BOA VISTA, Brazil — After crossing the Brazilian border into the town of Lethem in Guyana, a billboard declares that human trafficking is a crime. It’s a jarring message in this otherwise tranquil town with its streets full of stores selling products imported from China. Those are just some of the products that draw traders here from across the border in the Brazilian city of Bonfim, 132 kilometers (82 miles) away from the capital of Boa Vista, the Amazonian state of Roraima. Separated by the Tacutu River (or Takutu in Guyana), the cities are easily accessible by the BR-401 highway.

I crossed the border from Brazil into Guyana without being subjected to any inspections, despite the presence of a Federal Police post on the Brazilian side. Over the course of seven days in Roraima, three sources told me that traffickers in Boa Vista often recruit girls in Roraima and take them to Lethem, where they’re dragged into the sex trade at bars catering to gold miners.

In Guyana, prostitution is prohibited and mining operations are supervised. However, sources who requested anonymity for security reasons told Mongabay that the sexual exploitation of young women, including Brazilians and especially Venezuelans, routinely occurs.

In general, according to the sources, bars and other places frequented by young people in Boa Vista are targets for groomers working for organized crime networks that have invested heavily in mining activities in the Amazon. They lure girls and young women with invitations to business trips and promises of high pay, using expensive clothes, jewelry and perfumes as a draw for these poor young people. Harassment has also been observed around schools, vulnerable communities, urban and rural peripheries and Indigenous villages. Municipalities such as Uiramutã and Bonfim — both of which lie on the border with Guyana, with Bonfim just across the river from Lethem — are common hunting grounds for recruiters, according to the sources.

Many young people are slow to understand that they’ve been victims of human trafficking, and even when they do realize it, they avoid speaking out for fear of violent retribution by the criminal organizations that operate the mines. This contributes to the lack of reporting of cases, and also explains the billboard at the Lethem border crossing.

The area’s poverty has made it a target for recruiters, in addition to its strategic border location for gold miners. Uiramutã, home to 13,700 people located approximately 300 km (about 190 mi) from Boa Vista, ranked lowest out of all municipalities in Brazil on the national Social Progress Index (SPI) in 2024. Bonfim was 10th from the bottom on the list, and two other Roraima municipalities made the bottom 20.

There are more than 80,000 open mining sites throughout the Brazilian Amazon, according to a technical note published in 2024 by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). Known locally as garimpos, these mines are a major driver of deforestation in the region, covering a combined area of 241,000 hectares (about 594,000 acres), twice the size of the city of Rome.

Researchers specializing in border studies from the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR) recorded 309 human trafficking victims in the state from June 2022 to June 2024. Of these, 73% were immigrants and the rest Brazilian. Women sexually exploited in gold mines made up the majority of cases, although LGBTQIA+ people and families with children, recruited to work in slavery-like conditions, have also been involved.

The research, led by UFRR professor Márcia Oliveira, focuses on families at the Brazil-Venezuela border in Pacaraima seeking to legalize their documents to escape Venezuela’s economic and political crises. According to UNICEF, 60,000 Venezuelans entered Brazil under these conditions between January and August 2024, and more than 500,000 since 2015.

“Mining devastates nature in the same way that it destroys human values,” Oliveira told Mongabay in an interview in her office at UFRR, where she leads the research group that also looks into violence against women in mining operations.

One complicating factor in the research is the reluctance of victims to report cases. Testimonies show that most victims are unable to recognize themselves as having been trafficked. Some only become aware of it when they learn about the activities of the groups behind the crime.

According to the researchers, most of the young women who are recruited only realize they’ve been duped when they arrive at their destination. There, the traffickers seize their documents and cellphones, and block them from speaking to family members. They may also take them on clandestine routes, the trochas, to evade security checks and leave the victims disoriented.

Families also find it difficult to recognize the crime of human trafficking. Researchers identified this situation when they phoned family members who had put up posters on walls and lampposts across Boa Vista seeking help to find their missing daughters. When questioned by the researchers, many families said the girls had already been found and were working as cooks in a garimpo, seemingly oblivious to the possibility of abuse.

According to the researchers, these brief reassurances from the young women to their relatives, in the rare contacts authorized by the criminals, represent a kind of code to mislead them about the real situation, since historically in Roraima, working as a garimpo cook represents a certain status.

In some cases, the recruited girls send money back to their families. In others, they disappear, or are found dead, and family members opt not to get involved in investigations, fearing violence. Some victims manage to return from these experiences after being replaced, but to stay alive and deal with the trauma, they have to leave the state or even the country, with the support of humanitarian aid organizations.

Mute phone

Maria do Socorro dos Santos is the director of the human rights program at the Roraima state legislature. In her office, posters from the Prevention without Borders Project warn of the risks of human trafficking. One of them displays a phone hotline. The project was created in March 2024, but has never been activated since. Santos acknowledged that victims are often afraid to speak out, which nurtures the climate of impunity.

Santos advocates for education as a form of prevention, and has been collaborating with a network of partner institutions to arrange educational activities for students, teachers and other education professionals in Roraima. She’s visited 46 establishments to give talks and show videos and documentaries on the subject, and at each one she’s received reports of some kind of experience involving abuse, sexual exploitation or human trafficking. She said the state “lacks effective public policies to tackle the issue.”

Having studied sexual violence at the University of São Paulo (USP), and with more than 30 years of experience in research, educational campaigns and sheltering women and young people in situations of violence, Santos was invited by the Roraima legislature in 2015 to coordinate actions against human trafficking. Although she was already retired by then, she embraced the challenge because, she said, she believed there was still a significant gap in solutions to effectively tackle this crime.

“Groomers see people’s vulnerability as an opportunity to use their power of persuasion through a very well-organized network,” Santos told Mongabay. Over the past decade, she’s worked on research into criminal networks in Roraima and neighboring countries, looking for signs of sexual exploitation routes — a job that has proved a great learning experience on the subject.

The situation in Roraima has attracted the attention of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops’ Special Commission to Combat Human Trafficking, or CEETH-CNBB, according to its executive secretary, Alessandra Miranda. Part of the commission’s work involves raising awareness, mobilizing governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and seeking to strengthen initiatives to tackle trafficking. The issue was the central theme of a 2024 publication by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Miranda and other members of the commission were part of a delegation that visited Boa Vista and the municipalities bordering Venezuela and Guyana in mid-2024 to understand the reality through dialogue with local stakeholders. “I was struck by the state government’s dissonance with the issue of human trafficking,” she said. “It’s clear that this is a territory with serious human rights violations.”

Against this lack of policy from the state, Miranda added, the narco-garimpo criminal nexus has strengthened and continues to financially sustain this practice.

I contacted the Federal Police multiple times about any investigations or operations against human trafficking in Roraima and the border areas, but received no response.

Deforestation, pollution and violence

As well as abusing trafficked people, gold miners cause environmental destruction and disrupt local communities. “Rivers and other water sources are contaminated [mainly by mercury used in illegal gold mining], a problem that snowballs as it prevents communities from fishing and the water becomes unfit for human consumption,” environmental engineer Luís Augusto Oliveira, a member of the research collective MapBiomas focusing on the Amazon, told Mongabay.

Mining-driven deforestation also degrades riverbanks, leading to pollution and erosion. “The environmental damage is what remains in the regions affected by garimpo. The generation of wealth does not,” Oliveira said.

Roraima is among Brazil’s Amazonian states that still has high forest cover. But the reduction of this cover from 98% to 93% in 39 years worries researchers and environmentalists. The losses to mining have been significant during this time: garimpos accounted for 83 hectares (205 acres) of deforestation in 1985, but by 2023 this had increased 40-fold to 3,325 hectares (8,216 acres).

In Boa Vista, the activity is largely embraced, thanks to the long history of mining here. The centerpiece of the city’s main square, facing both the governor’s office and the state legislature, is a monument in honor of the miners, or garimpeiros.

Francilene dos Santos Rodrigues, a professor at UFRR and leading expert on the history of mining in Roraima, said organized crime is the major driving force behind the new wave of mining in the Amazon. According to Rodrigues, it’s similar to what happened in Colombia, where miners paid FARC guerrillas to protect them in the absence of the state.

UFRR sociologist Rodrigo Chagas, who studies violence, said he believes the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC in 2016 displaced the mining there to other Amazonian regions. Another push was the twin political and economic crises in Venezuela, he said, coupled with domestic factors in Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro, president from 2019-2022, openly advocated for mining on Indigenous lands.

Chagas said the gold route runs through the north of the Amazon, crossing the borders of Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guyana and Suriname. “The sex market follows this route,” he told Mongabay.

One issue that worries researchers in his group is the level of violence of drug trafficking groups associated with the garimpos. One emblematic case involved the murder of a miner in front of his colleagues, according to Chagas, solely because he wanted to marry one of the young women he was sexually exploiting. Chagas saw the episode as “a breaking point,” as well as “a message about changes in the rules of the game” that have generated more fear and tension.

In addition, the rise in the price of gold, which has hit record highs, has supercharged mining. “This is a risk that has become worthwhile,” researcher Francilene Rodrigues told Mongabay.

Cooks with status

Violence against women has become increasingly common in Roraima since 2017, following the invasion of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, the largest in Brazil, covering an area roughly the size of Portugal. The territory suffered from the expansion of mining and was invaded by around 20,000 miners between 1985 and 2022, rivaling the population of the Indigenous inhabitants.

According to the Hutukara Yanomami Association, which works in defense of the ethnic group, many girls have been taken for sexual exploitation and, in remote areas, young men have been recruited to work on mines — illegal on Indigenous lands under any circumstances, according to Brazil’s Constitution.

After an environmental and humanitarian crisis, the new government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro in the 2022 elections, began to tackle the invaders in 2023 through a series of more than 3,000 raids. The offensive pushed the invaders to other areas of the state and neighboring countries such as Guyana and French Guiana, where the Federal Police have identified cases of exploitation of Brazilian workers by criminal organizations.

“Within this society in which we live in Roraima, and lacking everything, there is a public that is very focused on getting something more quickly, and mining offers that,” mining researcher Joel Valério, who heads the Boa Vista-based Conviva Institute, told Mongabay.

“But what drives these people into a garimpo? Is it those who are harassing them or is it the lack of a way to survive in the interior of Roraima or on the peripheries of the capital without any financial success?”

For Valério, the innocence of some young women about human trafficking networks makes it easier for traffickers to lure them using false promises of well-paid work and a return to their families with money in hand.

That’s because, at a mining camp, the cooks are the only ones paid a fixed amount and protected by the leaders. Their duties also include washing clothes, and according to Valério, they’re not meant to be sexually exploited. The promise of attaining this elevated status in the hierarchy of the garimpo environment — being paid well while being untouchable — lures many young women to the mining camps.

Much of the social life of garimpos takes place in the currutelas, areas with bars where exploited women drink and dance to attract customers. Márcia Oliveira, the UFRR professor, said she’s heard testimonies from victims that young women are subjected to a routine of sexual exploitation with almost no right to rest in these places.

They also live in degraded environments, in lodgings without bathrooms or access to clean drinking water, according to Oliveira. The young women are paid in grams of gold, a common currency in the garimpos, but arrive at the site already in debt because the business owner expects to be reimbursed for the cost of the victim’s travel and stay. Oliveira said this work is analogous to slavery.

Banner image: IBAMA raid to fight illegal mining in the Yanomami Indigenous Land in Roraima in December 2023. Image courtesy of IBAMA.

Amazon illegal miners bypass enforcement by smuggling gold into Venezuela

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