How can governments respond effectively to minerals crime when criminal networks operate across borders, supply chains, and financial systems?
As global demand for gold and critical minerals continues to grow, illegal extraction and trafficking are increasingly linked to organized crime, illicit financial flows, corruption, environmental harm, and broader governance vulnerabilities. These dynamics are becoming particularly significant in the Andean–Amazon region, where mineral supply chains intersect with fragile ecosystems, transnational trade routes, and complex governance challenges.
UNICRI’s new report, Minerals Crime in the Andean–Amazon Region: Regional Cooperation as a Governance Response, examines how regional cooperation can help address the structural limits of fragmented national responses to minerals crime.
A Changing Governance Landscape
The global energy transition, digital technologies, and strategic competition for mineral resources are reshaping international supply chains. At the same time, rising gold prices and growing demand for critical energy transition minerals are generating new pressures and opportunities for criminal exploitation.
In this context, minerals crime is no longer limited to illegal extraction alone. It increasingly encompasses broader criminal ecosystems linked to money laundering, corruption, document fraud, environmental crime, and illicit trade.
The report highlights how criminal actors exploit regulatory gaps, fragmented oversight systems, and weak cross-border coordination to move illicitly sourced minerals through commercial and financial channels.
Regional Cooperation as a Governance Response
To explore how these challenges can be addressed, the report focuses on the Andean Community (CAN) and its Ad Hoc Committee on Illegal Mining (CAMI) as a case study in regional governance.
The analysis shows that existing supranational frameworks can provide legally grounded and politically viable spaces for coordinated action beyond the capacity of any single country acting alone.
The report draws on desk research, comparative regional analysis, and practitioner evidence gathered through the High-Level Strategic Meeting (RANE) held in Lima, Peru, in October 2025, convened jointly by the Secretaría General de la Comunidad Andina, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Peru, UNODC, and UNICRI.
Understanding the Governance Gap
A central finding of the report is that criminal networks linked to minerals crime already operate as regional systems, while governance responses often remain fragmented and primarily national in scope.
The publication identifies several structural challenges, including:
Divergent legal definitions and regulatory approaches.
Weak interoperability between traceability and customs systems.
Uneven forensic and investigative capacity.
Limited integration of financial intelligence into enforcement responses.
The report also highlights how illegal gold mining and crimes linked to critical energy transition minerals present distinct risk profiles and therefore require differentiated governance approaches.
Four Pillars for Regional Action
To support more effective regional responses, the report proposes a four-pillar analytical framework centred on:
Policy harmonization
Institutional and operational coordination
Financial intelligence integration
Interoperable traceability infrastructure
The report emphasizes that traceability systems alone are insufficient if they are not linked to enforcement, financial intelligence, customs cooperation, and judicial processes. It also underscores the importance of integrating safeguards for human rights, Indigenous Peoples, and environmental protection into governance responses.
A key message of the report is that enforcement strategies focused solely on seizures and site interdictions often displace criminal activity rather than dismantling criminal networks. Instead, the report calls for greater focus on the enabling infrastructure that sustains minerals crime, including illicit financial flows, logistics networks, commercialization channels, and professional enablers.
This includes:
Strengthening beneficial ownership transparency.
Expanding parallel financial investigations.
Improving AML/CFT cooperation.
Enhancing trade-data analysis and anomaly detection.
Developing regional forensic and evidentiary capacity.
Looking Ahead
The report concludes that the Andean region already possesses many of the institutional and technical foundations required for more effective regional action, including legal frameworks, coordination platforms, and emerging traceability systems.
The challenge moving forward is not simply the creation of new mechanisms, but improving coordination, interoperability, and sustained operational cooperation across the full mineral supply chain.
Building on this work, UNICRI is also exploring opportunities to further examine the role of traceability, financial intelligence, and cross-border cooperation in strengthening responses to minerals crime, including through future South–South dialogue and practitioner engagement on the use of traceability systems and supply-chain data for law enforcement and governance purposes.
In doing so, the publication contributes to broader international discussions on organized crime, illicit finance, supply-chain governance and the governance dimensions of the global energy transition.
