Illegal gold mining has become one of Latin America's most destructive criminal enterprises, rivalling the cocaine trade in profitability. Financial turmoil, geopolitical tensions and growing demand from Asia's middle classes have pushed the gold price near record highs of $3,500 an ounce as of early 2025.
Coca-bush cultivation in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru has doubled since 2010, and many gangsters, worried that cocaine may become less profitable, have piled into the illegal gold market. The two criminal activities complement each other: in the Amazon, coca farms and illegal gold mines often share infrastructure such as landing strips. Gangs invest drug-trafficking earnings in mining projects, whose output can be laundered and sold as though legally produced.
In Colombia and Peru, gangs are now thought to make more money from gold than from narcotics. Peru exported an estimated $4.8bn of illegal gold in 2024, or 44% of its total gold exports, up from 20% a decade earlier. In Brazil, the government estimates gangs earned more than 18bn reais (around $3bn) from gold sales in 2022, compared with 15bn reais from cocaine.
Criminals are razing the Amazon for gold. By 2018 roughly 1m hectares of forest had been cleared for mining; by the end of 2024 that figure had doubled, according to the Amazon Conservation Association. Much of the clearing occurred in supposedly protected areas. Mercury, used to separate gold from ore, poisons many Amazonian rivers.
In Peru, the largest gold producer in Latin America, several mafias are vying for control of Pataz, an Andean province. In Colombia, the biggest gold mine, Buriticá, is the site of a stand-off between its Chinese operator and 2,000 miners linked to the Gulf Clan. In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro gives the army a free hand to work with mining mafias in return for political loyalty. In Bolivia, the government's support for mining co-operatives has fostered a huge black market, and the central bank bought $1.3bn-worth of gold from miners in 2024 to shore up its reserves. In Ecuador, gunmen killed 11 soldiers in mid-2025 during an operation to shut down an illegal mine.
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