According to a new report, most of Venezuela’s gold is smuggled and laundered internationally through shell companies and opaque supply chains, including to the U.S. The operations are often controlled by military elites, guerrilla groups and transnational gangs, which exploit several loopholes and gaps in the U.S. financial and trade systems, the report by the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition says. The impact on Amazon forests, water and Indigenous communities is “devastating,” the authors write. They suggest several policy changes in the U.S. to prevent the transfer of illegal gold into the country, such as tightening oversight, closing legal loopholes and restoring domestic enforcement capacity, which has been dramatically reduced over the years due to the prioritization of resources to curb narcotics trafficking. The current U.S. government’s approach to drugs and gangs from Venezuela, which included strikes on alleged drug boats, is one they say shouldn’t be replicated for illegal gold as it “isn’t working” and the costs “are considerable.” “A militaristic, hardline U.S. response to illegal gold mining in the region would be both unwise and ineffective,” Julia Yansura, the FACT Coalition’s program director for environmental crime and illicit finance and co-author of the report, told Mongabay via email. “First off, many of our allies in the region have already tried this, sending in troops for rapid, military style ‘strikes’ against illegal mining sites. “What we are urging the U.S. to do is to employ new tools from the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing toolbox. By cutting…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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