Brazil police bust $166 million illegal gold scheme on Indigenous lands

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BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s Federal Police said on Wednesday they had dismantled an illegal mining scheme that extracted gold from Indigenous lands worth 4 billion reais ($166 million).

The investigations revealed that the illegal scheme recruited foreigners – mostly Venezuelans – to transport the illegal gold in luggage checked on commercial flights to neighboring Venezuela and Guyana, police chief Pedro Henrique Melo said.

The Federal Police was authorized to serve nine arrest warrants and 19 search and seizure warrants in six Brazilian states, including the seizure of more than 615 million reais in assets and cash.

In November, a major operation involving 20 agencies was launched to remove miners from the Munduruku Indigenous Land. A Reuters report followed actions at the beginning of the operation, and found that the involvement of indigenous people in illegal mining made it difficult to repress mining in the Amazon.

The Munduruku territory, a reservation with 140 villages where about 9,000 indigenous people live, has become a critical point for illegal mining, which under Brazilian law is banned on Indigenous lands.

(Reporting Ricardo Brito in Brasilia; Writing by Isabel Teles; Editing by Mark Porter)