The Federal Police (PF) seized, since the Ouro Alvo Program began, between 2019 and June 2022, approximately 733 kg of gold in operations carried out by Brazil to combat mining and illegal gold extraction, mainly in the north of Mato Grosso. and in Pará.
It all started with the operations that took place in clandestine mining in preservation areas and indigenous lands that resulted in the seizure of gold, where investigators sought to know the origin of the ore.
It was from these questions that the Technical-Scientific Directorate of the Federal Police in Brasília decided to set up the “Ouroteca”, a kind of library that could gather the various varieties of gold existing in Brazil and in part of South America.
With the “Ouroteca”, the police can map where the seized gold was extracted from. It is also possible to prevent illegal extraction of the precious metal, as well as help solve investigations.
This knowledge about the gold extraction site can be revealed with the use of reagents, microscopes and through equipment that uses the x-ray spectrum, which shows the shape of the grains and the composition of the minerals that make up the alloy, which even after purification and cast into a bar, it retains its identity.
According to the Coordinator of the Ouro Alvo Program, Federal Criminal Expert, Ricardo Moraes, after this work, “depending on the shape of the gold, we can find out if it came from the bottom of a river, if it was taken from a ravine or even if came from recycled jewelry.” Even, added Moraes, with these analyzes it is possible to answer several questions and fight crime at its root.
The laboratory uses the most modern equipment to identify gold and will serve all the PF superintendencies, as well as other institutions in the country that request the services of the “Ouroteca”.
The material seized by the police in the country that needs further clarification arrives at the laboratory in Brasília, sealed, with all the post-action identifications. After the studies are done, the gold is returned to the police authority.
The head of the Environmental Forensics Sector and federal criminal expert, Erich Adam, highlights that the idea is to bring together samples from Ouroteca with samples from other countries that pass through the country. After all, gold does not have an identity card, with the origin. This demands a lot of work from forensic analysis in the laboratory. From this, it is possible to identify the origin of the material.
OuroTeca should expand its gold samples and be extended with more samples from Latin America. This is because the illegal extraction of gold fuels organized crime and, with it, fuels other crimes, such as money laundering, human trafficking and slave labor.
Source: CNN Brasil
