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Article

30 May 2017

Author:
Peru Support Group

Peru: Court documents in USA reveal human rights abuses linked to ‘illegal’ gold mining, and to former employee of NTR gold refinery

“Affidavit brings new insights into illegal corporate gold trading”

…Illegal gold production is thought to constitute about 30% of Peru’s total gold production. This activity is where workers suffer the most horrendous health and safety conditions, often in conditions near to slavery. It is also where people suffer other forms of exploitation, such as prostitution. See for example, PSG article....The other end of the gold mining saga – and crucial to its control - is how illegal gold gets fed into the international gold market, in the process laundering it into ‘clean’ gold…Insight Crime has now published a report on a further pending legal case in the US judicial system of the District Court for the Southern District of Miami. Published in full is the 30-page affidavit of Colberd Almeida, special agent for Homeland Security, dated 10 March 2017. It concerns the case being brought against Juan P Granda, 'aka flecha', and two former colleagues. Granda, who has an Ecuadorian passport, worked for the Dallas-based metal refining company NTR (he has since been sacked) and, along with his two colleagues, is being charged with money laundering… The charge centres on the role that illegal gold and drugs play in this activity…The document is clear on the human rights dimensions of this illegal activity. It describes and cross references to the many accounts of abuse, prostitution and what is effectively slavery, the results of people's desperation and the total lack of any regulation (p3).  The environmental abuse, which the delegation has hopefully observed and been impressed by, damages livelihoods both for this and future generations, and opens the way to other forms of abuse…