About three years ago, I became obsessed with sleeping.
I had been watching prices rise for two decades. By December of 2023, gold had reached $2,000 an ounce, fueled by concerns from wealthy investors and governments. They were worried about terrorist attacks and wars and financial instability and, more recently, disease. He argued that gold would retain its value if stocks, bonds, and the dollar lost value.
At the same time, I was reading about illegal gold mining that was ravaging the Sahel and Amazon rainforests across Africa. It was fueling terrorist attacks and wars and financial instability and, more recently, researchers were learning, disease.
I have spent much of my career writing about money and power and the intersection of extreme wealth and deep poverty. I’m fascinated by the results of what rich institutions do to get rich. And I’m always looking for stories about how choices made in rich countries affect people in poor countries. So I told my editor, Matt Apuzzo, that during this price rise, I wanted to report on gold mining.
They were skeptical and asked what turned out to be the bigger question: Is hoarding gold to escape instability and violence actually creating more instability and violence?
He said, if banks and the US government – ​​the largest, most trusted suppliers of gold to investors – were buying the same gold that originated from a terrorist group, we would have a story.
By the end of that day, I was sure we would No there is a story
Large companies that sell gold to investors in the United States and Europe have strict policies to avoid purchasing gold that was mined criminally. And federal law requires America’s most prestigious gold dealer, the United States Mint, to use only US-mined gold for its investor-grade coins. A Mint spokesperson told me early in my reporting that it buys only American gold.
I asked the US Mint for a list of its gold suppliers and ran them through the shipping-record database. I found that suppliers were importing literally tons of foreign gold. And when I called them, they told me that they melt all that gold together, sometimes with US gold, to make bars that the US Mint eventually buys.
Was the Mint violating the law? After more than a year of work and more calls, more business records and wading through four decades of legislative history, I figured out what was going on. It wasn’t complicated: The US Mint buys foreign gold and claims that, as far as the law is concerned, it comes from the United States.
For decades, Mint leaders had been using logical gymnastics to label foreign gold as American. They purchased supplies originating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from Mexican pawn shops and through South American brokers. A 2024 federal monitoring report He said the Mint had stopped asking suppliers about the origin of gold more than 20 years ago.
I decided to locate this gold from at least one source.
When I started calling the end of 2024, gold was near $3,000 an ounce. One was from a Texas middleman who said his two largest gold customers were suppliers to the US Mint. Trade records show they imported the gold from a Colombian company that had a checkered legal history.
So I flew to MedellÃn with my colleagues Simon Posada and Federico Rios to find out where this gold comes from.
We arrive in Caucasia, a gold boomtown controlled by the Clan del Golfo, a US-designated terrorist group. The clan sells drugs and gold, and uses violence to take over their territory.
The three of us traveled there four times in the last year; By the third visit, gold had surpassed $5,000 an ounce.
The gold boom in Caucasia is evident in nightclubs and shops selling shiny new digging machines for mining. Downtown we saw people loading bags of gold into Brinks trucks while armed guards stood guard.
We met all kinds of gold industry people in and around the city – brokers, shovel-and-pan miners and people from a big company that dredges up river sediments to legally extract gold. We visited legal mines, illegal mines, and an industrial operation whose legality was unclear to anyone on campus.
We met the head of a miners’ union whose colleague was recently murdered, and a black-market dealer who advertised his business with Instagram videos.
We ate a lot of beef (a local specialty) and some vegetables (not a local specialty).
Eventually a contact took us to a place called La Mandinga. It’s a government-owned cattle farm where illegal miners tear up the earth with high-pressure pipes. They told us that the clan ran the place and charged them a monthly fee for mining on the land. The miners sell their gold to traders who also pay the tribe. The traders told us they sell the gold to an exporter, who ships it to Texas.
The US Mint blamed its suppliers. Suppliers told me they rely on Texan middlemen to hold the illegal gold. The Texan said he relied on a man from Mexico to do it. When I told them what I found, they all said they were done finding Colombian gold.
But the US Treasury, which is outside the Mint, denied there was any systemic problem. The Treasury’s position is that the practice of purchasing foreign gold for investor coins does not violate the law, a spokesman said.
For years, the Mint had been using a loose definition for U.S. gold, stating that foreign gold could be counted if it was supplied to the Mint by a company that purchased offsetting quantities of U.S. gold. A federal monitoring report in 2024 said the Mint had stopped enforcing that requirement more than 20 years ago.
After we presented our findings, a Treasury spokesperson said the department is investigating the Mint’s gold purchases and has tightened its sourcing standards to ensure that the “primary” source of gold the Mint purchases is the United States.
