Posted on 01/17/2018 8:29:24 AM PST by Red Badger
When Juan Granda ventured into Peru’s Amazon rainforest to score another illicit load of gold, he boasted that he felt like legendary Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
“I’m like Pablo coming ... to get the coke,” he told two co-workers in a text message in 2014.
A 36-year-old Florida State University graduate who once sold subprime loans, Granda was no cartel kingpin. But his offhand comparison was apt: Gold has become the secret ingredient in the criminal alchemy of Latin American narco-traffickers who make billions turning cocaine into clean cash by exporting the metal to Miami.
The previous year, Granda’s employer, NTR Metals, a South Florida precious-metals trading company, had bought nearly $1 billion worth of Peruvian gold supplied by narcos — and Granda and NTR needed more.
The United States depends on Latin American gold to feed ravenous demand from its jewelry, bullion and electronics industries. The amount of gold going through Miami every year is equal to roughly 2 percent of the market value of the vast U.S. stockpile in Fort Knox.
But much of that gold comes from outlaw mines deep in the jungle where dangerous chemicals are poisoning rainforests and laborers who toil for scraps of metal, according to human rights watchdogs and industry executives. The environmental damage and human misery mirror the scale of Africa’s “blood diamonds,” experts say.
“A large part of the gold that’s commercialized in the world comes stained by blood and human rights abuses,” said Julian Bernardo Gonzalez, vice president of sustainability for Continental Gold, a Canadian mining company with operations in Colombia that holds legal titles and pays taxes, unlike many smaller mining operations.
Pope Francis is expected to condemn the horrors of illegal mining when he visits the Peruvian Amazon this week.
In the Colombian rainforest, outlaw gold mines are poisoning workers and the environment. Police venture deep into the jungle to destroy them with explosives.
In Latin America, criminals see mining and trading precious metals as a lucrative growth business, carefully hidden from U.S. consumers who flaunt gold around their necks and fingers but have no idea where it comes from — or who gets hurt. The narcos know their market is strong: America’s addiction to the metal burns as insatiably as its craving for cocaine. NTR, for instance, was the subsidiary of a major U.S. gold refinery that supplied Apple and 67 other Fortune 500 companies, as well as Tiffany & Co., according to a Miami Herald analysis of corporate disclosures.
Last March, federal prosecutors in Miami charged Granda, his boss, Samer Barrage, and another NTR trader, Renato Rodriguez, with money laundering, saying the three men bought $3.6 billion of illegal gold from criminal groups in Latin America. They claimed the gold traders, who eventually pleaded guilty, fueled “illegal gold mining, foreign bribery [and] narcotics trafficking.”
Now, those prosecutors are investigating other U.S. precious-metals dealers suspected of buying tainted gold from drug traffickers, law enforcement sources say. Their goal is not just to take out crooked gold firms like NTR — they also want to kneecap the drug cartels.
Here’s why: Over the past two decades, as the U.S. war on drugs undercut the cash flow of narco-traffickers, kingpins diversified into Latin America’s gold industry. By using drug profits to mine and sell gold to American and multinational companies, criminal organizations can launder “staggering amounts of money,” said John Cassara, a retired U.S. Treasury special agent. The end result: The gold in American jewelry, coins and smartphones is helping finance shipments of narcotics to the United States, as well as illegal mining in Latin America, current and former law enforcement officials say.
Mining regions in the rainforest have become epicenters of human trafficking, disease and environmental destruction, according to government officials and human rights investigators. Miners are forced into slavery. Prostitutes set up camps near the miners, fueling the spread of sexually transmitted infections. One human rights group found that 2,000 sex workers, 60 percent of them children, were employed in a single mining area in Peru.
Meanwhile, strip mining and the indiscriminate use of mercury to ferret out gold are turning swaths of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems into a nightmarish moonscape. In 2016, Peru declared a temporary state of emergency over widespread mercury poisoning in Madre de Dios, a jungle province rife with illegal mining. Nearly four in five adults in the area’s capital city tested positive for dangerous levels of mercury, according to the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.
Even criminal outfits from Russia and China are investing in gold mining, observers say, abandoning heavy machinery in the jungle once they’ve extracted the metal. Soaring prices over the last two decades have driven the modern-day gold rush. In January, gold traded at roughly $1,300 per ounce on the open market, compared to less than $300 in 2001.
The human rights abuses and deforestation are a “bleeding sore that affects millions of people and their future livelihoods,” said Douglas Farah, a national security consultant and visiting fellow at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
“It’s become an enormously damaging industry that very few people are looking at seriously,” Farah said. “Just as with ‘blood diamonds,’ the gold issue ... brings together money laundering, forced prostitution, drug traffickers, human trafficking and child slavery.”
Until now, the international gold market’s dark side has drawn little public attention in the United States.
That lack of scrutiny has allowed the trade in dirty gold to grow more profitable than cocaine, according to government estimates in Latin America.
“Criminal groups make so much more money from gold than from coca, and it’s so much easier,” said Ivan Díaz Corzo, a former member of Colombia’s anti-criminal-mining task force.
And just like cocaine, a market for illicit metal has blossomed in South Florida, where nearly a third of the nation’s imported gold enters.
Over the past decade, Miami, a longtime point of entry into the United States for contraband, imported $35 billion worth of gold via air, according to U.S. Customs records analyzed by WorldCity, a Coral Gables-based economic data firm. That was more than any other U.S. city.
Some of the metal shipped to Miami is refined locally. Other batches are sent across the country to be melted down and manufactured into jewelry and bullion. Central banks around the world are major buyers of gold. So is the U.S. Mint. And electronics companies use small amounts of gold in consumer products because it is an effective conductor and doesn’t corrode.
One way or another, almost everyone has Miami gold in their pockets, portfolios or jewelry boxes.
Simple math shows it can’t all be clean.
Take Colombia, a country with a substantial mining industry that exported 64 tons of gold in 2016, much of it to the United States, according to government statistics. That same year, Colombia’s large-scale, legal mining operations produced only eight tons, according to the Colombian Mining Association. A significant part of the gap between what Colombia’s big mines produce and what the country exports is unlicensed gold — sometimes unearthed by operations controlled by narco-traffickers and other criminals.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article194187699.html#storylink=cpy
“One way or another, almost everyone has Miami gold in their pockets, portfolios or jewelry boxes.”
If anyone feels guilty about this, I will gladly take any and all off of your wrists, necks, ears and fingers or out of your pockets or portfolios, free of charge. ;)
I guess I’ve known for-ever that diamonds and PMs were tainted, but according to the Socialist Democrat Party, I’m an awful person just for being a ConservaTarian, anyway, so...Meh!
Sadly, all of my guns, ammo and coins were lost in a tragic boating accident...off the coast of Florida a few years back. ;)
An emotionally driven rant.
People go where there is opportunity.
People would not go to these illegal mines if they did not see opportunity there.
If the mines are being used for money-laundering, there is a good chance they pay better.
So, now we have ‘Blood Diamonds’, ‘Terrorist Tanzanite’, and ‘Narco Gold’.......................
I lived in South Florida during the Cocaine Wars of the late 70s early 80s. It was one reason I left.
The money in circulation was so tainted that every dollar bill you could come into contact with would test positive for cocaine......................
.....or get beat over the head and wake up with no teeth!...............
I’m in South Beach right now. Somebody’s definitely smuggling something with all the Rolls, Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Ferraris I’m seeing up and down the boulevard.
Yes, it’s called ‘MONEY’..................
I guess I’ll pass on that new set of grillz then. I don’t want to support the drug lords or posion the rainforest.
—
You do that. But don’t worry about poisoning the rain forest, the drug cartels will have it all chopped down and sold for timber to build homes before that happens.
“The money in circulation was so tainted that every dollar bill you could come into contact with would test positive for cocaine.”
Still is, everywhere.
Why do we have to be responsible for cleaning up absolutely everything..??
Oh, for crying out loud..!
This is the government equivalent of the Whole Foods payment kiosk scenario, in which instead of simply selling your food in return for money, they ask a bunch of gratuitous, activist questions like, if you want to contribute to 10 different causes.
I hate that.
no one screaming..?
okay, no crime, jeez..!
It makes my LibTard sister INSANE that I hold investments here. I can’t WAIT to tell her about her tainted jewelry. Hey! That’s what Big Sisters are FOR, Right? *SMIRK*
https://investorplace.com/2017/06/the-7-best-sin-stocks-from-the-vice-fund-vicex/
“VICEX, as the ticker implies, holds a basket of stocks specializing in alcoholic beverages, tobacco, gaming and defense/aerospace industries — commonly referred to collectively as ‘sin stocks.’”
Can’t argue with a 15% return now, can ya?
Poor girl, she’s gonna have to divest herself of all that tainted gold......................just wait till you tell her about illicit chocolate.............
I might have to invest there myself after a bit of research.
The Vice Fund has been good to me!
I’ll need a few crumbs to get started on that one.
This coming paycheck should finally reflect whatever tax things happen to me.
Hoping for ample crumbs for you! :)
I’d bet if you scratch the surface you will find cricket politicians.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.