- President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration reduced the expansion of illegal gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon, but miners keep finding new sites.
- In 15 conservation units, illegal gold miners destroyed 330 hectares (815 acres) in only two months.
- According to experts, gold miners expelled from Indigenous territories may be migrating to conservation units.
- Alliances with narco mafias and the rise in gold prices are obstacles to fighting illegal mining.
When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, illegal gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon was out of control. According to the research collective MapBiomas, illegal miners — garimpeiros, as they are known in Brazil — almost doubled the area they occupied during the administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s (2019-22), who openly defended the activity.
The most severe situation occurred in Indigenous territories, particularly among the Yanomami, whose heartbreaking images of sick children shocked the world. Humanitarian tragedies also affect other communities, such as the Kayapós and the Mundurukus in Pará state, where contamination from the mercury used by miners has dire consequences for Indigenous health.
Things changed when Lula’s environment minister, Marina Silva, resumed on-the-ground operations. According to Brazil’s environmental agency, IBAMA, in 2023, agents destroyed 150 backhoes and 600 dredgers, machines that churned up the riverbed searching for gold. As a result, deforestation linked to garimpos in the Amazon plummeted by 30% compared with 2022.
“We believe that when we have an institutional presence and work on several fronts, we reduce the number of deforestation and degradation alerts due to illegal mining,” Ronilson Vasconcelos told Mongabay from Itaituba, where he coordinates a special advanced unit of ICMBio, the agency responsible for federal conservation units.
Data are crystal clear in showing the effects of the environmental agents’ offensive. However, they also show that garimpos keep expanding across the Amazon, albeit at a slower pace. Indigenous territories, where any kind of mining is illegal, lost 13,000 hectares (32,123 acres) of forest to illegal gold mining in 2023, according to a report from Earth Genome published by the Brazilian news outlet Repórter Brasil. The area is equivalent to more than two Manhattan islands in New York.
In December 2024, a new report from Greenpeace Brazil revealed the situation is similar in 15 conservation units analyzed in the states of Amapá, Amazonas, Rondônia and Pará. In total, these areas lost 330 hectares (815 acres) — an area close to the size of Central Park in New York City — to illegal gold mining. The area was cleared by miners in only 60 days between September and October.
“Within the conservation units, mining is rampant,” Jorge Dantas, Greenpeace Brazil’s spokesperson, told Mongabay. The most affected areas are located on the border between Pará and Amazonas states, in the basins of the Crepori, Jamanxim, Maués-Açu, Abacaxis and Tapajós rivers.
Amanã National Forest, in Pará, is the new favorite destination for garimpeiros, who destroyed 1,036 hectares (254 acres) of forest within two months in the conservation unit. “There are 53 airstrips there, and all of them are located less than 5 kilometers [3 miles] from garimpos,” Dantas said. Alto Maués Ecological Station, in Amazonas, comes in second place with 48 hectares (118 acres) deforested in the same period.
One hypothesis for the garimpos boom in these areas is the migration of illegal miners coming from Indigenous territories increasingly targeted by federal raids. Since Lula took office, security forces carried out operations not only in the Yanomami Indigenous Land, but also in other territories like the Javari Valley, in Amazonas state, Kayapó and Menkragnoti, in Pará, and Sararé in Mato Grosso.
“This migration is sure to happen,” ICMBio’s Vasconcelos said, adding that the agency tries to anticipate this shift by reinforcing the protection of conservation units around these territories. “When the government planned this operation in the Munduruku Indigenous Land, we were very categorical in saying that we had to go more forcefully into the conservation units bordering the territory, especially the Tapajós Environmental Protection Area and the Amanã and Crepori national forests,” he said, referring to the raid launched in mid-November in the Munduruku territory, in Pará.
For Dantas, however, public administrations also have to offer other opportunities for the Amazon population. “Many people go into mining because they have no other option for income,” he said. “The state needs to be present not only with security forces but also bringing education, health and social assistance.”
Narcotraffic and smuggling
Since January 2024, ICMBio has conducted targeted operations in conservation units in Amazonas, Rondônia and Pará states, including the Amanã National Forest. In December, the agency reinstalled an operations base in the Transgarimpeira road, known as the gold road, in Itaituba municipality, Brazil’s illegal gold capital.
Vasconcelos points to resource limitations to fight criminal groups, increasingly organized and closely connected with international drug mafias. “They’re using these gold routes [to transport drugs], and it’s also very easy to launder drug money with gold.”
While federal agents struggle to get tools such as airplanes to fight gold mining in remote areas, garimpo owners have helicopters and operate complex logistics to move heavy machinery deep into the forest. The criminals’ advantage becomes even greater as the price of gold rises, hitting record highs in 2024. “A gram of gold costs more than 500 reais [$82],” Vasconcelos said. “We destroy a backhoe loader worth 800,000 reais [$131,000], and he will buy another one in no time.”
For Dantas, from Greenpeace Brazil, authorities must increase control over the gold trade. Pará’s Federal Public Ministry has also been asking for heavier regulation since 2019 to reduce the chances of gold laundering — when illegal gold enters the supply chain using documents from an unexplored legal mine.
Last week, prosecutors repeated their calls for increased regulation and requested a ban on gold miners with multiple exploration areas, the cancellation of licenses of unexplored mines and the creation of an electronic system to control the gold supply chain.
It would be a step ahead of the regulations put in place in 2023, including the requirement of electronic invoices for gold commerce. DTVMs, a group of financial institutions that are the only ones authorized to trade gold in Brazil, lost their “good faith” privilege, a legal provision exempting them from verifying whether their gold sources are legal.
Laundering illegal gold has become more difficult in Brazil, but experts state that the illegal metal keeps circulating without leaving tracks. In December 2024, for example, the Federal Police raided a criminal organization that recruited foreigners to transport gold outside Brazil on commercial flights. “Illegal gold very easily acquires the appearance of legality. It enters the financial market and reaches the jewelry stores,” Greenpeace Brazil’s spokesperson said.
Banner image: Deforestation linked to garimpos plummeted 30% in 2023, but gold mines keep advancing across the Amazon. Image by Fernando Martinho for Mongabay.
Resilient and resourceful, Brazil’s illegal gold capital resists government crackdown
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