By Michael Swan and Yone Simidzu, special to Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada
Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada has had a decades-long engagement with Brazil. Our support has helped our partners stand with, empower and accompany many Indigenous communities, especially in the Amazon region, who struggle to assert their rights to land, livelihoods and a healthy environment.
To help Canadians better understand the intricacies and complexities of the challenges that Indigenous communities face, the award-winning journalist couple Michael Swan and Yone Simidzu went on a mission to Brazil earlier this year. During his long stint as associate editor of The Catholic Register, Swan wrote extensively about our work. Simidzu, who is originally from Brazil, works as a Portuguese translator in Toronto.
The powerful testimonies and photos that Swan and Simidzu gathered in Brazil have appeared in the America magazine and been exhibited and presented across Ontario. The first instalment of their Notes from Brazil was published here on August 9, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. The remaining parts will be published on the next two Fridays of this month.
Gold is trading near record highs, north of US$2,400 per troy ounce, but the cost to the Yanomami is far greater.
In its April 2024 study, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil’s leading public health research institute, found 84 per cent of group of 293 Yanomami living along the Mucajai River had dangerously high levels of mercury in their bodies and 10 per cent had mercury in their bodies at three times the level the World Health Organization deems dangerous.
At 2 micrograms per gram―the level found in 84 per cent of the sample―the heavy metal can impair cognitive function, memory, attention and physical coordination. It can also result in blindness and damaged hearing and speech. Since the 1960s, it has been known as Minamata Disease. Passed through the placenta to the foetus, it can cause birth defects including microcephaly, cerebral damage and symptoms similar to cerebral palsy. At six micrograms per gram―the level found in nearly 11 per cent of the study participants―the effects are more severe and more certain.
“Our children are born sick, our people die because of gold mining,” Dário Vitório Kopenawa, vice president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, told L’Osservatore Romano for an April 9, front-page feature (see in Italian) in the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper.
Researchers from the Ozwaldo Cruz Foundation found 55.2 per cent of Yanomami children have cognitive deficits and more than 30 per cent of Yanomami suffer from degenerative nerve diseases.
On April 11, 2024, Dário Kopenawa’s father, shaman and political leader Davi Kopenawa visited Pope Francis to ask for his help.
“I am not afraid of the white man, but I am very afraid of the machines that destroy the earth and bring down the trees and create ditches in the soil to extract minerals. I am afraid that this extractive activity will ruin our communities, rivers, health, our survival, and our own riches. I am worried about our future; the next generations will need the forest,” the elder Kopenawa told Vatican beat reporters in Rome after his papal audience.
Mining and misery in Brazil
Gold is the reason Yanomami have mercury in their systems. Wildcat miners, known as garimpeiros, have infected the rivers of Yanomami Indigenous Territory with mercury. The mercury has infected the fish. The fish have infected the Yanomami.
The garimpeiros, who numbered as many as 20,000 during a wild gold rush on Yanomami land, encouraged by former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, are financed by the drug kingpins of First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital), Brazil’s premier organized crime gang. Narco-garimpo is a new category in Brazil’s mining industry. It turns out gold is not just profitable; it’s an excellent way of washing drug money.
The negative effects of illegal mining on the Yanomami and their land go beyond even the dire consequences of mercury poisoning. Armed garimpeiros have intimidated entire communities, keeping them away from their traditional hunting grounds, destroying the rivers that provide Yanomami with fish and even keeping people from cultivating their gardens. During the Bolsonaro years (2018-2022), garimpeiros took over government health stations and confiscated medications meant for Yanomami. By January 2023, photos of starving Yanomami shocked the Brazilian population.
The Most Rev. Evaristo Spengler, Bishop of Roraima, told us the garimpeiro invasion was the responsibility of the government that encouraged it―and it amounted to genocide.
Tracing tainted gold
But what if the garimpeiros’ illegal gold couldn’t be exported and couldn’t be sold on international markets? It turns out lab tests can determine where gold was mined by matching trace elements in the gold with a geographic database. These lab tests are not required of gold exported from Brazil to Canada.
Under international law, as a signatory to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Canada has a duty to do what it can to reduce the risks of genocide even beyond its borders, Osgood Hall Law School professor and founder of the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project Shin Imai told us.
“Canada, then, as part of the international community has a responsibility to address genocide in Brazil,” Imai wrote in an email. “One of the ways for addressing that problem is testing for the origin of gold.”
The London Bullion Market Association operates a voluntary Responsible Sourcing program that captures large mining companies and gold refiners, encouraging them to report on the sources of gold they trade. The World Gold Council runs a similar voluntary reporting program that requires miners and refiners who are part of the program to obtain third party audits to ensure their gold is responsibly and legally sourced. Neither of these programs require miners or gold buyers to test their gold in a laboratory.
How and why Canada must protect communities in Brazil
Voluntary reporting measures aren’t the same as government regulation and they don’t reassure the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability (CNCA), which counts Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada in its membership.
“Canada must urgently put in place mandatory measures to ensure Canadian companies and supply chains are not causing or contributing to human rights and environmental violations,” CNCA coordinator Aidan Gilchrist-Blackwood told us.
Though the CNCA couldn’t comment about the effectiveness of mandated lab testing of all imported gold without first consulting members of the network, Gilchrist-Blackwood did say mandatory regulation would be consistent with the CNCA’s approach to Canada’s new supply chain reporting legislation. Signed into law in May of 2023, this legislation requires large companies to publicly report on the risks of forced labour, child labour and some other human rights violations in their supply chains. CNCA and Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada are lobbying for strengthened regulation around the new law.
“For this law to be effective in addressing these kinds of serious abuses in Canadian supply chains, it must: 1) require companies to prevent human rights violations; 2) help affected people outside Canada access remedy in Canadian courts; and 3) apply it to all human rights,” Gilchrist-Blackwood wrote in an email.
Several requests to Global Affairs Canada’s media line asking for comment went unanswered.
Canada imports 31.4 per cent of the gold Brazil exports. Canadian miners are the largest foreign presence in Brazil’s mining industry with at least 35 Toronto Stock Exchange- or Toronto Stock Exchange Venture-listed companies in production or exploring for mineral assets in different regions of the country. Vancouver’s Equinox Gold, listed on the TSX, owns four mines in Brazil that produced 296,800 ounces of gold in 2023. Lundin Mining, also in Vancouver and listed on the TSX, bought Yamana Gold in 2019 and now produces 60,000 ounces of gold a year in Brazil.
Canada can make difference in Brazil, but will it?
Canada’s dominant position in Brazilian mining means that Brazil would happily comply with a Canadian lab test requirement for their gold exports, said Francisco Alves, editorial director of Brasil Mineral, a magazine specialized in mining (see website in Portuguese).
“The gold industry in Brazil is concerned about the illegal extraction that is being done in Indigenous territories,” Alves said.
Legitimate, legal mining companies want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the narco-garimpeiros tearing up the Yanomami homeland, he said. “I believe that the majority will react positively [to mandatory lab testing], because most of the industrial gold producers in Brazil are listed on the Canadian stock exchange,” said Alves.
University of Sao Paulo professor and founder of the university’s Centre for Responsible Mining Giorgio de Tomi sees mandatory lab testing as a “feasible option,” but doubts it would capture much in the way of illegal gold.
“Canada buys gold from reputable sources and well-known traders. It is unlikely that these institutions take the risk of purchasing gold from unknown, artisanal miners. It may happen, but I find it unlikely,” he said.
But in Switzerland, where 70 per cent of the world’s gold is refined, industry watchers are not quite so confident.
“Hiding the origin of gold is a major issue,” said Christoph Wiedmer, co-director of the Society for Threatened Peoples, Switzerland.
Wiedmer’s research leads him to believe that dirty gold, blood gold, circulates in the legitimate gold market. India and China, the two largest markets for gold, have no interest in regulation and the Dubai gold souk is notorious for its indifference to the criminal origins of gold, he said.
“Gold is so valuable, so it is easy to smuggle, to cheat and to declare it wrongly,” Wiedmer said in an email from Bern. “Both Switzerland and Canada play an important role as buyers of gold from many places, including dirty origin.”
For lab tests that could trace gold to its geographic origin, laboratories would need a huge database of trace elements and their origins, said Wiedmer. But that’s the beauty of a mandatory testing regime.
“It would be a good idea to oblige gold importers to regularly do such tests and fill in at a central database,” Wiedmer said. “It might help to avoid Switzerland from importing genocide gold.”
Is Canada importing genocide gold? We don’t know. Nobody’s testing.
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