Illegal Mining in Colombia
Channel: Headwaters Magazine
Date: 2018-01-30

Reposted from the Miami Herald: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article194362569.html

Outlaw gold mines, often controlled by narco-traffickers and guerrilla groups, are scarring swaths of South America and exploiting workers.
Illegal miners use backhoes to tear up the earth and mercury to separate the precious metal from mud and sand – turning the rainforest into a hellish moonscape and creating a toxic brew that poisons rivers and people.
One company, South Florida-based NTR Metals, illustrates what's going wrong in today’s gold industry. To make a profit, NTR needed a steady stream of gold to supply a massive Ohio refinery owned by its parent company, Dallas-based Elemetal.
NTR looked south and in 2012 dispatched its employees to the rainforest to find gold – by any means.
In Peru, the company linked up with accused money launderer Pedro Pérez Miranda, aka Peter Ferrari.
Illegally mined gold shipped to Ferrari – hundreds of millions of dollars worth – was melted into crude bars and flown to Miami International Airport. But the racket was broken up when Peruvian cops seized a shipment of Ferrari’s gold outside Lima in 2013.
Disrupted but not deterred, NTR’s traders arranged to smuggle Peruvian gold into neighboring countries to evade authorities.
From those countries, the metal was exported to NTR in Miami.
Then NTR shipped the gold to Ohio, where it was smelted, refined and sold to high-tech electronics companies, jewelers and investors.
The scheme collapsed – as did NTR – after the feds charged its employees last year with laundering $3.6 billion of dirty gold.
The Ohio refinery – and hundreds of well-paying jobs in an economically depressed area – went under, too