Almost three years ago, I became obsessed with gold.
I’d been watching the price shoot up for two decades. By December of 2023, gold was an eye-watering $2,000 an ounce, inflated by the anxiety of wealthy investors and governments. They worried about terrorist attacks and wars and financial instability and, lately, disease. Gold, they reasoned, would hold its value if stocks and bonds and dollars lost theirs.
At the same time, I’d been reading about illegal gold mining devastating the Sahel across Africa and the Amazon rainforest. It was fueling terrorist attacks and wars and financial instability and lately, researchers were learning, disease.
I’ve spent much of my career writing about money and power, and the intersection of great wealth and deep poverty. I’m fascinated by the consequences of actions that wealthy institutions take to become wealthier. And I’m always looking for stories about how the choices made in rich countries affect people in poor ones. So I told my editor, Matt Apuzzo, that during this price run-up, I wanted to report on gold mining.
He was skeptical and asked what turned out to be the big question: Is the hoarding of gold to avoid instability and violence actually creating more instability and violence?
If banks and the U.S. government — the biggest, most credible suppliers of gold to investors — are buying the same gold that originates with, say, a terrorist group, he said, we would have a story.
By the end of that day, I was pretty sure that we would not have a story.
Big companies that sell gold to investors in the United States and Europe have seemingly ironclad policies to avoid buying gold that was criminally mined. And federal law requires America’s most reputable gold seller, the United States Mint, to use only U.S.-mined gold for its investor-grade coins. A Mint spokesman told me early in my reporting that it buys only U.S. gold.
I asked the U.S. Mint for a list of its gold suppliers and ran them through a shipping-records database. I found that the suppliers were importing, literally, tons of foreign gold. And when I called them, they told me they melt all that gold together, sometimes with U.S. gold, to make bars that the U.S. Mint eventually buys.
Was the Mint violating the law? After over a year of work and more calls, more trade records and a detour into four decades of legislative history, I figured out what was going on. It wasn’t complicated: The U.S. Mint buys foreign gold and claims that, as far as the law is concerned, it comes from the United States.
For decades, Mint leaders had been using logical gymnastics to call foreign gold American. They bought supplies originating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, from Mexican pawn shops and through South American brokers. A 2024 federal watchdog report said the Mint had stopped asking suppliers about gold origins more than 20 years earlier.
I decided to trace this gold back to at least one of its sources.
Gold was nearing $3,000 an ounce when I started making calls in late 2024. One was to a Texas middleman who said his two biggest gold clients were suppliers for the U.S. Mint. Trade records showed he imported gold from a Colombian company with a checkered legal history.
So I flew to Medellín with my colleagues Simón Posada and Federico Rios to figure out where this gold originates.
We ended up in Caucasia, a gold boomtown controlled by the Clan del Golfo, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. The Clan sells drugs and gold, and uses violence to hold onto its territory.
Between the three of us, we traveled there four times over the past year; by the third trip, gold had surpassed $5,000 an ounce.
Caucasia’s gold boom is obvious in nightclubs and in the shops that sell shiny new excavators for mining. Downtown we saw men loading bags of gold into a Brinks truck while armed guards stood by.
We met all sorts of gold-industry figures in and around the town — brokers, shovel-and-pan miners and those with a huge company that vacuums up river sediment to legally extract gold. We went to legal mines, illegal mines and one industrialized operation whose legality wasn’t clear to anyone on the premises.
We met the head of a miners’ union whose colleague had just been killed, and a black-market dealer who advertised his business with Instagram videos.
We ate lots of beef (a local specialty) and few vegetables (not a local specialty).
Eventually a contact took us to a place called La Mandinga. It’s a government-owned cattle ranch where illegal miners tear up the earth with high-pressure hoses. They told us that the Clan ran the place, charging them a monthly fee to mine the land. The miners sell their gold to traders who also pay the Clan. Traders told us they sell the gold to the exporter, who sends it to Texas.
The U.S. Mint blamed its suppliers. The suppliers told me they rely on the Texan middleman to keep out illegal gold. The Texan said he relies on a guy in Mexico to do the same. After I told them what I found, they all said they stopped receiving the Colombian gold.
But the U.S. Treasury, which overseas the Mint, denied there was any systemic problem. The Treasury’s stance is that its practice of buying foreign gold for investor coins does not violate the law, a spokeswoman said.
For years, the Mint had been using a loose definition for U.S. gold, saying that foreign gold could count if it was supplied to the Mint by a company that had bought an offsetting quantity of U.S. gold. A federal watchdog report in 2024 said the Mint stopped enforcing that requirement more than 20 years ago.
After we presented our findings, a Treasury spokeswoman said the department is investigating the Mint’s gold procurement and has tightened its sourcing standards to make sure the United States is the “primary” source of the gold the mint buys.