Gold trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean has never been more profitable. Prices of the precious metal surged over 40% in 2024 to reach a record high of over $3,000 per ounce in March 2025.
The demand for this precious commodity has fueled environmental destruction throughout Latin America, driving deforestation in Bolivia, poisoning Indigenous communities in Brazil, and destroying river ecosystems in Colombia and Peru.
Gold mining is considered illegal when undertaken without the proper permits. While many people carry out subsistence mining without papers, organized crime groups have seized on gold as a valuable income stream, often controlling or extorting local miners that extract the mineral, and then selling it via their corrupt networks.
SEE ALSO: Podcast Series: The Shadow of El Dorado
InSight Crime spoke with Julia Yansura, the Program Director for Environmental Crime and Illicit Finance at the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition about how criminal groups have capitalized on this multibillion-dollar industry and what is being done to address the issue.
InSight Crime: The price of gold has been rising pretty steadily for about a decade, and surging in recent years. What impact has this had on criminal networks?
Julia Yansura: What we’ve seen is increasing involvement from organized crime groups in illegal mining. When you get a really dramatic increase in the price of gold, that unfortunately plays right into their hands. It means that criminal groups have more money that they can use to buy weapons, to finance operations, to wreak havoc in our various countries.
IC: How does illegal gold mining connect to other illicit economies? And why is gold mining so attractive to criminal groups?
JY: Illegal gold mining has incredibly close connections with drug trafficking. It happens in two main ways. Drug trafficking organizations will diversify their business model and get into other income-making opportunities, investing in illegal gold mines or extorting informal gold miners. It’s estimated that in Colombia and Peru, illegal gold mining generates more income for criminal groups than drug trafficking, and that’s saying a lot, because those two countries are the top cocaine producing countries in the world.
The other thing we’re seeing is that organized crime groups in the region are using illegal gold as a money laundering strategy. The way that works is that they transport gold across international borders, then use it to pay for things, for example, using the gold to buy real estate, or selling the gold and then putting the cash in a bank account or investing the cash in a small business.
Gold is incredibly high value, which makes it easy to transport. So if you want to transport $1 million in cash, that’s a lot of cash. It’s physically large. The equivalent of $1 million in gold, that’s much smaller, which makes it easier to move around and hide.
Gold is also very hard to trace. It can easily be used in different countries around the world. It retains value, or, as we’ve seen now, even appreciates in value.
Over the past 10 or 15 years, a major focus of the US anti-money laundering system has been to crack down on bulk cash. You can no longer walk into a bank with a backpack full of cash and just deposit it. You can no longer buy high-value items using cash with no questions asked. We’ve come so far in terms of cracking down on dirty cash, but we haven’t done the same thing for gold. And so it remains this huge loophole that criminal groups know about, and they exploit it.
IC: What makes illegal gold mining so difficult to address?
JY: A lot of times when we talk about environmental crime, people assume that it’s all occurring via clandestine smuggling networks. And that’s actually not the case. We see a lot of evidence that these illegally sourced natural resources are entering formal supply chains. And a lot of the movement of these illegally sourced natural resources across international borders involves the use of formal companies.
Oftentimes, the proceeds from these crimes are laundered in different jurisdictions. So even though the illegal logging or illegal mining might happen in a country like Colombia, many times the money laundering would happen in another country. Typically, environmental criminals look for countries or jurisdictions that have lax requirements, that allow a lot of anonymity, that allow a lot of financial secrecy. I’m talking about the “tax haven” or financial secrecy jurisdictions in Latin America.
IC: What countries in Latin America are the biggest concerns for money laundering?
JY: We’re very concerned about the role of the United States as being a destination for money laundering from environmental crimes that take place in Latin America. There have always been really close economic and financial ties between Latin America and the United States, and the United States has had a longstanding problem with shell and front companies. That makes it a very attractive place to launder illegal proceeds.
IC: What actions has the current US administration taken to address this issue?
JY: We’re seeing a lot of concerning developments that are going to weaken our national system on anti-money laundering and anti-corruption.
SEE ALSO: How Trump’s Anti-Money Laundering Rollback Could Help LatAm Criminals
The recent changes seem to contradict the Trump administration’s own stated priorities, specifically around things like combating drug cartels and the fentanyl crisis. If you want to go after drug trafficking, the best way to do that is going after drug money, and you’re going to need anti-money laundering laws and special prosecutors [at the US Justice Department] who work on white collar crime. You’re going to need laws that allow us to pull back the veil on corporate secrecy. So, they’re really getting in the way of their own stated objectives.
IC: What can policymakers and financial institutions do to stem these illicit gold flows and money laundering via environmental crimes?
JY: For the financial sector, the most important thing is to improve their understanding of the illicit finance risks associated with illegal gold mining. I would encourage financial institutions to look at this with the very serious lens of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing. When you put it in those terms, financial institutions understand that these are very serious risks associated with natural resources and these economic activities.
One of the really important things for governments is having a clear sense of who’s behind companies operating in that country. Who are the real people? Not their lawyers, not their frontmen, not their gardener, but the real person who owns a company, who benefits from that company. That is a well documented international best practice called beneficial ownership.
We have seen a lot of progress on this within countries in the western hemisphere. Panama is a country that’s been making progress. Colombia implemented their registry of beneficial owners, which will help cut down on the use of shell and front companies. Ecuador and Peru are also currently in the process of implementing this. And then in the case of the United States, we really hope that the administration reconsiders their position in light of the overwhelming evidence of how shell and front companies have been harming Americans and harming security interests within the Western Hemisphere.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.