Forensic technology aids Brazil's crackdown on illicit Amazon gold trade

BRASILIA, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Harley Sandoval, an evangelical pastor, real estate agent and mining entrepreneur, was arrested in July 2023 for illegally exporting 294 kilos of gold from Brazil's Amazon to the United States, Dubai and Italy.

On paper, the gold was sourced from a legal prospect Sandoval was licensed to mine in the northern state of Tocantins. But police said not an ounce of gold had been mined there since colonial times.

Using cutting-edge forensic technology, along with satellite imagery, Brazil's Federal Police said it was able to establish that the exported gold did not come from the Tocantins prospect. Instead, it had been dug up from three different wildcat mines in neighboring Pará, some on protected Indigenous reservation lands, according to previously unreported court documents dated November 2023 seen by Reuters.

The prosecution is one of the first in Brazil using the new technology to tackle clandestine trading that may account for as much as half of the gold output of Brazil, 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.

Seizures of illegally mined gold have surged seven-fold in the past seven years, according to Federal Police records obtained exclusively by Reuters.

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 there is no way to establish where the gold was mined once it is melted down into ingots for export.

"That's impossible. To export gold one always has to melt it down," he told Reuters by telephone.

Historically, gold is notoriously difficult to trace, especially once metal from different sources has been melted together, erasing the original signatures. After that, it can easily be traded as a financial asset or be used in the jewelry industry.

But investigators say that's starting to change. A police program called "Targeting Gold" is creating a database of samples from across Brazil that are examined with radio-isotope scans and fluorescence spectroscopy to determine the unique composition of elements.

The technique, long used in archaeology, was pioneered in mining by University of Pretoria geologist Roger Dixon to help distinguish between legal and stolen gold.

The program developed in partners...
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