2020, nearly half of all the gold produced in Brazil, 229 tons worth more than $20 billion at current prices, was illegal or of suspect origin, according to Instituto Escolhas, a think tank. Itaituba and two neighboring municipalities produced or laundered 86% of Brazil’s illegal gold between 2019 and 2020, according to a report by federal prosecutors.
Most of the so-called artisanal mines of today are a far cry from a prospector setting out with a pickax, or a panner sitting by the stream. These are massive operations, and it takes deep pockets to fund them. When five garimperios who belonged to a regional drug gang were killed by police during a September raid, authorities then went in to make some of the assets unusable: Officials destroyed 30 excavators and 22 pickups at the site on indigenous lands in Mato Grosso state.
Garimpeiros dig out the headwaters of jungle streams to filter gold dust and nuggets from the soil. They gradually expand downstream, excavating the banks and building terraced pools to collect water. The jungle is crisscrossed with miles upon miles of airstrips for transporting machinery in and gold out, and the rivers are dotted with hulking mining barges.
Across the Amazon, drug runners have a history of sharing logistics with garimpeiros that dates back at least to the 1990s, and the continued growth in the cocaine trade has spawned more transit routes.
Cocaine production continues to boom in neighboring Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. In 2022, it surged 20% to 2,757 tons, according to the most recent data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Demand for the powerful stimulant is growing across Europe while it appears to be contracting in the US, according to the agency. This shift in the market makes trafficking routes through Brazil’s Amazon more important. Most of the cocaine smuggled through the rainforest to the Atlantic coast goes to Africa and then on to Europe.
“The same logistics used for narcotrafficking are used for illegal mining,” said Francisco Xavier Medeiros de Castro, a colonel with Roraima state’s military police who currently serves in an advisory role for the state’s legislature on security. Pilots in the region “don’t want to know if they are working for traffickers or garimpeiros. They do their flights and get paid,” he said.
Sometimes, gangs start out selling drugs to garimpeiros and then end up in mining for themselves, said Joao Paulo Berte, a police chief in Mato Grosso state who carries out operations against illegal miners on the Sarare indigenous territory.
“People from Red Command spend time at the mines because they need money,” Berte said. “This is the danger — that the activities get mixed.”
Under Lula, more than a year of raids against illegal mining means that many of the small-scale operators are shutting down. But the people who have worked in the jungle for generations have no viable alternatives for work. Interviews with those involved in the industry show that instead of returning to towns like Itaituba, the workers are scattering, going deeper into the forest and into the hands of the gangs like the PCC and Red Command.
“What is the economic alternative for 30,000 to 40,000 garimpeiros,” said Chagas of Roraima’s Federal University. “The fear is that this link between narcos and garimpeiros grows, and turns into something more violent — that it goes completely out of control.”
The rise of narco gold diggers underscores how Latin America pays a disproportionate price for the consequences of global drug prohibition. Trafficking proceeds undermine the rule of law across the region and encourage destruction of ecosystems.
One of the investigations that Sofia Freitas Silva, a federal prosecutor for Brazil’s western Amazon, took on in 2024 includes evidence that PCC members were involved in an illegal mining operation. Still, she’s careful to note that most illegal mining investigations don’t have proven links to narcos.
“It’s not a majority of the cases,” she said.
Daruich Hammoud, a lawyer who was based in Itaituba until recently and has defended garimpeiros, said that one major problem stems from the government not clearly distinguishing between those operating mines illegally and those that have all the necessary permits. The broad crackdown has left many without much alternate choice than to go underground.
“Gold didn’t stop getting produced at all these places,” Hammoud said. “The government is forcing them to work illegally.”
Claudio Atilio Mortari, a second-generation garimpeiro who operates a permitted mine, agrees. He resents being grouped with criminal miners and traffickers who invade indigenous lands to extract gold. It was, after all, the government that encouraged his father to move to Itaituba more than 40 years ago. He sued Brazil’s environmental regulator in 2023 for destroying a backhoe, generators and other equipment at his camp during a raid.
“Before, they used to say we were heroes,” Mortari said. “Now, we’re treated like bandits.”
To get to Mortari’s mine, first you fly up and across the Tapajos river. The water, unlike the silty brown Amazon, is a vibrant greenish blue. Blankets of smoke waft through the air as ranchers set fires to clear brush. The terrain then gives way to the classic Amazon forest canopy: The deep green is dotted with yellow and purple flowering trees. As you approach the Serra Dourada mining settlement, you begin to see long, meandering garimpeiro sites that stretch for miles into the horizon.
Locals like Mortari are determined to continue their frontier way of life. When the government cracks down on one area, many garimpeiros pack up and move to other mineral-rich parts of Brazil’s Amazon that aren’t being targeted, or into neighboring countries.
After the raid at Mortari’s mine last year, the 20 mine workers on site didn’t want to go back to Itaituba. They spread out to other mines in the area, many of which operate illegally — and some, most assuredly, are under the influence of the Narcos.
“They can’t stop,” Mortari said. “They have to keep on working.”
(By Peter Millard and Mariana Durao)
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