For decades, cocaine has shaped the way the United States thinks about organized crime in Latin America. But criminal organizations adapt when markets change, and today, one of their most profitable opportunities is gold.
For example, one of Colombia’s largest gold exporters allegedly used a network of anonymous companies to launder $1 billion of illegally mined gold sourced from drug trafficking and paramilitary groups that was then exported to refineries in Miami. And the problem has not disappeared.
Just this year, a Boston-area man previously convicted of assault and drug trafficking was found guilty in a new scheme to smuggle gold and platinum into the U.S. from Colombia and to launder money. As part of the scheme, international travelers wore crudely made gold jewelry on repeated flights to the U.S.. The gold was later sold to refineries.
According to prosecutors, the man bragged about how easy it was to smuggle, telling his conspirators, “I got four and a half kilos, no papers.” He recounted leaving Colombia “with just a backpack full of platinum,” and passing through JFK, “the largest [expletive] ‘port in America.”
These cases illustrate how criminal organizations have diversified, yet U.S. strategies for combating them remain heavily influenced by the drug wars of decades past. To catch up, U.S. policymakers must recognize that illegal gold mining is not only an environmental problem. It is also an organized crime and illicit finance threat that demands stronger tools to disrupt the criminal networks and financial flows behind it.
The shift toward gold makes sense when you look at the incentives. Gold prices have reached historic highs, while cocaine prices have remained relatively flat. Decades of anti-narcotics enforcement have also made drug trafficking a closely scrutinized criminal enterprise, while illegal gold mining has received far less attention. Criminal organizations follow profit, and in Colombia and Peru, illegal gold now generates more money for criminal groups than cocaine.
Gold also offers an advantage that cocaine never could. There is no legitimate market for cocaine, but there is an enormous global market for gold. Illicit gold can be laundered near the mine through forged paperwork or false identities. Once given an apparently legitimate origin, it is difficult – though certainly not impossible — for refiners, traders, financial institutions, and consumers to distinguish it from legally mined gold.
Illegal gold mining represents an existential threat not only to the region’s forests, but also to the people and communities who depend on them, driving deforestation and poisoning rivers with toxic mercury. But focusing only on the environmental destruction caused by illegal mining misses the broader criminal enterprise. Once illicit gold reaches international markets, its transactions increasingly touch the formal banking system, and the United States is particularly exposed. We are the single largest destination for Colombian gold exports, while the Colombian government estimates that 80% of the country’s gold-related exports have an illegal or criminal origin.
If the United States wants to disrupt this trade, it needs stronger tools to target the financial infrastructure that makes it profitable.
Congress should start by making transnational illegal gold mining an underlying, or predicate, offense for money laundering. Money laundering prosecutions generally require authorities to connect illicit proceeds to specified underlying crimes, and transnational illegal gold mining is not currently included. Adding it would give investigators and prosecutors stronger tools to follow the proceeds and pursue the networks that facilitate and profit from this multi-billion dollar trade.
Congress should also close a glaring vulnerability at our borders. Travelers carrying more than $10,000 in cash into or out of the United States must report it, but gold bars do not face a comparable requirement. Criminal networks can therefore move enormous amounts of value across borders in a compact and portable commodity without triggering the same reporting requirement that applies to cash. Requiring travelers to report high-value gold the same way they do cash would give law enforcement greater visibility into suspicious cross-border movements.
Those tools also depend on investigators being able to identify the people behind the companies moving illicit proceeds. FACT Coalition research found shell and front companies to be the most common method identified for moving dirty gold and laundering illegal mining profits in the South American cases examined. Strong beneficial ownership reporting requirements are therefore an important part of combating the illegal gold trade.
Yet the United States recently moved in the opposite direction. In August 2026, the Treasury Department finalized a rule exempting U.S. companies and individuals from reporting their true owners under the Corporate Transparency Act, unlawfully gutting the law and taking a crucial investigative tool out of the hands of law enforcement. At a time when criminal organizations are becoming more sophisticated at moving illicit proceeds through legitimate markets, the United States needs to at least keep pace, closing long-standing financial loopholes that facilitate these crimes. Treasury should rescind this rule.
Criminal organizations have already recognized that the economics of their business are changing. Our response needs to change with them. After decades of learning how to follow the drugs, the United States now needs the tools to follow the gold, the companies moving it, and ultimately, the money behind it.