'Invisible gold': Justice orders physical tracking of cassiterite to block Amazon minerals from the global market - O GLOBO

Ten days after the revelations from the special series "Invisible Gold" by O GLOBO, which exposed how illegal cassiterite mining in the Amazon supplies global technology and even fashion giants without a trace, the Federal Court in Roraima has mandated unprecedented transparency regarding the transit of minerals illicitly extracted from the Yanomami Indigenous Land and the Campos Amazônicos National Park.

In a preliminary injunction as part of a R$1.7 billion civil lawsuit, the 1st Federal Civil Court of Roraima ordered White Solder, a metallurgy company, and the Cooperativa de Produtores de Estanho do Brasil (Coopertin) to immediately implement stringent tracking and accountability mechanisms. They are prohibited from purchasing raw materials without formal and geospatial proof of a legal origin. Cassiterite is the raw material found in nature from which pure tin is extracted after smelting and refining processes.

In practice, the decision signed by Federal Judge José Vinicius Pantaleão Gurgel do Amaral requires the companies to appoint compliance directors with legal responsibility to present the physical and geospatial tracking of over 12,000 tonnes of tin suspected of being laundered from the Yanomami Indigenous Land and the Campos Amazônicos National Park. They must prove batch by batch the origin of the Amazon's "black gold," or face a daily fine of R$50,000.

"For each batch acquired without proof of origin, the insertion of mineral of unknown provenance into the formal market becomes irreversible, with its traceability permanently diluted in the procurement process and conversion into exported product. In determining the causality of environmental damage, those who do, those who fail to do when they should, those who allow it, those who don't care if it happens, those who finance it, and those who benefit when others do, are all equivalent," highlighted Judge José Vinicius Pantaleão Gurgel do Amaral in the decision.

The court granted a 30-day deadline for White Solder to submit a detailed, batch-by-batch list of all cassiterite purchases since January 1, 2021. The report must include suppliers, CPF/CNPJ numbers, data, volumes, invoices, municipalities, and the declared mining processes of origin.

In the same 30-day period, Coopertin must present a nominal list of all its members, proving current mining titles, georeferenced polygons, and environmental licenses for the areas where they claim actual extraction occurs. If obligations are not met, the court has set a daily fine of R$50,000 per violation and R$20,000 per day of delay in report delivery, with an initial cap of R$5 million for each company, directed to the Defense Fund for Diffuse Rights.

One of the decision's most compelling points is the personal accountability of the senior management. The magistrate ordered White Solder and Coopertin to appoint, within 30 days, formally identified compliance directors or managers to the court. These executives will be personally liable, under the law, for the accuracy of the data and quarterly reports submitted to the Federal Court and the MPF.

"Immediate judicial control of the lawfulness of the ongoing operation chain is necessary to prevent evidence from degrading and the activity from continuing. The community cannot bear the cost of the convenient blindness of the formal links in the mining chain," the judge added.

The urgency of the judicial intervention is based on evidence collected by the MPF showing that the supply chain continues to operate at a rapid pace, even after the launch of Operation Forge of Hephaestus and the execution of search and seizure warrants at White Solder's headquarters in Ariquemes, Rondônia, visited by the O GLOBO report.

White Solder itself confirmed to the civil inquiry that it received 12,500 tonnes of cassiterite from Coopertin between 2022 and 2024. However, when pressed to prove the origin of this production, the cooperative declared removal volumes incompatible and lower than the sales recorded by the investigation, revealing the entity's continuous use as a "front" for laundering minerals from the "Pupunha" region in the Yanomami Indigenous Land and the Campos Amazônicos National Park.

The decision has direct implications for the supply chain of technology multinationals (like Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, Sony, and Philips), which have declared the Brazilian refinery as a certified tin supplier to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and are already the subject of a civil inquiry.

Additionally, the court has ordered the Union, the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (Funai), Ibama, and ICMBio to declare their interest in formally joining the process as active participants alongside the MPF.

Requests for the complete suspension of activities and immediate on-site audits were denied at this time to ensure the defendants' right to prior defense, but the decision already signals a landmark in the economic crackdown on the clandestine mining chain in the Amazon.

The O GLOBO report detailed how the mechanism used to "legitimize" the so-called "black gold" worked: cassiterite (an essential ore for extracting tin used in electronic solder) extracted within the Yanomami territory — in the region known as "Pupunha" — was falsely recorded by Coopertin as if it originated from regular mining by its members.

Identified as one of the largest producers and suppliers of tin and solders in the world, Brazil's White Solder, headquartered in Ribeirão Preto (SP) with branches in Manaus (AM) and Ariquemes (RO), became a defendant in the court under the accusation of leading a reception, refining, and "legitimization" scheme that moved at least R$200 million under the guise of a "green compliance" facade between 2020 and 2025. Between May and August 2021 alone, the PF-seized accounting recorded the illegal flow of over 525 tonnes of the ore.

In the Yanomami territory in Roraima, extraction operated with a technical division of labor. In the Baixinho and Pupunha mines, excavators and pumps were operated by organized groups: root workers cleared vegetation, jetters built containment structures, and suction operators extracted sediment. Field coordinators, such as Valdeci Aparecido Cardoso, a miner known as "Keké," organized the teams and provided daily extraction volume reports to financiers and operation partners, including Jidalias dos Anjos Pinto, known as "Tiziu" (a former state deputy), and Felipe José da Silva Galvão, who acted as an aircraft pilot. The structure had its own clandestine aviation logistics, operating from airstrips opened in the forest, in addition to using mercury in associated gold mining.

The next step was to legalize the product. Cassiterite collected by intermediary Nelcides de Almeida Mello (who died last month in a traffic accident) was recorded with false documents provided by the Cooperativa de Produtores de Estanho do Brasil (Coopertin). The cooperative maintained a headquarters in Boa Vista without operational activity or employees, but issued guides and invoices to simulate that the ore came from authorized mines by the National Mining Agency (ANM). Of the total moved by the cooperative over a five-month period, R$166.3 million came from White Solder. According to the investigations, the almost exclusive destination of the cassiterite was White Solder, which accounted for 97.6% of the cooperative's credits in that period.

Once it reached the refiner's blast furnaces in Rondônia, the cassiterite was converted into high-purity ingots. The industrial process removes the product's physical characteristics of origin. With documentation regularized on paper and compliance seals, the tin entered the international market.

To understand how the illegally extracted ore from Roraima turned into an export product with a compliance certificate, the O GLOBO report went to the state of Rondônia, to the municipality of Ariquemes. Located 200 kilometers from Porto Velho, the municipality and the Bom Futuro district — home to the world's largest open-pit cassiterite mine — are not just the backdrop of the investigation but the operational and financial center of the scheme dismantled by the Federal Police.

* The "Invisible Gold" series — on how illegally extracted minerals from the Amazon supply the global technology chain and why no one can track them — is supported by the Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).

The translation of this text into english was carried out by Project Irineu, O GLOBO's initiative to develop artificial intelligence tools. Here is the link to the original report.