How Trump’s Anti-Environment Crusade Enriches Drug Traffickers

The president has pledged to combat transnational drug organizations. Yet these groups make vast sums from environmental crimes, and his administration has gutted personnel and programs that targeted them, a new report shows.

President Donald Trump vowed to combat drug trafficking organizations and the opioid crisis, but a new report details how his extensive cuts to staff and programs targeting environmental crimes are hindering those efforts. 

Illegal gold mining, one of the most ruinous environmental crimes, is filling the coffers of transnational drug organizations, generating more money than the drug trade in some countries, according to research from the nonpartisan Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition.

The report warns that the illegal gold trade in the Americas threatens the integrity of the U.S. financial system, undermines regional security and provides funding for drug traffickers and other criminal organizations. That allows these groups to carry out operations that endanger Americans, especially with drug overdoses being a leading cause of death in the United States.

Yet, since taking office, Trump has reassigned top environmental crime prosecutors at the Department of Justice to other issues; reduced staff at the Department of Homeland Security’s Wildlife and Environmental Crimes Unit, the top agency fighting illegal gold extraction; laid off personnel at the Department of State working on the issue; and cut U.S. funding for programs to combat illegal gold mining and prosecute perpetrators. 

Former U.S. Agency for International Development programs in Peru, for example, had brought together the private sector, universities and the Peruvian government to mitigate illegal mining’s impact on communities and hold criminals accountable. Trump dismantled USAID earlier this year.  

The cuts are in line with Trump’s larger “America first” policy agenda and his attempts to gut climate and environmental protection objectives from the federal government, declaring the issues “woke.” 

“How can you disrupt organized crime if you loosen and weaken the enforcement system that fights it?” said Melina Risso, research director at the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian non-partisan think tank.

“It seems like a legalization of the illegal,” she added. 

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. 

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on the report but said in a written statement that illegal gold mining does have direct consequences for the United States, with transnational criminal organizations using the profits for other illicit activities like drug and human trafficking.  

Illegal gold mining is one of the fastest-growing and largest illicit economies in the Americas. In some parts of the Amazon rainforest, where vast amounts of illegal gold mining take place, the crime has grown 18 percent annually. 

“Criminals see it as low-risk, high-reward—they know they won’t get caught,” said Julia Yansura, report co-author and FACT’s program director for environmental crime and illicit finance. 

The lucrative illegal gold trade generates roughly $8 billion a year in Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador alone, according to the report. Los Choneros, an Ecuador-based crime syndicate, generates around $1 million a month from the activity, and Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang Trump has fixated on, now “operates as a de facto authority in mining hubs,” extracting illegal gold worth $1.7 million to $2.8 million daily, the report says. 

Miners extract gold from sediment using mercury, a process that severely pollutes water sources and devastates ecosystems, turning verdant forests into barren land devoid of life.

Once released into rivers, mercury travels long distances. As it moves up the food chain, its concentration grows in a process known as bioaccumulation, meaning that predators at the top of the chain have much higher levels of mercury in their bodies than the organisms they eat. 

Indigenous, Afro-descendant and other communities living in the forest, who often rely on fish for most of their protein, are at extreme risk. 

Multiple studies have documented the severe and dangerous health impacts illegal mining has on humans. Mercury exposure can lead to neurological issues, particularly in children, and worsen malnutrition. 

Exposure to other pollutants, like heavy metals and dust from blasting, can damage internal organs, trigger respiratory issues and increase risk for waterborne diseases like cholera. Water pits left over after blasting riverbeds have been linked to surging malaria rates, with mosquitos breeding in the stagnant water. 

A report released earlier this year by human rights experts with the Organization of American States said illegal gold mining forcibly displaces communities, increases violence against environmental defenders and is linked to sex trafficking and other crimes. 

At least 2,100 environmental defenders, people who act peacefully to protect ecosystems, have been murdered since 2012. Many of the killings have taken place in the Amazon.  

“The situation on the ground is really bad and really urgent,” Risso said. 

In 2023, Brazil declared the condition of the Yanomami Indigenous peoples a “public health emergency,” following reports of extreme malnutrition, disease, attacks on children and other harms linked to illegal mining in their territory. 

Dubán Canal, secretary of the Bogota-based Amazon Alliance for Reducing the Impacts of Illegal Gold Mining, described the crime’s toll as “absolutely devastating” for people living in the forest as miners expand their operations deeper and deeper into it. Many of the affected areas, he said, are small communities of distinct Indigenous peoples. 

“With populations of only about 200 to 300 individuals, their very survival is at risk,” he said. “Two decades ago it was just the main rivers. Now they’re going into the veins of the Amazon.”

The expanding mining frontier is also pushing closer to uncontacted Indigenous peoples’ territories. Canal questioned why governments aren’t doing more to stop the crimes: “We’re talking about human beings.”

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of State released its annual reports on human rights practices across the world, removing a long-standing section tracking violations of Indigenous peoples’ rights. 

The United States is one of the largest consumer markets for illegally mined gold. Other top consumer countries include China, the United Arab Emirates and India. 

In recent years, drug trafficking organizations have found increasingly creative ways to smuggle illegal gold into the United States, including as jewelry, disguised as clothing buttons and hidden in private airplanes. Law enforcement officials at Miami International Airport have uncovered more than one ton of illicit gold over the last three years, the report says. 

The U.S. financial system is also where transnational drug organizations use illegally mined gold to launder billions of dollars, and where illegal gold mining profits themselves are laundered. 

“Financially, illegal gold mining contributes to money laundering schemes that impact U.S. financial institutions,” the State Department statement said. “Criminal organizations use gold as a way to clean their profits, making it harder to trace illicit funds and enforce anti-money laundering laws. This weakens the integrity of global financial systems, including those relied upon by the United States.”

Front and shell companies are a main pathway for laundering illicit funds. In 2021, a bipartisan U.S. law was passed to close that loophole by requiring companies to report their true owners, a practice known as “beneficial ownership.” 

 

In March, the Trump administration, through the Department of the Treasury, excluded over 99 percent of the companies the law was intended to cover, “effectively gutting the law,” the report says. 

Reversing that policy would be just one of several easy steps the U.S. government could take to combat illegal gold mining, Yansura said. 

Other recommendations include stepping up monitoring in maritime ports; requiring the Federal Aviation Administration to collect data on “beneficial” owners of private aircraft, which are used to transport illegal gold and launder funds; creating a sanctions program to address environmental crime; restoring funding for programs that combat illegal gold mining; and increasing enforcement and prosecution of environmental criminals. 

The State Department said its Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs continues to support its counterparts’ work in the Amazon region, citing its collaboration with Colombia’s National Police to dismantle illegal gold mining in Amazon border regions. 

“By addressing these issues, the United States is protecting its security and economic interests from the ripple effects of illegal gold mining,” the statement said. 

Regional Efforts to Combat Environmental Crimes

Last week, leaders and officials from eight Amazonian countries met in Bogotá for the fifth presidential summit of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, a regional initiative aimed at protecting the world’s largest rainforest.

The Amazon stores vast amounts of carbon dioxide, making it a vital counterweight to global warming. The forest also produces one-fifth of Earth’s fresh water and is one of the planet’s most biodiverse and culturally diverse places.

One of the main drivers of forest loss there is illegal gold mining, along with cattle ranching and illegal logging. 

The outcome of the gathering led by Colombian President Gustavo Petro was the “Declaration of Bogotá,” which included commitments to combat environmental crimes by addressing mercury use, strengthening security cooperation, improving gold traceability and addressing threats to environmental defenders and other human rights violations. 

Yansura said the declaration needs to be translated into specific actions: “It’s worth asking how it will be implemented and whether countries will really stick to these commitments.” 

One example: Illegal miners often evade law enforcement by crossing national borders in remote Amazon regions. The current system is too slow, Yansura said. Police pursuing criminals must go through lengthy bureaucratic chains of command that loop through their respective capital cities and foreign ministries, giving criminals a chance to escape. 

Yansura had hoped leaders would have agreed to direct, on-the-ground communication and coordination mechanisms between law enforcement. 

Still, Yansura called the declaration a positive step. She emphasized that regional efforts alone aren’t enough. 

“We need so-called ‘destination countries’ to step up their efforts and be better partners and allies,” she said, referring to nations like the U.S. where the gold ends up. 

In 2019, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then speaking as a senator, seemed to agree: 

“Illegal gold mining’s effects are not limited to the communities outside of the United States. They are, in fact, a direct threat to our interests,” he said, underscoring that other countries need help combatting the crime and preventing related human rights abuses and environmental destruction. 

“There is a major human toll,” he added, “if we do not get control of this problem.”

Cover photo:  An officer of the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources takes part in an operation against Amazon deforestation at an illegal mining camp known in the Yanomami of Brazil on Feb. 24, 2023. Credit: Alan Chaves/AFP via Getty Images