Brazil's federal police carried out a wide operation against illegal mining in the Amazon on Tuesday, raiding a criminal organisation that financed the production and sale of 3.1 tonnes of gold whose origin was hidden with fraudulent papers.
The police said the majority of the arrests and two dozen search and seizure warrants served were in the south of Para state, where illegal gold mining has surged in recent years in the rainforest, much of that on protected Indigenous reservation land.
Much of the gold was refined in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, a city in the north of Sao Paulo state that has a thriving jewellery industry and where illegal gold is melted down into ingots with legal gold, making it hard to trace the illegal metal.
comments powered by Disqus
.jpg)
All feeds
