Illicit Gold

Gold has never been worth more, and almost none of it has to say where it came from. In the Amazon, that gap has become an industry. We follow a single trade from the mud it comes out of to the wedding ring it ends up on: the garimpeiro who mixes mercury with his bare hands and eats fish from the river he poisons, the armed groups who don't dig but sell the diesel and collect the tax, the airstrip no inspector visits, and the furnace where the crime quietly ends and a commodity begins.

Because that's the part nobody talks about. Once gold is refined, no routine assay can establish where it was mined. Once it's melted, everyone's gold is the same gold, and every person who handles it afterward is telling the truth. We trace what that buys: a cartel the United States calls a terrorist organization, a state that launders through its own central bank, a shipment of Iranian oil, a payment to Hezbollah, a coin sold by the U.S. Mint with an eagle stamped on it. And in a field in Colombia, we find a man with a gamma-ray detector pulling land mines out of a farm, because gold routes are worth protecting with explosives.

This isn't a story about gold. It's about what happens when a crime becomes a commodity, and who pays for it.

An investigation by

ICAIE + RADOC

Executive producers

David M. Luna · Sam Rad

Production

An Illicit Shadows Production

On camera

Sam Rad