THE 592 GUARDIAN♦INVESTIGATIVE REPORT♦ JUNE 2026

EXPORTING ECOCIDE

How Brazil’s Gold-Laundering Fraud Is Crossing Into the Guiana Shield — A Comparative Assessment of Guyana’s Exposure Prepared for the Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In June 2026, Greenpeace Brazil published Gold Laundering in the Amazon: Anatomy of a Fraud, a forensic account of how Brazil’s Garimpo Permit regime has been converted into a laundering instrument for gold stolen from Indigenous Lands and Conservation Units. Of 187 mining tenements the organization examined across Pará, Mato Grosso, and Rondônia, 98 showed irregularities consistent with fraud, together accounting for 25.3 tons of gold worth an estimated R$18.4 billion. The pattern Greenpeace documented was not a single bad actor but a structural feature of the permitting system itself: permits granted without independent geological verification, production volumes accepted on the word of the permit holder, and buyers shielded for a decade by a legal presumption of good faith that Brazil’s Supreme Court only struck down in 2025.

This assessment argues that the same structural conditions are already present in Guyana, and that Guyana is not a hypothetical extension of Brazil’s problem but a documented destination for it. The Guiana Shield is a single contiguous goldfield split across several jurisdictions with wildly uneven enforcement; when Brazil tightens its grip on illegal mining, capital, equipment, and personnel move to whichever neighboring jurisdiction offers the path of least resistance.

The clearest current illustration is the Marudi mining district in Region Nine, where a Special Mining Permit issued to a cooperative that no longer legally exists continues to generate gold sales, and where a Brazilian national recently sentenced to over twenty-two years for organizing illegal mining inside Yanomami Indigenous Territory has been photographed with senior Guyanese officials.

This is a desk-based comparative assessment, built on public reporting, court records cited in the Brazilian and Guyanese press, regional research, and the Greenpeace report itself. It does not attempt the satellite-and-productivity audit Greenpeace conducted in Brazil, because that capability does not currently exist inside Guyanese civil society, and because the underlying GGMC and Guyana Gold Board declaration records such an audit would need are not realistically obtainable through Guyana’s domestic information-access channels — a constraint TIGI’s own experience with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative process illustrates directly.

That gap is the basis for this brief’s central recommendation: that TIGI formally invite Greenpeace’s gold-forensics team to extend its methodology to Guyana’s highest-risk permits, beginning with Marudi.

THE BRAZILIAN TEMPLATE: ANATOMY OF A FRAUD

Brazil’s Garimpo Permit, or Permissão de Lavra Garimpeira (PLG), was created in 1989 to bring small-scale, cooperative mining into a simplified legal regime. Over time, and especially after prior mineral-survey requirements were waived to speed the regularization of existing operations, the PLG became something else: a documentary shell. Because permit holders themselves declare how much gold a site is capable of producing, with no independent geological check, a PLG can certify almost any volume of gold as legitimately mined, regardless of what is actually happening on the ground.

Aircraft destroyed by Brazilians Inspectors

Greenpeace Brazil sorted the 98 irregular permits it found into two categories. Ghost garimpo mines, just under a third of the irregular permits but nearly half the declared tonnage, showed no mining activity whatsoever on satellite imagery or flyover — meaning the permit existed purely to supply a paper trail for gold mined somewhere else entirely, including inside Indigenous Lands.

Industrial-scale garimpo operations, the larger category by count, involved multiple permits held by the same cooperative or by linked titleholders, combined into operations far beyond the legal size limit for small-scale mining, with no visible boundary between tenements on the ground.

The buying side of this system was protected for a decade by a 2013 law presuming the legality and good faith of brokers who bought gold from PLG holders, provided the seller supplied basic paperwork. Brazil’s Supreme Court declared that presumption unconstitutional in March 2025, after finding it had functioned as a shield for exactly the laundering pattern Greenpeace later documented. Federal audit bodies reached similar conclusions: a 2025 audit found the national mining agency was not exercising its legal authority to require geological surveys, and a 2022 audit had already found the agency failed to enforce even basic documentation standards. Greenpeace’s recommendation to Brazilian regulators was correspondingly narrow and specific — require the surveys the law already allows for, and cancel permits that have generated royalty payments with no corresponding evidence of mining.

ONE GOLDFIELD, SEVERAL JURISDICTIONS: THE LEAKAGE PROBLEM

“The Guiana Shield does not respect the borders drawn across it. The same greenstone geology that produces gold in Pará and Roraima continues, structurally uninterrupted, through Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, and the population of small-scale miners working it has moved across those borders for over a century, following wherever enforcement is weakest and prices are highest.”

This is not speculation; it is measured. A 2025 study using deep-learning analysis of satellite imagery across Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana found a 995 percent increase in the number of active mine sites and a 1,411 percent increase in total mined area between 1995 and 2024 — figures that track closely with the 1,100 percent expansion of garimpo area Greenpeace documented across the Brazilian Amazon over a similar period.

Peer-reviewed research on the region’s deforestation patterns has identified the underlying mechanism directly: tighter enforcement in one Guiana Shield jurisdiction correlates with reduced mining-driven deforestation there, and a corresponding rise next door. French Guiana’s repression campaign after 2008 is the clearest documented case; Suriname and Guyana absorbed much of what it displaced.

Brazil has just run a larger version of the same experiment. Military and federal police operations against illegal mining inside Yanomami Indigenous Territory pushed garimpeiro capital and labor into Venezuela and Guyana, a migration regional security researchers already describe as established fact rather than future risk. Guyana has hosted large populations of Brazilian miners before, with one historical estimate placing an enclave in the tens of thousands at the turn of the millennium during an earlier crackdown cycle in Venezuela.

“What is different this time is the scale of Guyana’s own gold sector, the volume of capital now attached to it, and the fact that the people arriving are not only artisanal miners displaced by enforcement but, in at least one documented case, the organizers of large-scale criminal operations themselves.”

CASE STUDY: THE PERMIT THAT OUTLIVED ITS HOLDER

Mazoa Hill, in the Marudi mining district of Region Nine, is the clearest illustration available of how Brazil’s fraud pattern would look transplanted into Guyana’s permitting architecture.

Rodrigo de Mello with Min. Bharrat

In 2021, an agreement gave the Rupununi Miners Association Cooperative Society a Special Mining Permit covering a 400-hectare section inside a larger concession held by the Canadian company Golden Shield Resources, through its subsidiary Aurous Guyana. In May 2023, Guyana’s Ministry of Labour cancelled the RMA Cooperative’s registration following an inquiry under the Co-operative Societies ActAccording to reporting in March 2026, mining at Mazoa Hill has continued since, under a permit issued to a legal entity that, on paper, no longer exists. The Rupununi Miners Association disputes that this represents any irregularity, maintaining that operations continue under proper authorisation despite what it describes as administrative restructuring.

This is functionally the same defect Greenpeace identified in its ghost garimpo mine category: a licensing instrument detached from the legal or physical reality it is supposed to certify.

The difference is that Brazil’s ghost permits were typically disconnected from mining activity on the ground; Guyana’s case at Mazoa Hill is disconnected from the legal existence of the permit holder itself — arguably a starker version of the same regulatory failure.

Bruna Mello- sister of Rodrigo making payments to GGMC

The dispute over what is actually leaving the site has become public and unresolved. Opposition parliamentarians who visited Region Nine in early 2026 alleged that gold worth millions of US dollars is leaving Marudi daily; the GGMC’s Commissioner has publicly rejected claims of large-scale smuggling as lacking technical credibility, while the Rupununi Miners Association has called allegations of foreign control and illegal airstrips unsubstantiated.

Access to the site itself is restricted to those who comply with entry requirements set by the miners’ association, which means the dispute cannot currently be resolved by anyone simply going to look.

None of this is happening in a vacuum for the people who live there. Wapichan communities raised concerns about the original Marudi mining deal as early as 2021 and 2022, when a UN Special Rapporteur communication to Golden Shield Resources noted that affected Indigenous communities appeared to have been consulted only after the mining agreement had already been signed — a sequence inconsistent with international free, prior and informed consent standards.

Brazilian fugitive ,PPP benefactor ?

Subsequent testing identified Parabara village, the community closest to Marudi Mountain, as carrying the highest mercury contamination levels recorded among Indigenous communities studied in the region — a Guyanese parallel to the Fiocruz findings Greenpeace cites from the Munduruku Indigenous Land in Brazil, where the great majority of pregnant women tested carried mercury above safe thresholds.

THE CATARATAS VECTOR: WHEN THE RECORD CROSSES THE BORDER TOO

What makes Marudi more than a regulatory curiosity is the presence there, as recently as March 2026, of Rodrigo Martins de Mello, a Brazilian national known as Rodrigo Cataratas. A Brazilian federal court sentenced him in February 2026 to more than twenty-two years in prison for leading a criminal organisation that mined illegally inside Yanomami Indigenous Territory — the same protected territory Greenpeace’s Brazil report uses repeatedly to illustrate the human and environmental cost of garimpo expansion. Court documents cited in Guyanese press coverage describe a logistics network of at least twenty-three aircraft used to move miners, fuel, supplies, and extracted minerals into and out of Indigenous land.

de Mello with Minister Anand Persaud while a fugitive in Brazil

Images circulating in early 2026 showed Cataratas alongside senior Guyanese government officials. The South Rupununi District Council, convening a meeting with the GGMC and the Rupununi Miners Association on 14 March, was told by miners present that Cataratas had been operating in the Marudi area and was assured he was no longer there. No independent confirmation of his departure has been offered. Toshaos at that meeting raised explicit concern about the prospect of Brazil’s criminal mining networks establishing themselves in the South Rupununi — language that suggests local Indigenous leadership already understands what this assessment is arguing in writing: that the same operators, not merely the same methods, can move between jurisdictions faster than oversight bodies can track them.

THE VERIFICATION GAP: WHY GUYANA CANNOT ANSWER ITS OWN QUESTION

Guyana’s gold-buying architecture differs from Brazil’s on paper. Where Brazil relied on numerous private broker-dealers shielded by a statutory presumption of good faith.

Guyana centralizes purchase through a single statutory buyer: under the Guyana Gold Board Act, no one may sell or buy gold from anyone other than the Board or its licensed agents. In principle, a monopsony buyer should be easier to audit than a fragmented private market.

In practice, the underlying vulnerability is the same one Greenpeace identified in Brazil. Declared origin and declared volume are accepted at the point of sale without independent geological verification against the size and history of the claim or permit involved. This is not a new concern for Guyana’s gold sector: a Ministry of Finance-linked audit document has previously recorded an episode in which gold believed to have originated in Guyana surfaced in Curaçao accompanied by electronic documentation from Guyanese sources, with the audit noting that recommended follow-up investigation did not appear to have been pursued by the responsible agencies.

The mechanism Greenpeace calls the second presumption of good faith, in other words, has a Guyanese precedent.

What Guyana currently lacks is the tool Greenpeace built to resolve exactly this kind of dispute: a productivity benchmark, expressed as gold declared per hectare of permitted area, cross-checked against satellite imagery and flyover validation, capable of distinguishing a permit that is producing the gold it declares from one that is laundering gold mined elsewhere. Applied to the live dispute over Marudi’s output, that methodology would not need access to contested domestic paperwork at all; it works from publicly available satellite data and the declared boundaries of the permit itself — precisely why it is the right tool for a jurisdiction where the underlying GGMC and GGB declaration records are not realistically obtainable through domestic information-access channels.

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS: GYEITI’S CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Brazil’s federal audit bodies found that the agency responsible for granting and policing PLGs was not exercising the oversight authority the law already gave it. Guyana’s parallel institution for extractive-sector transparency, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative process, has its own documented capture problem. In November 2025, TIGI publicly disputed the government’s appointment of a Civil Society Convenor for Guyana’s EITI process on the grounds that the appointee himself held seventeen mining licenses across roughly nineteen thousand five hundred acres in the Cuyuni Mining District, an arrangement TIGI characterized as incompatible with the independent civil-society oversight role the position is meant to perform.

Ecocide in real-time

The detail matters because it answers, in advance, an obvious objection to this assessment’s central recommendation

Guyana cannot simply ask its own oversight architecture to investigate itself. By TIGI’s own public account, the body specifically designed to give civil society an independent check on extractive-sector data is, at present, occupied by an extractive-sector concession holder

WHY THIS NEEDS GREENPEACE

Greenpeace Brazil did not produce an opinion about gold laundering in the Amazon; it produced a method. Royalty declarations benchmarked against permit area, cross-checked with satellite mosaics and validation flyovers, turned a contested political argument about smuggling into a falsifiable, hectare-by-hectare claim about what a piece of land could plausibly have produced. That method does not depend on subpoena power, or access to a mine site, or on cooperation from the agency being investigated. It depends on satellite coverage and public permit boundaries, both of which already exist for Guyana.

TIGI brings what Greenpeace’s Brazil team cannot supply on its own: domestic legitimacy, an anti-corruption mandate dating back to 2010 as Transparency International’s accredited national chapter, and existing relationships with the Indigenous representative bodies whose communities are living with the consequences at Marudi. Greenpeace brings the remote-sensing and forensic-accounting capacity that no Guyanese civil society organization currently has in-house, built and tested on a directly comparable case just across the border.

Neither organization can close Guyana’s verification gap alone. Together, they could turn Marudi from a dispute between an opposition party and a government commissioner into an independently documented fact.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1.The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission should require verified production estimates or prior geological survey before granting or renewing Special Mining Permits and small-scale claims, rather than accepting self-declared productive potential — mirroring the authority Greenpeace recommended Brazil’s National Mining Agency actually use.

2.An independent body, ideally the Office of the Auditor General working with external technical support, should review permits and Special Mining Permits generating Guyana Gold Board declarations with no verifiable corresponding production, beginning with the Mazoa Hill SMP tied to a dissolved cooperative.

3.GYEITI’s Civil Society Convenor role should carry an enforceable conflict-of-interest bar against active concession holders, restoring the independent verification function the position was created to provide

4.TIGI should formally invite Greenpeace’s Brazil-based gold-forensics team to extend its satellite-and-productivity methodology to Guyana’s highest-risk permits, starting with Marudi/Mazoa Hill, in partnership with the South Rupununi District Council and the Amerindian Peoples Association.

5.Guyana should pursue an independent, geochemically or satellite-grounded traceability mechanism for its gold sector, since self-certification by permit holders and a single statutory buyer of last resort cannot, on their own, substitute for ground-truthed verification.

Note on sourcing: this assessment is a desk-based comparative analysis drawing on public reporting, court records as cited in the press, NGO and academic studies, and the Greenpeace Brazil report. Claims still disputed by named parties — including the scale of gold leaving Marudi and the current whereabouts of Rodrigo Martins de Mello — are presented as disputed, not as established fact, and are flagged as such in the text and footnotes above.

End.