The illegal gold rush sweeping the world
Historic price rally lures criminals and paramilitaries into illicit mining from the Amazon to Sudan
Michael Pooler in Itaituba, Joe Daniels in Bajo Cauca, Aanu Adeoye in Lagos, Monica Mark in Johannesburg, Chloe Cornish in Dubai and Leslie Hook in London
As global gold prices took off, residents of Stilfontein, a sleepy South African town surrounded by abandoned shafts from the country’s mining heyday, began noticing some intimidating newcomers.
“We see their cars loaded with guns and equipment,” one store owner said of the armed criminals who began frequenting Stilfontein’s hardware shops.
“They’re not from here.
They just come for a few days and then disappear again.”
The gangsters were there to profit from a brutal but thriving underground economy, in which thousands of impoverished wildcat miners are put to work deep in South Africa’s disused mines — once among the world’s most profitable — while criminals battle for control.
“There are mini-wars happening underground,” said Louis Nel, a South African mining security consultant.
“They fight with each other, they use IEDs [improvised explosive devices].”
This is the dark side of the 21st century gold rush, as organised crime groups from across sub-Saharan Africa to south-east Asia and the depths of the Amazon pile into illicit mining to feed one of the most lucrative trades of recent years.
Gold’s value is up threefold over the past decade, and more than a quarter since the start of this year alone, as investors seek safety from trade wars, inflation and geopolitical tensions.
Its fungibility, which makes the precious metal easy to launder in trading and refining hubs like the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland, has turned mining into a magnet for everyone from Clan del Golfo, Colombia’s largest armed group, to the warring sides in Sudan’s ruinous civil conflict.
Estimates vary, but the illicit gold mining industry is worth tens of billions of dollars annually, with the UN saying organised crime groups are “embedded” in supply chains.
Non-profit SwissAid last year estimated that 435 tonnes of gold — the equivalent of $31bn at the time — were smuggled out of Africa in 2022, double the volume a decade before.
And in South America’s number one gold producer Peru, for example, the financial regulator estimated that over 40 per cent of last year’s $15bn of gold exports were illegal.
“Criminal enterprises are making more money from the gold trade than from drugs,” said Sasha Lezhnev, policy adviser at The Sentry, an investigative organisation that seeks to disable networks benefiting from armed conflict.
“This is a huge trade.”
These global black market forces are increasingly in play in South America, where the Amazon rainforest is on the frontline of the rise of so-called “narco-miners”.
“Organised crime groups came to the Amazon for cocaine, using these remote territories as hide-outs for drug labs and trafficking corridors,” said Bram Ebus, co-director of Amazon Underworld, an investigative platform.
“But they stayed for the gold.”
Brazil’s stretch of the rainforest has long been home to small-scale and often unauthorised wildcat mining, known as garimpo.
For decades, the activity has been an economic lifeblood in places like Itaituba, the country’s unofficial gold laundering capital.
In a forest clearing a few hours away, the manager of a garimpo points to a gaping three-metre deep hole containing bluish water, out of which a motor pumps slurry on to a wooden frame for filtering through fabric.
Mercury will be added and burned off to remove the metal from its ore.
In 60 days, the man said, it yielded 2kg — worth about R$1.1mn ($200,000) at legal rates.
“People come from all over Brazil with the dream of getting rich,” he added.
An environmental inspector talks with a miner while he is detained during an operation against illegal mining on Yanomami Indigenous land in Roraima state, Brazil © Uesliei Marcelino/ReutersAmong the newcomers, according to officials, activists and indigenous leaders, are drug gangs like São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando do Capital and Rio de Janeiro’s Comando Vermelho, which have in recent years begun providing everything from security and weapons for camps to direct involvement in some mining operations.
Humberto Freire, director of the Amazon and environment at Brazil’s federal police, said cocaine smugglers and illegal miners use similar logistics, such as light aircraft and clandestine landing strips.
“We have identified gang members who were arrested at mining sites and clashed with police forces,” he said.
“Illegal garimpos are increasingly armed, including with high-calibre weapons, such as AK-47 rifles and machine guns,” federal prosecutor Andre Porreca said, adding that there was evidence of illicit gold being exported overseas via Italian mafias.
“Narco-miners” are already conspicuous in neighbouring countries.
Graffiti on storefronts, homes and road signs marks the presence of Colombia’s Clan del Golfo in the mineral-rich northwestern region of Bajo Cauca.
The Clan, a successor to paramilitaries that fought left-wing guerrillas in the 1990s, long taxed local goldpanners and small-scale miners, but in recent years has expanded into running dredgers on the River Cauca and excavators that dig up its banks, according to analysts.
Residents speak of intimidation and say they are afraid to travel at night.
“Everyone has to pay them,” said one miner who operates a dredger.
“Not just the miners but all business owners, down to the empanada seller on the street.”
The gangsters are even muscling in on legitimate, industrial-scale gold operations.
At the Buritica complex in Colombia, owned by China’s Zijin Mining, the Clan has seized miles of tunnels with deadly clashes ensuing.
Similar scenes have played out in Peru, where 39 workers have been killed over the past three years in assaults by criminal gangs robbing gold directly from the veins of the Poderosa mine in the Andean foothills.
This criminal gold hunt in the Amazon is threatening native peoples.
In Sawré Muybu, a small settlement of the Munduruku tribe outside Itaituba, villagers say wildcat mining has scared away hunt animals, polluted waterways with mercury and brought other ills.
“When garimpo comes, so does malaria, alcohol and drugs,” said local elder Juarez Saw.
“It threatens our way of life.”
Once mined, illegal gold quickly makes its way around the world through hubs like Miami, Mumbai and Hong Kong.
The UAE has emerged as one of the world’s top gold trading centres and, according to critics, a major laundering hub thanks to historically weaker compliance requirements and buyers’ willingness to pay cash.
Marc Ummel, head of raw materials at SwissAid, said the UAE acts like a “washing machine” for the metal, with gold from elsewhere refined and labelled as Emirati, before being sold on to other hubs like Switzerland and the UK.
Refined gold bars are chemically virtually identical, making it impossible to distinguish their origins.
A UAE official said the country “plays a responsible role”, adding that authorities have stepped up enforcement with thousands of inspections.
Much of the gold flowing into the UAE comes from Africa, where natural riches, conflict and weak states have combined to make the continent an epicentre of illicit mining.
South Africa, at one point the world’s largest gold producer, is an easy target thanks to its high unemployment and rampant criminality.
Thousands of disused mines have been taken over by so-called zama zama miners, many of whom are impoverished migrant workers from countries like Eswatini and Mozambique.
But while authorities have cracked down — cutting off food and water into the shafts and detaining those who emerge — analysts say the forces behind it are harder to stop.
“You have to get to the financiers and the guys that actually make the profit,” said Nel, the security consultant.
Arguably the dystopian consequences of this new gold rush have been most apparent in Sudan, where mining profits have helped fund a civil war in which at least 150,000 people have been killed.
Workers crush ore containing gold at a small-scale gold milling operation outside Atbara, Sudan © Simon Marks/BloombergA UN report this year alleged that the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group which the US has accused of committing genocide, financed operations including “sophisticated weaponry” through looting gold.
According to researchers, much of this ends up in the UAE, which in the face of fierce international pressure — including being placed on a money laundering watch list in 2022 — has tightened controls and brought in responsible sourcing rules.
But despite the new measures, vendors in Dubai’s bustling gold souk admit they have no idea where the jewellery and bullion they sell comes from.
“We don’t go to Sudan and get gold and sell it,” said one jewellery vendor who asked not be named.
“We go to a big wholesale market, give cash and get gold.”
The devastating human toll of illicit gold extraction in the Amazon was brought to the world’s attention a few years ago by a crisis of hunger and disease among Brazil’s Yanomami indigenous people, which was blamed on harassment and violence by trespassing miners.
Following an explosion of garimpo under hard-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, the leftwing administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2023 launched a fightback with raids to shut down camps and destroy equipment.
The government has claimed successes, pointing to a 98 per cent drop in illegal mining sites in the Yanomami territory.
In parallel, the country’s supreme court ended a ‘good faith’ presumption for buyers that critics said allowed tonnes of illicit gold to obtain legal status.
Researchers say the actions are bearing fruit.
Brazil’s declared gold exports fell by two-fifths to 62 tonnes last year compared to 2022, with shipments to India plummeting 97 per cent and to the UAE 64 per cent, according to the NGO Instituto Escolhas.
Artisanal miners, known as ‘zama zamas’, mine for gold in Stormhill, west of Johannesburg, where territorial battles between rival zama zama groups wreaked havoc in 2023 © Shiraaz Mohamed/AFP/Getty ImagesBut enforcement is constrained by limited funding, the vast size of the Amazon and, in some cases, connivance of the authorities.
“Municipalities issue mining licences for properties which are then used to launder illegal gold,” one official said.
Indigenous activists say that wildcat miners return once security operations end or spread to different areas, including across the border into Guyana and Venezuela.
Ultimately — as in South Africa and elsewhere — there are serious doubts about whether government crackdowns can beat the increasingly well-funded criminal networks, with the World Gold Council warning the scale of illicit gold flows, corruption and money laundering is “without precedent”.
“Garimpo not only dirties the river, destroys the forest and contaminates the fish, but it is also serving organised crime,” said Alessandra Korap, a Munduruku campaigner.
“We want people abroad to know this.”
Additional reporting by Beatriz Langella and Jorge Carrasco
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