- Criminal groups are operating to smuggle illegal gold from the Brazilian Amazon into Venezuela, where the metal is laundered and exported overseas.
- Illegal gold traders adopted this new strategy after Brazil’s administration increased control over the metal’s commerce.
- Mongabay followed the steps of Adriano Aguiar de Castro, who, according to authorities, jumped from one gold laundering scheme to another and now is also involved with gold smuggling into Venezuela.
- The need to cross national borders brings gold trading groups closer to organized crime and poses new challenges to authorities.
In 2023, Brazil’s Federal Police spotted an unusual movement in the small airport of Santarém, in Pará state: Seemingly humble Venezuelans buying expensive last-minute tickets and always paying for extra luggage. In October, agents decided to go for it and arrested a Venezuelan man trying to board with 21 kilograms (46 pounds) of gold hidden in thermos bottles.
Two months later, another atypical situation caught the authority’s attention: a man carrying 47 kg (103.6 lbs) of gold suffered an attempted robbery in Manaus. His plan, frustrated by the attack, was to ship the cargo in a private jet.
After a judge authorized the Federal Police to access the phones and financial information of suspects, agents found these two episodes were connected and part of a much larger scheme to send illegal gold from the Brazilian Amazon to Venezuela and, possibly, Guiana.
Such a scheme was a novelty to the investigators and a sign that illegal gold traders were becoming sophisticated amid the growing siege of Brazilian authorities. After four years under the administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-22), whose policies and rhetoric boosted illegal mining, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came to power in 2023, attacking the illegality on two fronts. On one front, agents resumed raids on the ground. On the other, new administrative measures made it harder to trade illegal gold.
“We can see very clearly that the sector has been restructured,” Raoni Rajão, a researcher at the Minas Gerais Federal University (UFMG), told Mongabay. “What our sources have shown is that the amount of gold trafficked across the borders has increased significantly.”
The organization found by the Federal Police in 2023 in the so-called Flygold investigation was divided into four cores: supply, transport, reception and money laundering. According to the court files, the metal was primarily transported by Venezuelans, who had an easier time crossing the border. It was carried on ferries, boats, planes, vehicles and even on foot, on a route initiated in Itaituba that could pass through Santarém, Manaus and Boa Vista before reaching Venezuela. There, one of the possible buyers was a company called Alibaba Goldcenter, the investigators concluded.
Composed of both Venezuelans and Brazilians and with operational bases in Itaituba and Boa Vista — Roraima’s capital located 230 kilometres (143 miles) from Venezuela’s border — the group is suspected of having smuggled at least 1 ton of illegal gold from February 2023 to March 2024. The smuggling activity peaked when the United States lifted trade barriers on Venezuelan gold, from October 2023 to January 2024, turning the neighbor country into an attractive shipping platform.
As the investigations advanced, a very familiar name came up. Adriano Aguiar de Castro was a man full of tricks, as shown in several police investigations. Operating for years in the Brazilian Amazon’s illegal gold hotspots, he was a master of gold laundering and knew well the shortcuts from the muddy mining sites deep into the rainforest to refineries in Europe and Asia. With a simple document fraud, illegal metal entered the legal market by the front door. As the rules of the game changed, however, he rapidly adapted and became a key character in the gold smuggling scheme.
According to the lawsuit, he was suspected of collecting illegal gold in Pará and handling it to the logistics group. “Adriano and his companies are yet another piece of the nucleus of suppliers, co-opting possibly illegally mined gold and sending it to be laundered in other countries,” the lawsuit stated.
Besides the large sums of money passing through Castro’s bank accounts, a photo of him in front of a small airplane in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, also reinforced Castro’s key role in the organization. Next to him in the picture was Aldo José Pinheiro, who was pointed out by authorities as the “leader and responsible for the material transportation route.” Mongabay tried to reach Pinheiro’s lawyer with no success. The Brazilian justice issued an arrest warrant against Castro, but he wasn’t found at his address nor presented himself to the police.
Castro’s defense said it wouldn’t comment on Mongabay’s report.
The master of fake mines
Castro’s first appearance in police records dates back to 2019 when the Federal Police seized 110.9 kg (244.5 lbs) of gold hidden under the seats of an airplane at Goiânia airport. Soon, authorities would find it was just a small share of the 1.5 metric tonnes of illegal gold traded by the criminal organization that year, totaling nearly 218 million reais ($37 million).
Castro was the right hand of the group’s leader, Bruno Cecchini, the Federal Police concluded. “[Castro] is one of the main articulators of illicit transactions related to the illegal exploitation of ore and the laundering of money derived from this crime,” the investigators wrote in a report of the investigation known as Céu Dourado.
Among his attributions was to start the construction of a fake mine in the municipality of Colniza, in Mato Grosso, aimed at deceiving authorities about the origin of the gold traded by the group. The facilities were built on lands with regular mining authorizations. The metal, however, was coming from illegal mines, known in Brazil as garimpos, in northern Mato Grosso and southern Pará. The practice, known as gold laundering, was widespread in the Brazilian Amazon at that time.
When authorities visited the site in August 2019, an employee said he was constructing “lodgings, a cafeteria and the installation of machinery for the future operation of a ‘mining company.'” He also confirmed no mining activities had taken place in the area for the last three months, contradicting invoices stating gold extraction was in full swing. According to the court files, Castro hired the builder “to start the infrastructure work on the site in order to give the image that gold mining was already taking place there.”
In a statement to Mongabay, Cecchini’s lawyer denied any falsehood on his mines’ operations. Read the full response here.
The Brazilian justice accepted the charges against Castro in June 2022, and he is awaiting trial. It didn’t keep him away from business. One year later, a photo of a hole in the ground would make the Federal Police officers automatically remember Castro and the fake mine case.
The hole was about 1 metre (3.3 feet) in width and 1.5 m (4.9 ft) long, too small to accommodate an adult lying down. Even though it was the origin of 379.4 kg (836 lbs) of gold valued at 137.6 million reais ($24 million), according to Fênix DTVM, the gold trading company that declared in its tax forms to have been supplied the metal from this stretch of land located more than 2 km (1.2 mi) from the Trans-Amazonian road, in Pará state.
The area was owned by one of Fênix’s alleged suppliers, José Barbosa de Lima, who had 10 mining authorizations. From these sites, Fênix declared he had extracted a total of 988.2 kg (2,178.6 lbs) of gold valuing 257.4 million reais ($44.9 million) from 2021 to 2022. When the Federal Police looked at satellite imagery of Lima’s lands, however, it found no sign of a mine site.
Fênix justified this, saying the operations were underground, sending as proof a photo of Castro standing next to the hole — a seemingly homemade endeavor that contrasted with the large volume of gold supposedly taken from there, comparable to large industrial mining sites.
Fênix’s response was described as an “innovation” by Brazilian investigators used to different gold laundering strategies. They stated the excavation seemed recent and “without any lateral containment and structure that would allow a person to descend to significant depths to mine,” adding that Lima’s environmental license only allowed mining on riverbanks and not underground. “It is already clear that no relevant mining activity is possible in the conditions mirrored in the photographs presented,” they stated.
The police would conclude that Fênix sourced its gold from garimpos of Itaituba municipality, known as the Amazon illegal gold capital and located in the Tapajós River basin. The region has a history of illegal mining in protected areas like the Munduruku Indigenous territory, whose population has bodies with alarming levels of mercury — the substance used by illegal miners to separate the gold from the ore contaminates the water and the fish consumed by traditional communities.
In a statement sent to Mongabay, Fênix said “its activities are based on legality, transparency and compliance with the strictest international compliance standards.” Read the full response here.
The generous payments made by Castro to Lima’s son, Josivan, led the police to believe he was paying to use Lima’s mining processes to launder the illegal gold sold to Fênix, indicating the “reformulation of Castro’s business in Pará” after the dismantling of his former scheme in Mato Grosso. In a message to Mongabay, Lima’s lawyer said he wouldn’t comment on the article.
The illegal gold from both Castro’s organizations found its way to the international market. In Céu Dourado’s case, the metal was sold to Italy. In Fênix’s, the gold ended up in an Indian refinery that supplies large tech companies like Google and Amazon, the Brazilian news outlet Repórter Brasil showed.
In the meantime, Castro got involved in a third investigation, named the Sisaque raid. According to the Federal Public Ministry (MPF), the group traded around 13 tons of illegal gold, valued at more than 4 billion reais ($678 million), from 2020 to 2022, and the product ended up in countries like Italy, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. The Federal Police concluded that Castro’s role was to buy the metal from many small suppliers and resell it to the exporting company.
Turning the table
Garimpos, which account for about one-third of Brazil’s gold production, are a simplified mining practice not subjected to the same strict environmental requirements as large-scale mines. This looser legislation was initially designed for artisanal miners who explored small areas with primitive instruments.
Today, however, garimpos’ owners run large enterprises that spend millions of dollars in backhoes and bulldozers, leaving behind devastating environmental impacts. Although they can operate within the legal framework, many don’t follow environmental regulations and open their mines in forbidden areas, like Indigenous territories.
For years, illegal gold found its way to international markets by using the same strategy as Castro’s: gold laundering. The metal was mainly sold to financial companies called DTMVs, the only institutions authorized by Brazil’s Central Bank to make the first acquisition of garimpos’ gold.
DTVMs used to have small offices close to the gold-producing sites, especially in Itaituba. Much of the metal arriving at their counters was illegal, but it was too simple to sort it out: When filling out the tax papers, the DTVM’s employee would indicate a legal mine as the product’s origin.
“Only those who didn’t want to launder gold didn’t do it. It was very easy,” Rodrigo Magalhães de Oliveira, a Pará Federal Public Ministry law analyst, told Mongabay.
While gold laundering was rife inside the chilled DTVMs’ offices, public authorities were still focused on destroying machinery in garimpos deep into the forest. “There was still an idea that illegal mining was fought by going into the field and destroying some dredges,” Rajão said.
Things started to change in 2018 when MPF launched its first major investigation against a DTVM operating in Pará, accused of laundering gold from Zo’é’s Indigenous Land. Four people were found guilty in 2024. “It was the first large-scale investigation into the acquisition of illegal gold, when the MPF began to investigate the supply chain more structurally,” Oliveira said.
In 2021, a groundbreaking report from UFMG showed it was far from being an isolated case and concluded that almost a third of the gold produced in Brazil was illegal. To get to this figure, Rajão’s team analyzed satellite images of the areas DTVMs declared as the metal’s origin. In many cases, they found absolutely no sign of mineral activity.
“Instead of pointing out specific cases, the MPF could now say that practically the entire Tapajós Basin bought illegal gold through the DTVMs,” Rajão said. New investigations followed, targeting more companies, like Fênix, but also public bodies failing to keep the supply chain under control, like the National Mining Agency and the Central Bank.
“The MPF has systematically opened public civil actions and brought to justice all the main players in the illegal gold chain in the Amazon,” the UFMG researcher added.
However, advances on the probes were overshadowed by President Bolsonaro’s administration. Instead of reducing, the mining areas almost doubled during his government, pushed by the dismantling of environmental enforcement and the rise in gold prices.
“It had the effect of spreading mining to places where it was not traditionally seen,” Luiz Jardim Wanderley, geographer and professor at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), told Mongabay. “And the price of gold has led to an increase in the volume of mining since with more resources, the prospector can buy more machinery, more backhoes.”
Where is the gold?
Things started to change in 2023 when President Lula came to power and resumed raids on the ground. However, the main break came by striking the gold trade, not only its production.
The first blow to illegal gold organizations followed a rule forcing gold traders to issue electronic invoices, making it much easier for authorities to monitor the supply chain — by then, it was all registered by handwriting. Then, the Supreme Court ended the “good faith” concept that had exempted DTVMs from verifying the origin of the metal. By the old rule, if the seller said the gold was legal, it should be enough proof for the DTVM to buy it.
“Illegal Brazilian gold was mostly, if not completely, laundered,” Oliveira said. “So much so that there was no difference in price between legal and illegal gold at the DTVM counter.”
The new rules had an immediate effect. Brazil’s gold exports plummeted by 29% in 2023, according to Escolhas Institute, which advocates for the sustainable development of natural resources. From January to July 2024, there was a 35% decrease compared with the same period the year before.
In Pará state, the collection of the tax paid by DTVMs over garimpo’s gold dropped by 51% from 2022 to 2023 and by 47% from 2023 to 2024, as registered by the National Mining Agency. DTVMs also made their withdrawal clear by closing most of their offices in the gold-producing centers. Itaituba, which had 23 purchasing points in 2021, now has only two.
“The DTVMs with local offices were closing down because laundering had become a dangerous business, which it hadn’t been until then,” Rajão said.
However, new illegal mines kept blooming in satellite imagery, though at a much slower pace. According to MapBiomas, a civil society platform that tracks changes in land use, the area occupied by garimpos dropped more than 40% in the Amazon in 2023 compared with the year before. In 2024, it fell 35%. Still, 7,213.5 hectares (17,825 acres) of forest were destroyed by new mines in Lula’s first two years in office — more than half of it (4,205.5 or 10,392 acres) reported in Pará.
“Although the mining rate has decreased, it hasn’t fallen to the same extent as the gold declared [in taxes],” Rajão said. “So clearly there is still a lot of gold being produced illegally.”
The persistence of the activity could also be observed on the ground, where mines would rush to resume operations as soon as the environmental agents turned their backs. Garimpeiros, as those working in garimpos are called, also carved new hotspots in conservation units, according to Greenpeace. In January 2025, the organization also identified a new surge of dredges — which churn up the riverbed in search of gold — in the Madeira River, in the Amazonas state, only five months after a federal offensive destroyed 459 of these structures. In February, the Federal Police would find an underground gold mine designed to cheat satellite imagery in Maués municipality, also in Amazonas.
Illegal gold was still being produced in the Brazilian Amazon, but it had almost disappeared from public records. “This gold is coming out from another corner,” MPF’s Oliveira said.
Probes like Flygold started to clarify through which routes at least some of this gold is flowing. With the new rules put in place in Brazil, the investigators concluded, “the laundering of this ore may be taking place outside the country, in places with more lenient legislation.”
Measuring the size of this smuggling activity, however, is not simple. Accounting for the illegal gold smuggled into Venezuela is tricky since it leaves few traces and no paperwork. In 2024, a cross-border investigation from South American news outlets analyzed Venezuela’s data from 2013 to 2023 and found gold exports historically exceeded gold production, indicating part of this metal could be coming from neighboring countries. However, the journalists who authored the investigation said the country’s figures “have gaps that prevent a precise analysis.”
Even global supply chain data platforms like Panjiva have a hard time in tracking these shipments. The Center for Climate Crime Analysis, a nonprofit that investigates emitters of climate-warming greenhouse gases, looked at Panjiva data and found only six Venezuelan gold shipments, all of them after 2021. The largest of them, of 1,984 kg (4,374 lbs), was made by the Venezuelan Central Bank in November 2022 to “non-declared countries.” The other ones, totaling 120.8 kg (266.3 lbs), were sent to Turkey, mostly in 2023.
Mongabay reached the Venezuelan Central Bank and the Venezuelan embassy in Brazil, asking about the gold smuggling case and the country’s gold trade data, but both institutions didn’t respond.
However, according to sources heard by Mongabay, the Flygold criminal organization is not an isolated case. “We can’t give too many details, but we have this information that there is a chain of [gold smuggling] through Venezuela but also Guyana and Suriname,” said UFMG’s Rajão, whose research team collaborates with Brazilian authorities.
In January 2025, the Federal Police targeted another group in the Brazilian Amazon suspected of ferrying around 34 kg (75 lbs) of illegal gold, valued at 18 million reais ($3.1 million), from November 2023 to February 2024. Mongabay found the metal was smuggled into Venezuela and Bolívia, according to a Federal Police agent who spoke off the record.
This new dynamic means an inversion of the metal flow across the continent. For decades, the ease of laundering illegal gold in Brazil made it the perfect “laundering machine,” where gold was “legalized” before being exported. Not by chance, Brazil historically exported more gold than it produced, indicating part of the metal was coming from undeclared areas.
“Brazil used to be an excellent hub for illegal gold from different neighboring countries,” Rajão said. “Today, we’re seeing a reverse flow: Illegal gold from Brazil is crossing the border into Venezuela because it’s now easier to launder gold in Venezuela and export it to countries like India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”
Getting closer to organized crime
The reorganization of the crime routes poses new challenges to Brazilian authorities. First, by bringing new actors into the scene. “Before, very few actors concentrated practically the entire flow of illegal gold being laundered in the Amazon,” Rajão said. “You could count them on your fingers. And the MPF and Federal Police went after them one by one.”
Now, groups smuggling gold through the borders must rely on a sophisticated logistics system often controlled by organized crime. “The organized crime isn’t there taking the gold from inside the Indigenous territory, but it is supplying the mercury, taking the gold to Venezuela to be laundered or even exchanged for weapons and base paste [a raw form of cocaine],” the UFMG researcher told Mongabay.
In Roraima, for example, a Venezuelan criminal organization joined forces with the Brazilian mafia group Primeiro Comando da Capital, and forced Venezuelan immigrants to work on illegal gold mines. The intersection of illegal gold mining and organized crime in the Amazon is also observed in Peru, stated Livia Wagner from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a civil society organization based in Geneva, Switzerland.
“From 2011 onwards, many international groups began to operate in garimpos. Before, it was just local groups,” she said. According to the researcher, criminal organizations were attracted by the continuous rise in gold prices and the possibility of using the metal to launder money from drug trafficking. “Organizations are seeing that there’s a lot of money in mining and that public policies aren’t moving forward, so there’s still a lot of room for new groups to enter.”
These new routes don’t mean the Brazilian offensive is not working, Wanderley, the UFF professor, stated. “It’s working, and at the same time, the garimpo is looking for other ways out,” he said.
Oilveira, from MPF, said the government managed to decrease the pace of garimpos’ advance in the Amazon amid consecutive records in gold prices. “Having a drop in mining in a context of rising gold prices is not trivial, so the measures have had an impact,” he said. “But the measures are insufficient, and we have to step up the fight, both with inspections at airports and the extraction points.”
According to experts, countries buying gold from the Amazon should also improve their practices. “Switzerland already has an initiative called Better Gold, but it needs to move faster. Canada, which is one of Brazil’s biggest gold buyers, doesn’t have such an explicit initiative. And there are countries like India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and China that have shown no interest in moving forward,” Rajão said. “As long as countries and companies buy gold from illegal mining, resources will continue to flow into the Amazon.”
Banner image: Federal forces have been expelling illegal gold miners from protected areas like the Munduruku Indigenous Territory in Pará state. Image courtesy of the Federal Police.
Brazil’s illegal gold miners carve out new Amazon hotspots in conservation units
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