New technology supports Brazil’s efforts to combat the illegal gold trade in the Amazon region.

Recent advancements in scientific analysis have enabled researchers to examine the “DNA of Brazilian gold.”

The illegal gold mining industry has expanded significantly following the relaxation of regulations under former President Bolsonaro.

Artisanal mining has transformed into a lucrative enterprise for organized crime groups.

By Ricardo Brito and Anthony Boadle

In July 2023, Harley Sandoval, an evangelical pastor, real estate agent, and mining entrepreneur, was apprehended for unlawfully exporting 294 kilograms of gold from Brazil’s Amazon to the United States, Dubai, and Italy.

Officially, the gold was claimed to be sourced from a legally licensed mining site in the northern state of Tocantins. However, authorities reported that no gold had been extracted from that location since colonial times.

Employing advanced forensic technology and satellite imagery, Brazil’s Federal Police determined that the exported gold did not originate from the Tocantins site. Instead, it was excavated from three separate illegal mines in the neighboring state of Pará, some of which encroach upon protected Indigenous lands, as revealed in previously undisclosed court documents from November 2023 reviewed by Reuters.

This case represents one of the initial prosecutions in Brazil utilizing this innovative technology to address the clandestine trade, which may constitute up to half of the country’s gold production. Brazil is a significant producer and exporter of gold, and illegal mining activities have proliferated across numerous sites in the Amazon rainforest, resulting in environmental degradation and increased criminal violence in the area.

According to records from the Federal Police obtained exclusively by Reuters, seizures of illegally mined gold have increased sevenfold over the past seven years.

Sandoval, who has been released while awaiting trial, continues to lead services with his wife at a Pentecostal Evangelical church in Goiania, Brazil. He refutes the charges against him, asserting that once gold is melted into ingots for export, it is impossible to trace its origin.