PART I· GOLD, CRIME AND THE CUYUNÍ

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

PART I· GOLD, CRIME AND THE CUYUNÍ

THE CUYUNÍ MACHINE

How Venezuela’s Criminal Gold Economy Crossed Into Guyana

OPINION BY: The 592 Guardian

Nicolás Maduro is gone. Operation Absolute Resolve saw to that in January, when US forces removed the man who had ruled Venezuela through fifteen years of expropriation, hyperinflation, and increasingly naked criminal governance. What Absolute Resolve did not remove, and was arguably never designed to remove, is the machine Maduro built to keep himself and his generals solvent while the rest of the Venezuelan economy collapsed around them: the gold economy of the Orinoco Mining Arc.

That machine is still running. It has simply found a new, more convenient source of supply — and increasingly, that source is Guyana.

This is not a story about a war on the other side of a border that Guyana happens to share. It is a story about a border that has become, in the words of one regional judicial official close to trafficking investigations in the tri-border zone, “a well-oiled machine” — one with “long-standing political backing, armed force and the ability to move seamlessly across the countries of the region.” Guyanese gold is moving into that machine. Guyanese cocaine is moving alongside it. And the state institutions built to notice either flow have, so far, mostly not.

A MARKET TOO BIG TO DIE WITH ONE MAN

Venezuela’s gold sector was generating an estimated US$2.2 billion a year by 2025, a financial lifeline for a state whose oil revenue had been gutted by mismanagement, underinvestment and sanctions. That revenue did not depend on Maduro personally. It depended on the Orinoco Mining Arc— the 112,000-square-kilometre zone created in 2016, ostensibly to formalize mining and attract foreign capital, which instead became a jointly-run enterprise of senior military officers, Colombian guerrilla factions and Venezuela’s most violent prison-born crime syndicate, Tren de Aragua.

The arrangement was straightforward and durable: the military and political establishment provided protection and looked away; armed groups collected extortion taxes from miners and enforced order with their own courts and their own punishments; everyone with a stake in the system had reason to keep it running regardless of who occupied the Miraflores Palace. Acting president Delcy Rodríguez; herself under EU travel sanctions — was reported in 2020 to have personally moved over US$68 million in gold bars to Spain, which gives some sense of how far up the chain the arrangement reached.

None of the men who built or benefited from that system left with Maduro. Tren de Aragua, designated a foreign terrorist organization by the US in February 2025, is named explicitly in the pending US Legal Gold and Mining Partnership Act now moving through the Senate. So are the Colombian guerrilla group ELN and the broader network of Venezuelan sindicatos — armed collectives such as Las Claritas, led by Tren de Aragua founding figure Yohan “Johan Petrica” Romero, which taxes miners and traders across Bolívar state and has survived both government offensives and rival incursions by leaning on its old relationship with Chavista power structures.

That is the point analysts keep making and that Guyanese officials keep underplaying: removing Maduro removes a figurehead, not an economy. If political uncertainty in Caracas increases, the incentive for these groups to fight over territory rises. If a new protection arrangement stabilizes instead, they simply consolidate and intensify what they were already doing. Either way, the gold still has to move — and increasingly, it is Guyana it moves through, and increasingly, from.

THE REVERSAL: GOLD NOW FLOWS OUT OF GUYANA, NOT IN

For years, the accepted wisdom along the border was that Venezuelan gold moved into Guyana — smuggled across to evade the sanctions regime imposed on Caracas since 2018, laundered through Guyanese buying houses and export documentation, and shipped onward with a paper trail scrubbed clean of its origin. That pattern has inverted.

An investigative report published in March 2026 by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) authored by Marcena Hunter, Gabriel Funari and Sophia Pickles — documents Guyana as a source of gold now flowing into Venezuela, not merely a laundering point for gold flowing out of it. Venezuelan military generals, the report finds, are paying an 8 percent premium above international market prices to Guyanese traffickers willing to sell across the border; a margin wide enough to outbid Guyana’s own legal domestic gold-buying market and pull supply directly out of the formal chain.

“Illicit gold from Brazil and Guyana is increasingly moving into Venezuela, where military buyers are prepared to pay a premium.”

— GI-TOC, “Shifting Amazon Gold Flows” (March 2026)

The mechanics are specific enough to map. Gold moves by road from Lethem, on the Guyana-Brazil border, to Boa Vista in the Brazilian state of Roraima, which the GI-TOC report identifies as the region’s primary aggregation hub — the point where Guyanese and Brazilian gold are pooled together before being trucked or flown onward into Venezuela. Private airstrips, including ones inside Guyana, are used to move consignments of 20 to 100 kilograms at a time, a volume large enough to matter and small enough to stay below the threshold that tends to trigger community-level notice or law-enforcement attention. When one border tightens, the report notes, the flow simply displaces to a softer one — and the Guyana-Venezuela border, running along the Cuyuní River through the disputed Essequibo region Venezuela itself claims, is among the softest available.

The Cuyuní corridor is not merely a transit route. Indigenous leaders in the area report that armed actors — some tied to sindicato networks, some to guerrilla factions like the ELN operating out of the Venezuelan town of San Martín de Turumbang, just across the river from Guyana’s Eteringbang; now collect payment from people heading upriver into mining areas on both the Guyanese and Venezuelan sides. That is a rent extracted on Guyanese soil, or immediately adjacent to it, by armed groups answering to no Guyanese authority. Guyana Defence Force patrols along the river have twice this year come under fire from the Venezuelan bank — once in May, and once in an earlier incident a pattern of hostile contact that sits uneasily alongside official framing of the border as a normal, if disputed, frontier.

The financial engineering layered on top is, if anything, more advanced than the physical smuggling. The GI-TOC report documents a “crypto-for-gold” mechanism in which gold moving out of Guyana is exchanged for Tether, the US dollar-pegged stablecoin, allowing Venezuelan military buyers and criminal brokers to settle instantly and opaquely, outside the reach of Guyana’s own financial-intelligence apparatus. From there the gold’s trail goes cold: GI-TOC cites evidence of onward export to Turkey, Iran and China, or retention as an undeclared reserve by the same military officials who kept their positions through Absolute Resolve.

THE SAME CORRIDOR, A SECOND COMMODITY

Guyana’s gold problem and Guyana’s drug problem are not two stories. They are the same geography, the same infrastructure, and increasingly the same operators, running two commodities through one set of rivers, airstrips and ports.

US Treasury sanctions announced against Guyanese trafficker Paul Daby Jr. in mid-2025 did not describe a narcotics operation with a side interest in gold — they described a single logistics network. Daby Jr. was sanctioned for coordinating multi-ton cocaine shipments from Colombia and Venezuela by aircraft, using illegal airstrips inside Guyana, and concealing loads in shipping containers moving out of Guyanese and Surinamese ports. The same Treasury notice names him as separately involved in smuggling illegal gold out of Guyana by sea. One network, two exports, the same weak points:

Porous land borders, under-monitored ports, remote airstrips and, as the US State Department’s own assessment has repeatedly noted, corruption that reaches into the institutions meant to stop it.

The narcotics volumes moving through Guyana have grown sharply enough to draw their own warnings from regional analysts. Guyanese authorities seized just 85 kilograms of cocaine in 2023 and 236 kilograms the following year — modest totals that sit oddly alongside the country’s role in a 4.4-ton seizure in August 2024 and a 2.4-ton seizure from a semi-submersible 150 miles off the Guyanese coast, both achieved only with direct US Drug Enforcement Administration involvement rather than through independent Guyanese detection. Analysts tracking the region now argue explicitly that US military pressure on Venezuela is displacing trafficking routes rather than closing them, and that Guyana — with new seaports, rapid economic growth and exactly the infrastructural gaps traffickers have exploited for a decade — is the most attractive place for that displaced traffic to land. Cocaine shipments traced back to Guyanese ports have already turned up in Trinidad, in Antwerp, and as far away as West Africa, where GI-TOC researchers have specifically flagged an uptick in cocaine arriving from Guyana and Suriname since 2023.

The through-line is not coincidence. It is a single regional criminal economy — Colombian and Venezuelan supply, Guyanese and Surinamese transit infrastructure, sindicato and guerrilla enforcement on the ground, and a financial system agile enough to launder either gold or cocaine proceeds through the same crypto and shell-company channels; that has simply expanded to fill the space Guyana’s growth has opened up.

Gold and cocaine are not competing stories for space in this newsroom. They are one story about what happens to a small, resource-rich, institutionally thin state sitting next to a collapsing one.

WHAT GEORGETOWN HAS SAID, AND WHAT IT HAS NOT DONE

President Ali has not been silent on this. Speaking alongside US Ambassador Nicole Theriot at an event hosted at the American embassy in Georgetown, Ali stated that Guyana is “putting enormous resources into ensuring that the threat of illicit gold smuggling that can help empower or safeguard undemocratic forces is uprooted,” and separately claimed Venezuela was being forced to spend significant resources cracking down on gold smuggled in the other direction — a claim Caracas rejected outright, with the Maduro-era foreign ministry accusing Ali of “rendering accounts to his true masters” for making the remarks from inside the US embassy rather than from a Guyanese platform. Ambassador Theriot, for her part, praised US-Guyana security cooperation as “the strongest it has ever been.”

That exchange, whatever else it reveals about the diplomatic temperature between Georgetown and Caracas, revealed something else worth noting: a public claim of enormous resources being committed, made at a friendly embassy event, with no accompanying seizure figures, no named enforcement operation, and no indication of what This publication has documented the pattern before, across noise-nuisance enforcement, AI-misinformation penalties and hinterland airline fares alike: an announcement calibrated to the audience in the room, unaccompanied by the institutional follow-through that would make it verifiable. Cross-border criminal gold flows, GDF soldiers taking fire from across the river, and a documented Guyanese role in hemispheric cocaine trafficking are not the kind of threat that responds to a press-conference commitment. They respond to seizure data, prosecutions, and the kind of institutional capacity Guyana has shown, in sector after sector this publication has covered, that it does not yet reliably have.

The pending US Legal Gold and Mining Partnership Act offers Guyana a genuine opening — improved intelligence-sharing, stronger supply-chain oversight, collaboration with producer nations willing to be genuine partners rather than convenient transit points.

Whether Georgetown treats that opening as a chance to build real capacity, or as another occasion for a press conference at the embassy, is the question this series will keep asking as it continues.

Part Two of this series will examine the institutional response — or the absence of one — inside Guyana’s own regulatory and law-enforcement architecture.

SOURCES

Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, “Illicit Gold Trafficking to Venezuela and the Implications of US Action” (March 2026) and “Shifting Amazon Gold Flows” report, as reported by Kaieteur News (April 5, 2026); InSight Crime, “A Golden Opportunity: Maduro and Venezuelan Miners Target Essequibo”; InSight Crime, “Amid US Strikes, Booming Guyana Could Become Drug Trafficking Hub” (March 2026); International Crisis Group, “A Curse of Gold: Mining and Violence in Venezuela’s South”; US Department of the Treasury/OFAC sanctions notice on Paul Daby Jr. and Randolph Duncan networks; US State Department International Narcotics Control Strategy Report; Venezuelanalysis; Wikipedia “2026 in Guyana” chronology of Cuyuní River incidents.