The cassava starch cookies have been a significant part of Brubeyk García Nascimento’s life, a 38-year-old man of average height with a thick beard, from Goiás, a state in the central-western region of Brazil. After all, it was the income from Biscoito Estrella, a small cookie factory founded by his mother on the family land in Anápolis, that allowed Nascimento to attend private schools until he graduated with a degree in engineering.
However, it was another, far more valuable product that made him a millionaire almost overnight: Amazonian gold. Between 2019 and 2022, Nascimento bought and sold a staggering 4.6 tons of gold, generating gross revenues of nearly 1.5 billion reais (around 269.5 million dollars at current exchange rates), according to records from the National Mining Agency (ANM). This volume accounts for 6.7% of all the gold reserves held by the Central Bank of Brazil.
The majority of this gold was exported to Italy, from where it was distributed worldwide, taking various forms, including electronic components for Apple devices and parts for Tesla vehicles.
For the Brazilian Federal Police (PF), however, this is illicit gold, smuggled from Venezuela or mining activities that have devastated parts of indigenous lands in Pará and Roraima, both lush provinces in northern Brazil, the latter bordering Venezuela. According to police investigations, the gold was laundered through a network of fraudulent mining permits issued to mining cooperatives in southern Pará.
Moreover, the PF claims that Nascimento is one of the largest gold smugglers in Brazil’s recent history. He rivals the infamous Gold King, a nickname that Dirceu Santos Frederico Sobrinho earned between 2019 and 2020 when he traded 4.3 tons of illegally obtained gold.
Nascimento’s acquaintances attest to his enormous influence in the Brazilian gold market. “He exported 100 kilos of gold weekly,” states Harley Franco Sandoval, an evangelical pastor also accused of gold smuggling in the northern region of the country.
The metal has brought Nascimento the prosperity he dreamed of. Today, the businessman exhibits the predictable external signs of wealth: Porsche and BMW cars in the garage and a private jet in the hangar. Alongside these, there are less predictable markers: a collector of cachaça liquor—the sugarcane distilled spirit typical of Brazil—he once paid nearly 12,000 dollars at an auction for an exclusive edition bottle from the Weber Haus distillery in Rio Grande do Sul.
And this is despite the fact that until the mid-2010s, Nascimento was solely focused on helping his parents package and sell cassava cookies in the rural area of Goiás.
Brubeyk Nascimento (named by his father, a military police officer, inspired by the 1980 American film, Brubaker) enjoys quoting business clichés to frame his meteoric rise. “Opportunity knocks at your door, but you have to open the door,” is one of his favorites. That opportunity appeared early in the 2010s when, recently graduated in mechanical engineering from the São Paulo State University (Unesp) in the interior of São Paulo, he had to return to Anápolis to help his mother with the cookies. He did what he could.
During his journey, he more than doubled production: he partnered with truck drivers to transport cookies to other states and discovered Tucumã, a locality in southern Pará—the second largest state in Brazil, located within the Amazon region—where he opened a distribution center for Biscoito Estrella. There, the entrepreneur diversified his business and became the owner of a food wholesaler. He also noticed that some of his customers were paying with gold extracted from the region. Without hesitation, he seized the opportunity; he just had to take advantage of it. He contacted the Gemology Center of the state of Goiás in Anápolis and the ANM office in Goiânia, the regional capital, to learn more about the metal’s composition and how the Brazilian gold trade works.
In a conversation with Piauí last October in a hotel lobby in Goiânia, Nascimento recalled that time: “I knew nothing about this market, so I went to study.” During one of the visits with ANM technicians, he learned that an Italian company, Safimet, had opened a branch in the Goiás capital to buy gold. In 2018, he decided to establish BAMC Laboratory of Soil and Mineral Analysis, based in Anápolis, and became the primary local gold supplier for the Italians. Thus began a unique tale of entrepreneurial success, riddled with irregularities and environmental crimes.
In troubled waters, ‘garimpeiros’ cash in
The largest river in Roraima, measuring 870 kilometers in length, is the Uraricoera, which runs from west to east through the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, an ethnic group from the Orinoco and the Amazon that lives between Brazil and Venezuela.
The turbulent and cascading waters of the Uraricoera guarantee the survival of dozens of indigenous communities, but they also awaken the interest of gold seekers on its shores and riverbed. Over the last decade, the Uraricoera has undergone brutal invasions by men and machines in search of the metal. The Yanomami estimate that around 5,000 gold seekers currently work along the river. “The sound of planes and helicopters transporting machinery and food to the mines has become daily,” claims Fernando Palimi Theli, head of the Palimiú Yanomami community, the largest along the Uraricoera. As a result of the mining invasion and deforestation, malaria cases have surged among the Yanomami living along the river. In 2015, only 164 cases were reported. Last year, this number shot up to 2,605, according to data from the Socio-environmental Institute (ISA) of Brazil.
The situation worsened drastically during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency (2019-23). Encouraged by the then-president, gold miners rushed into Yanomami territory, including the shores of the Uraricoera. In 2022, Bolsonaro’s final year in office, gold mining destroyed 459 hectares along the river, according to ISA. Due to continuous land excavation with machinery, the waters of the Uraricoera became murky, and fish disappeared, worsening food shortages for the indigenous people. Moreover, armed men began to attack communities; in one invasion, two children from the Palimiú community drowned while trying to escape.
In Pará, Nascimento met the man who, as per the Federal Police’s investigation, helped him enter the lucrative world of gold smuggling: Fábio Monteiro da Silva, from Sergipe, the smallest state in Brazil, located in the northeast. While working as a taxi driver in Lagarto, a town in Sergipe’s interior, Silva was a lookout for hitmen and drug traffickers, monitoring the movements of potential victims. He was eventually sentenced but served his community service sentence in his new home, Tucumã. There, he learned to fly aircraft and set up his own gold mine.
When Nascimento met him, Silva owned a sizable mine on the Uraricoera River, employing about 20 men, according to a police investigation. The mine was only 25 kilometers away from the Yanomami community of Waikás, one of the most affected by illegal mining. By then, Silva was already affluent. The connection between them, also according to the PF, was evident in reports from the Financial Activities Control Council (COAF), which revealed suspicious transfers from Silva to Nascimento totaling 1.74 million reais, or slightly over 300,000 dollars.
The duo’s scheme, according to police, involved a Mining Cooperative of Ourilândia and Region (Cooperouri), where Silva was a director in a neighboring town to Tucumã. Cooperouri is a hotspot for environmental illegality, accumulating 4.9 million reais, approximately 877,000 dollars currently, in fines from Ibama (Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) for mining in unauthorized zones. Furthermore, in 2021, it was subject to a Federal Police operation for sponsoring gold mining, which is prohibited by law, in the Kayapó Indigenous Territory, another tribal area in Pará.
According to the Federal Police’s investigation, Cooperouri is one of Nascimento’s largest gold suppliers. Their commercial relationship became so close that, in emails from the Goiás businessman, police found evidence indicating that he himself issued invoices for the cooperative. (Nascimento denied to Piauí that he controls Cooperouri; he claimed that he simply taught partners to operate legally).
Both Cooperouri and other mining cooperatives were useful for Nascimento’s plan, as they possessed the so-called Garimpeira Exploitation Permit (PLG, in Portuguese), a document issued by the mining agency that allowed garimpeiros to extract within a specific perimeter. At that time, the law did not require sellers, whether cooperatives or not, to prove that they had extracted their gold within the area covered by the PLG. This was known as the “presumption of good faith.” Thus, sellers always claimed to have conducted transactions legally with entities holding permits, with invoices and tax payments. (The Value Distribution Companies (DTVM) are the only companies authorized in Brazil to trade gold in cooperatives).
Nascimento’s BAMC operated in this market but was a fraud in reality. To begin with, the company is not a DTVM. Still, it claimed to have bought gold from cooperatives and other companies that together relied on 16 PLGs. But that was not true either. Forensic expert Ricardo Livio Santos Marques of the Federal Police examined the 16 permits (15 in Pará and one in Tocantins, a young state formed from a division of Goiás in 1988) and made two discoveries. In 10 cases of the permits submitted, there was no evidence of actual mining activity. In the other six, the mining area had production incompatible with the volume of gold that Nascimento claimed to have purchased. According to the Federal Police, the gold actually came from illegal mines within the Yanomami Territory, like the one maintained by Fábio Monteiro da Silva, or from indigenous areas in Pará, especially the Kayapó Territory. In Brazil, there are legally established reserves for indigenous people.
But Nascimento also handled gold from another source: neighboring Venezuela.
Exchange with Venezuela
There is no consolidated data on Venezuela’s gold production, but estimates are significant. In a 2021 study, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimated it to be between 30 and 40 tons annually, amounting to just under half of Brazil’s production of 94 tons in 2024. However, the OECD asserted then that only 20% of the gold extracted in Venezuela was exported through official channels. The rest was illicitly smuggled to neighboring countries to evade the effects of international sanctions imposed on Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorial regime.
Until the early part of this decade, Brazil was the primary destination for this gold, since illegal mining in Venezuela concentrates in the southern states of Amazonas and Bolívar, which border Brazil. With sanctions hindering gold exports and the ramifications of the socio-economic and humanitarian crisis plaguing the country for years, the perfect environment was created for smugglers on both sides of the border: bartering illegal gold for food. The Federal Police estimates that between 2017 and 2019, at least 1.2 tons of Venezuelan gold were exchanged for food in the neighboring country and then smuggled into Brazil to be exported as if it were Brazilian gold.
This scheme led to exports from Roraima to Venezuela surging from a meager 600,000 dollars in 2015 to 275 million dollars in 2022, according to data from Brazil’s Ministry of Development, Industry, Commerce, and Services.
The Federal Police asserts that Brubeyk Nascimento thrived in this Venezuelan gold rush. Between the end of the last decade and the beginning of the current one, BAMC’s owner sent 48.7 million reais (around 8.7 million dollars) to Roraima, according to COAF. Half of this amount went to food companies, including the Frigo 10 meatpacking company, whose partners include the state governor, Antonio Denarium, and Distribuidora Solimões, which belongs to a partner of the governor. (Although named in a Federal Police investigation, neither the governor nor his associate are under formal investigation).
Another political figure mentioned in the police investigation is the retired Venezuelan military and former governor of Bolívar state (2017-21), Justo Noguera Pietri, who was also the commander of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) from 2013 to 2014. In 2020, while serving as governor of Bolívar state, Noguera Pietri frequently crossed the border in a Brazilian truck belonging to Fríos Roraima, suspected of being involved in an illegal gold-for-food exchange scheme, according to a report sent to the Federal Police by the Venezuelan embassy of Juan Guaidó’s interim government, headed by lawyer and internationalist María Teresa Belandria. The officer currently has an arrest order issued by Argentine justice, where he is accused of crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the repression of protests in Caracas and other Venezuelan cities in 2014.
It was not possible to locate any representative of Fríos Roraima. However, retired General Noguera Pietri responded to the request for a statement, attributing any accusations against him of being linked to gold smuggling as part of a political attack. “I’ve been implicated in supposed human rights violations in Argentina; meanwhile, I still remain here on my farm in Apure,” he said over the phone from Los Llanos in southwestern Venezuela. “I can’t say I know someone who traffics in gold.”
Nascimento had a direct interest in that border area. Piauí obtained a copy of a 2022 notarial power in which the supposed owner of the São Felix estate, an area of 1,192 hectares in Amajari, at the extreme north of Roraima, cedes control of his property to Nascimento. The Climate Crime Analysis Center (CCCA), an NGO denouncing illegal actions that exacerbate climate change and violate human rights, conducted a study at Piauí’s request and found no evidence of economic activity on the São Felix estate. However, besides being located just 13 kilometers from the area of illegal mining activity on the Venezuelan side, the estate is also situated in a region where the Minerar cooperative, based in Boa Vista, the state capital of Roraima, has a PLG permit. Completing the circle, Minerar supplied gold to BAMC, and among its directors are owners of food companies in Roraima.
In his conversation with Piauí, Nascimento denied smuggling gold from Venezuela into Brazil. According to him, the transfers to supermarkets and food wholesalers in Roraima were donations to alleviate the socio-economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. “I made donations to Boa Vista, to Venezuelans who were starving,” he stated. Regarding the São Félix estate, he said he planned to raise cattle there, but the venture faced challenges due to difficult access, especially during the rainy season. (When Nascimento took control of the farm, of course, it was already rainy season).
Golden Margin
An analysis of COAF reports on suspicious banking transactions involving Nascimento, obtained by Piauí, provides crucial clues about his partners. Among BAMC’s gold suppliers are dozens of people who are currently being prosecuted for gold smuggling or illegal mining in the Amazon. BAMC also bought gold from the Amazon Gold Miners Cooperative (Coogam), whose director, Edvaldo Santos Lopes, faces accusations of money laundering linked to cocaine and arms trafficking in Rondônia, another of Brazil’s 26 states, located in the southwest’s jungle region along the Bolivia border. The criminal case has not been resolved yet.
Another significant gold supplier for Nascimento was Serra Pelada Mining, owned by Pastor Harley Sandoval. Between July 2020 and December 2022, Serra Pelada sold 294 million reais—close to 53 million dollars at today’s exchange rate—to BAMC. “During those years, I worked almost exclusively with him [Nascimento]. We spoke every day,” the pastor told Piauí in a conversation in Goiânia last August. According to Sandoval’s estimates, Serra Pelada sold a total of two tons of gold, of which 1.5 tons went to BAMC. The pastor’s company had a mining project in Natividade, Tocantins, but, according to the Federal Police, extracted gold in an illegal area adjacent to the Kayapó Indigenous Territory in Pará. Investigators found phone conversations involving miners linked to Sandoval negotiating with the Kayapó to establish mines within the indigenous territory.
In an interview with Piauí, Nascimento admitted to having purchased gold of illegal origin but denies any wrongdoing. He compares his gold purchases to buying a car. “Nobody asks if the car is locally produced or foreign. Once the invoice arrives, everything is correct, so the origin doesn’t matter. I bought this gold in good faith, believing its source was legal,” he claims.
Brubeyk Nascimento was not the only mining entrepreneur to use PLGs to launder illegal gold. A study from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) revealed that between 2021 and 2022, 26% of gold production in Brazil was of illegal origin, as the declared origins were based on PLG permits without evidence of mining or exploration beyond the permitted perimeter. “The study exposed the lack of control over gold production in the Amazon,” remarks researcher Raoni Rajão. The lack of oversight from the federal government prompted the Federal Public Ministry of Pará to file a public civil lawsuit against the ANM and the Central Bank, responsible for investigating DTVMs. The Ministry seeks to compel both institutions to oversee the sector. The case has yet to be resolved.
By laundering the illegal gold’s origin, Nascimento increased his profit margin. All gold trade, regardless of legality, is governed by the gram price of gold on the London Stock Exchange. Legally extracted gold typically sells in Brazil at a 5% discount from the official price. Gold from illegal mines, on the other hand, is slightly cheaper, ranging from 7% to 8% below the price. By camouflaging the origin of the metal via the PLGs, according to the Federal Police, Nascimento pocketed that 2% to 3% difference. It may seem small, but in transactions that involve tons, the profits stack up.
Once the origin of the gold was legalized, BAMC resold the metal, following all legal market protocols, with invoices and tax collection. In 2022, BAMC ranked eleventh among the largest gold traders in Brazil, according to ANM data. Since gold exports are exempt from ICMS (Sales Tax), unlike sales in the domestic market, Nascimento prioritized overseas sales. Considering the high value of the metal (in mid-May, a gram was worth over 100 dollars) and the substantial volume of gold traded by BAMC, Nascimento’s profits were substantial. “I was a significant player in the market in Brazil. Major multinationals respected me; I had credibility,” he declared.
According to the Federal Police’s calculations, approximately 90% of the gold acquired by BAMC was resold to Safimet, a precious metals refiner based in Arezzo, one of the largest jewelry centers in Italy. With a social capital of eight million euros and a net profit of 2.38 million euros in 2023 (the latest available data), Safimet supplies gold to several multinationals such as Tesla, Apple, Epson, and Konica Minolta, as well as the jewelry market, particularly to Marcel Robbez Masson, one of France’s largest jewelry manufacturers.
Upon founding BAMC in 2018, Nascimento partnered with the Italian company. “I’m very grateful to Safimet. It’s a highly professional company,” says the businessman. On its official website, the company states among its main goals, “to promote practices that respect and improve the environment.” Safimet did not respond to Piauí’s inquiry.
Police Shenanigans
In late 2019, Nascimento found another important foreign business partner: MLBT Consulting Corp (later renamed Doromet), a gold trading company based in the heart of Manhattan, New York. After unsuccessfully attempting to procure metal from Colombian mines, Americans Frank Giannuzzi and Steven Bellino, partners of Doromet, met Nascimento through his wife, a Brazilian. The Goiás businessman, who learned English in his youth while working as a hotel employee in South Carolina, traveled to New York and, during a dinner with Doromet’s partners, agreed to sell 35 kilos of BAMC gold to the American company, a shipment worth 6.8 million reais, or roughly 1.2 million dollars.
Nascimento would have earned a 3% profit on the shipment’s value, equivalent to 300,000 reais or about 36,000 dollars. The following month, Giannuzzi and Bellino met with Nascimento in Manaus, capital of the Amazonas state, along the river of the same name, and finalized the deal details. Days before shipping the cargo to the United States, Giannuzzi, Bellino, and Nascimento presented the gold documentation to tax agents at the local airport. The shipment was approved, but the agents grew suspicious of the metal’s origin and alerted the Federal Police.
On the night of January 24, as the two Americans prepared to board a flight to New York with the 35 kilos of gold in a pink suitcase, the PF seized the cargo, arrested Nascimento, and confiscated his cellphone. The next day, he was released by the court, without getting his phone back, after paying a bail of 100,000 reais, almost 18,000 dollars. Before that, he had to testify before the Federal Police.
He stated that the shipment consisted of melted jewelry and that it had been acquired from Werner Rydl, a controversial entrepreneur of Austrian origin who became a Brazilian citizen and declared a multi-million fortune in gold to the Federal Revenue Service, which he supposedly stored in the Atlantic Ocean. Nascimento provided police with a contract where Rydl committed to supply him with 700 kilos of gold weekly.
The Federal Police’s Superintendency in Amazonas had recently received imported equipment from Germany, capable of analyzing the chemical composition of any material. If the shipment indeed originated from melted jewelry, its purity should have been around 75%, as such items contain other metals, primarily copper and, in some cases, silver. However, the purity of the bars sold by BAMC was 93.2%. Additionally, traces of mercury were found that, according to federal agents, only occur when the metal is extracted from nature. Ultimately, the equipment showed that the gold had characteristics similar to bars seized by the PF in illegal mines in the Tapajós River basin, located in western Pará. Besides the forensic analysis, conversations found on Nascimento’s cellphone strengthened the suspicion that the gold originated from mines.
On March 26, 2020, Doromet filed a lawsuit requesting the return of the seized cargo. In November 2020, eight months after the seizure, the Regional Federal Court of the 1st Region granted the request despite expert evidence indicating that the gold came from illegal mining. “We were literally going to hand the gold over to the criminal,” stated then-PF superintendent Alexandre Saraiva to Valor Econômico newspaper. To prevent the material’s return, the police executed a bureaucratic maneuver. In March 2021, they removed the gold from the Caixa Econômica Federal branch in Manaus, where it was being held, and took it to the Superintendency, arguing that additional forensic analysis of the mineral would be needed. The next month, at Alexandre Saraiva’s request, the ANM administratively seized the cargo, thus circumventing the TRF’s decision. The gold remains confiscated to this day.
The loss of the gold did not prevent Nascimento from continuing his supply, and Doromet kept its interest in his services. “Steven, I promise you I won’t lose money. Once I reach an agreement, I’ll give you a position to gain a good profit that justifies all this. Trust me,” the Brazilian wrote to Steven Bellino in English days after the Manaus seizure. In May 2020, following the confiscation of the original shipment, BAMC exported another gold shipment to Doromet, this time successfully. Conversations found on Nascimento’s cellphone, which the Federal Police accessed, suggest it involved over a ton of gold. Part of this shipment was negotiated by Bellino and Giannuzzi in Turkey.
However, by late 2020, Bellino and Giannuzzi had a dispute. Bellino filed a lawsuit in New York against Giannuzzi and Nascimento, claiming that despite investing 750,000 dollars in the company, he was not receiving his share of the “lucrative gold business.” The lawsuit has yet to be presented in court.
Brubeyk Nascimento was unaware that when the multimillion-dollar cargo was seized at Manaus Airport, he was already being investigated by the Federal Police. Six months prior, late in the morning of June 21, 2019, highway patrol agents grew suspicious of a car traveling on BR-174, headed to Boa Vista and Manaus, and decided to stop the driver. Under the gear shift, agents found nine gold bars weighing a total of 4.79 kilos. The driver, José Cláudio Rabelo Rita, was arrested and taken to the Federal Police Station in Manaus. An expert report revealed that the gold came from illegal mining.
When the police asked who owned the gold, Rabelo remained silent. The next day, on Saturday, a Federal Police agent was having lunch at a restaurant across from the agency’s headquarters when he overheard three men at a nearby table discussing the confiscation of the nine gold bars. One of them claimed the gold was his, lamenting the loss. The following day, a Federal Police agent observed the same trio dining at the restaurant from the street, likely waiting for Rabelo’s release. (He wouldn’t be freed until two months later when he was sentenced to three years in open prison for misappropriating federal funds).
As soon as the three left the restaurant, the agent entered the establishment and requested the credit card receipt used by the trio to pay for the meal. This is when Brubeyk Garcia do Nascimento’s name came to light. From there, the Federal Police began to unravel the story. They found that Rabelo was a compatriot of Fábio Monteiro da Silva, the pilot who owned the illegal mine on the Uraricoera River, and was affiliated with Cooperouri, the cooperative that supplied gold to Nascimento. Everything fit into place. The Federal Police ended up executing three operations: Emboabas, named after the native São Paulo people who migrated to Minas Gerais drawn by 18th-century gold deposits; Eldorado, launched in Roraima, which uncovered the food-for-gold exchange in Venezuela, and the purchases of gold from clandestine mines in the Yanomami Territory; and Lupi, focused on illegal gold transactions between Nascimento and Pastor Sandoval.
Reinventing Traffickers
On the morning of September 20, 2023, the Federal Police launched three simultaneous operations. They arrested Nascimento and Sandoval. Nascimento was released 13 days later thanks to a habeas corpus appeal. Sandoval spent 39 days in prison. “It was incredibly humbling,” laments the pastor. “Until I went to prison, I was a businessman. But there, you have no name, dignity, or rights. If you are sick one night, if you have a toothache, you suffer in pain.”
In Operation Lupi, both face charges of smuggling, receiving, fraudulent declaration, and organized crime (Sandoval is also accused of misappropriation of federal funds and money laundering). The case hasn’t concluded yet. In Emboabas, BAMC’s owner, along with Americans Bellino and Giannuzzi, was charged with misappropriation of federal funds and environmental crimes; Nascimento was also charged with tax crimes and money laundering. Finally, in Operation Eldorado, no charges have yet been filed.
Nascimento and Sandoval still have all their assets frozen by the courts. “I had to start my life from scratch,” says the pastor, whose assets confiscated by the justice amount to, according to his estimates, 14 million reais, equivalent to 2.5 million dollars. “I know I’m not a criminal. I’m an entrepreneur, and my dream is to prove that I owe nothing of what I’m accused of.”
Sandoval is currently a multimillionaire real estate broker in Goiânia, while Nascimento offers financial consulting in Manaus. “I wasn’t addicted to money. Did I make money? Yes, I did. But I never got trapped in it,” says Nascimento. “I tell my parents it was a great learning experience. I’ll try again, in other situations, in other fields. Because everything passes, right?”.
In April 2023, five months before Brubeyk Nascimento’s arrest, the Supreme Federal Court annulled part of the law establishing the “presumption of good faith” in gold transactions by shipping companies in Brazil. Since then, it’s the seller’s responsibility to prove the metal’s legal origin. Just before that, in March, the Federal Treasury Secretary began requiring the sector to issue electronic invoices for any gold-related transaction; previously, the sector only operated with paper invoices, hindering oversight.
The two changes in the gold market regulations led to a significant drop in tax revenue from gold trade. In 2022, still under Bolsonaro’s government and with old regulations, the legal gold market in the Amazon generated 11.3 billion reais, around 2.021 billion dollars. In 2024, already under the new government of Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, this figure dropped by 38%, to 6.970 billion reais or 1.246 billion dollars, according to ANM. However, a total of 7,213.5 hectares of forest were destroyed by new mining operations between 2023 and 2024, according to data from MapBiomas published on the Mongabay website, indicating that illegal gold mining remains an active and profitable business in Brazil.
Both researcher Raoni Rajão and PF agents interviewed by Piauí suspect that, since Brazil has become inhospitable for gold laundering like Nascimento’s, the Brazilian black market has sought to smuggle the metal from clandestine mines in the Amazon to neighboring countries, from where it is exported to the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Among these countries is Venezuela, which until 2022 sent gold to Brazil and, starting the following year, began receiving Brazilian gold, particularly between October 2023 and January 2024, when the United States lifted trade barriers on Venezuelan gold. “The black market always finds outlets, especially for a product with high added value like gold,” asserted Rajão.
*This story is published in Armando.info with explicit authorization from Brazil’s ‘Piauí’ magazine.
**The coverage was supported by Luiz Fernando Toledo, from the United Kingdom; Cecilia Anesi, Edoardo Anziano, and Andrea Palladino, from Italy; and Joseph Poliszuk, from Venezuela.
