BRAZIL-GOLD/ (CORRECTED): CORRECTED-INSIGHT-New technology aids Brazil’s crackdown on illicit Amazon gold trade Brasilia: Harley Sandoval, evangelical pastor, real estate agent, and mining entrepreneur, was arrested in July 2023 for the illegal export of 294 kilograms of gold from Brazil’s Amazon to the United States, Dubai, and Italy.
In paper terms, the gold was mined at a licensed prospect, to which Sandoval was licensed, in the north of Tocantins. Police said, however, that not an ounce of gold had been mined since colonial times.
Using state-of-the-art forensic technology and satellite imagery, the Brazilian Federal Police said it had established that none of the exported gold was sourced from the Tocantins prospect.
Instead, it had been dug up from three wildcat mines in neighboring Pará, some on protected Indigenous reservation lands, according to unreported court documents dated November 2023 seen by Reuters.
The prosecution is one of the first in Brazil to use the new technology to tackle clandestine trading, which may account for as much as half of Brazil’s gold output. Brazil is a major producer and exporter of the precious metal. Illegal gold mining has surged at thousands of sites in the Amazon rainforest, bringing environmental destruction and criminal violence to the region.
Federal Police records obtained by Reuters exclusively reveal that seizures of illegally mined gold have risen seven-fold in the last seven years. Sandoval, who has been released pending trial and continues to preach with his wife at a Pentecostal Evangelical church in the central Brazilian city of Goiania, denies the allegations. He maintains that once gold is melted down into ingots for export, it is impossible to establish where it was mined.
