Investigating Latin America’s Global Reach Of Illicit Activities

hello everyone welcome to join Carlos you are on mute hello and welcome everyone we have more than 100 people from around the world thank you for joining This Global investigative journalism Network webinar about how Latin American connects to your story investigating the Region's Global Rich of illicit money illegal mining drug trafficking and environmental destruction my my name is Carlos Eduardo weres I am the director of connectus connectus is an accelerator platform that has become a reference from for investigative journalism in the Americas due to its committed to the journalistic collaboration for the production of in

depth stories that help expose the abuse of power even in closest society and for the analyze that allow improved understanding of the hemisphere today's webinar is tailored for investigative journalists who want to learn from colleagues who have unreal intricate webs of misconduct that start in Latin America but impact communities around the world this session will delve into stories about the forestation drugs and Mining and provide relevant tips and tools from those exposes and how to pursue groundbreaking investigation in your own regions from transnational criminal networks to financial Manu using to consult ilicit gains that webinar

would highlight recent investigation that have strucken illegally mining gold from the Amazon to the to India for example or cocaine from Colombia to European ports and on M The Hiding owners of offshore companies based in Panama and other Latin American countries as journalists understanding the methodology behind corrupt activities and learning how the better Expos it is crucial for producing impactful transnational collaborative pieces in this G we in our four senior investigative journalist will share lessons learning uh on how to work Beyond borders on local stories about global issues this webinar is part of gn's Latin

American Focus week which is underwe right now you will find the link to related stories stories in the chat box to begin I welcome our panelist today I say welcome first with Bianca padro U she's from Puerto Rico but now is based on on on Peru Bianca welcome thank you uh with Joseph PUK she he is from Venezuela but now is in in Mexico Joseph yes hi guys and with Lilia sa she's from Mexico and I don't know where where are you Lilia right now in Mexico Mexico City yes hi caros and L Fernando too

she is from Brazil and he is in Brazil now hi L Fernando youra is great your camera is soft now know what happened sorry hello okay great before we start a little bit of information about the global investigative journalism Network for those of you not familiar with it JN is the largest global network of nonprofit investigative journalism organizations with 250 members organization in 91 countries but it works with journalists everywhere in nonprofits in commercial organization and with Freelancers it has an extensive range of resources and tip sheets and help journalist worldwide which you can check

on j.org before uh before we start I would also like to remind our audience that we have live interpretation from English to Spanish English to Arabic and vice versa so if you would like to use this service please in the botton in the sun screen and and the in the botton you can find the click of the interpretation and select the language that you prefer we have about 90 90 minutes and we also want to hear from you in the audience please send writing questions and message in the Q&A box and well get to us

many as we can you can start asking questions right now when the speaker when the speakers are finished Andrea sa H who is our editor in Spanish in in J will join us on the screen to moderate the questions and finally H please note the we will be recording this session for posting later on YouTube Okay so let's start uh we are going to start with h Bianca Bianca is a Bianca padro Casio is an independent journalist working in both the US and in Peru she's from Puerto Rico and she is part of Oho publicos

crossborder investigation Network she contribute uh to dirty gold roots that is the last latest investigative series of the new destination of go legally mining in the Amazon which include 15 suspicious import companies in the US and the United Arab Arab Emirates recently foro publo she also contribute to ocrp a narco project with a story on how on how illegal mining has becomeone and increasingly important resources of income for a arm groups illegal arm groups in Colombia uh welcome again bian um thank you everyone for joining uh from many different parts of the world um and

to GI JN for the invitation um for Oho to kind of talk about um how we how we did this investigation and I'm happy to hear your questions and I'll do my best to answer them um so this is our series that published earlier this year um we call the dirty gold Roots a decade of illegal Mining and laundering uh from the Amazon and I just wanted to kind of start first explaining what oopo is we are a a journalism organization in Peru that was founded in 2014 and we do National investigative journalism and also

crossborder or transnational investigative journalism uh focusing on abuses of power and civil rights and we have been uh awarded uh for our work in uh in Peru and also abroad and um we also are considered the most widely read and influential investigative Outlet in in Buu according to the digital news report uh which has named us uh the most widely read in the past four years so that's a little bit about us and we do a lot of transnational investigative work with other outlets in the region particularly but we are looking to expand so um

I'm happy that we have people from other parts of the world and if anything in the presentation sounds like something you would be interested in in in your country uh please reach out and we'd be happy to connect so a little bit about uh how this project came about it was a collaboration between 18 journalists in five Amazon countries um in Peru it was led by us in AO uh we were joined by L Spector in Colombia tum in Brazil El in Bolivia and Rista Vaso in Ecuador and I just wanted to to make it

very clear that of course we were leading it but it was a huge team with a lot of photographers and editors and data uh reporters so and people that helped us put together our um our website so it was a big team that that worked on this um so just for context for those of if you not familiar with um the illegal gold problem in in the Amazon uh it is a growing problem as as a lot of my colleagues know um for context in Colombia for example official figures show that uh up to 80%

of the gold that is exported is estimated to be of illegal origin in Bolivia Peru and Brazil That's 30% um and in Bolivia the gold has displaced natural gas as Bolivia's main export product so this is the magnitude of the problem that we are talking about and this is because gold is very easy to launder um and it as the value of gold has increased in um in the past several years especially as we've seen since the pandemic um the Amazon has become a a hub or a hotspot for illegal gold mining because of the

level of purity of the gold that can be mined from the rivers in the Amazon um and in the invest instigation what we found was actually that the Amazon Rivers uh that in the past were not you know were were not uh being taken over by illegal extractive Industries have now become a greater part of this um of this problem so how this investigation started uh it was in 2015 that hopo first started looking at the laundering of of money through illegal gold mining and um um this was an investigation that kind of started it

all for ohoo and we wanted to reproduce the methodology that was used in 2015 so that we could figure out okay what are the new hotpots where is this gold going and what are the places where um illegal mining has grown in our territories um what we found in this investigation uh which took us seven months to to complete was that between 2014 and 2023 almost a 10year span uh the MS some countries exported more than 3,000 tons of high Purity gold um and what we the way we did it was by finding the discrepancies

between what countries formerly declar to produce and what is finally exported so whatever doesn't have uh a known origin we consider to be suspicious and of um of suspicious origin or you know um ilit origin and Peru accounts for the largest figure of is so 92% of that discrepancy was actually gold that was exported from Peru so among the the new destinations um we found that India and United Arab Emirates are the two destinations that have been growing in importance in the region um it doesn't mean that in the 10e span it has displaced countries

like Switzerland or the United States but it just means that they are growing in importance and they now ex uh import a greater uh um a greater percentage and we found that a group of 15 gold uh suppliers that exported to these countries are linked to suppliers in our countries that have been investigated for illegal mining or money laundering and what facilitates this laundering is that there are weak traceability uh capabilities along the supply chain there are records that are faked locally so people that are mining this gold um will say that they got it

from X place um you know on this date but that doesn't actually uh mean that that's the case um and there are very weak local uh laws that that can ensure that that's actually um that that is uh being um fiscal I'm sorry that I'm missing the the word in English right now um and also that we seen countries like Ecuador and Colombia where there are criminal organizations that have switched or moved on to money to Illegal mining as a greater source of income whereas before they were more dedicated to drug trafficking so the data

and methodology I'll try to go through this very quickly um we use the five countries custom records uh because the national uh gold export figures in general don't show the details on uh how the companies on on the companies that are trading gold in the countries and we compare them with the gold production figures for each country so these are obtained Through official sources um and we also access police files in Ecuador Peru and Colombia that shed light on the companies that are being investigated for illegal Mining and that helped us figure out what are

what okay what are the companies that are actually exporting and not um and there's no um oversight as to uh their supply chain in the process um so for the the gold there's many different types of gold in the International harmonized System so we focused on the 7 1.08 um which is the following um types of gold uh we focused on this one because there were other types of gold in the harmonized system that uh relate to jewelry and things like that and we knew that we wanted to just focus on you know the raw

gold that that is being exported from the countries and we also traveled and did on the ground reporting in seven different points in the region so in Buu we traveled to three different places the naay river Sena River and we went to laa which has been a historical hot spot for illegal mining in the past decade in Brazil we went to itba and in Colombia uh the inida inida river in Ecuador the Napo River and in Bolivia the Mad Theos river which is very close to the border with Peru so this project took s seven

months to be completed and standardizing the data was the most challenging part um we did a total of 43 information Rec Quest and we interviewed more than 30 experts and prosecutors authorities um and I just wanted to make a note that Brazil and Bolivia for us were the most opaque countries in terms of access to information and we had to significantly um scale back the amount of information that we could uh investigate for these countries so for example a lot of the companies that we ended up publishing about are not from Brazil or Bolivia because

their countries do not um do not make public the names of of the companies that trade in gold from from Brazil and Bolivia uh outwards um so these are a couple of different um shortcomings that we had just based on the information that we could get access to and just to uh kind of end on another important part of our investigation we did Focus significantly on what are the due diligence practices of these companies abroad um what are they doing and what have they changed in the past 10 years that that wasn't um being taken

into consideration before and um you know what are they doing to make things better right because at the end of the day the companies that end up selling the gold to companies like apple or um you know Walmart or or whatever those companies have as much responsibility in the supply chain as the people buying the gold directly from the minor so we looked a lot at um what was happening there and what we found is that a lot of companies especially in countries like India United Arab Emirates do not have a very good um due

diligence process and compliance offices um and uh and we also looked at what the countries uh that we were based in were doing to also improve uh the the due diligence process and we found that in Colombia and Peru these authorities have shifted a little bit from you know mining Crackdown to moneya laundering investigations that could be linked back to illegal mining um and I just wanted to end yeah well I'm done this is just a photo of um mados and just to look at uh pretty much the the how the the ground is looking

right now um with the illegal mining problem um and this is all illegal mining from what's seen in the picture and the the the devastation and deforestation that it also causes um as an environmental crime so thank you so much and I'll be looking forward to your questions great thank you bianka I just want to underline how all publical follow up and and the or investigations 10 years ago and how they uh cross and com the combination of information first for C records second for Golden gold production figures and policy files no and the combination

of these databases helped to to expose something something really big and and how the the investigations can reveal something that happened in in very close system like India and United arabist Emirates H we are going to continue with Joseph thank you Bianca Joseph polisuk is Editor in Chief and co-founder of Armando doino uh Trail blade News website dedicated to investigative journalist uh Joseph lets a team of intrepid reports who have produced major investigation reviling Financial misdeeds and corruption in Venezuela take in mind that everything related with corruption in Venezuela is hundreds thousands of millions of

dollars which has been red one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world were according with Transparency International H Joseph 10 minutes thank you yes Carlos thanks a lot and thanks a lot to gjn for this invitation to permit us to show part of the work that we are doing in Armando info that as you said is the only media dedicated exclusively to the investigative journalism in Venezuela and I came with a coll of cases in order to show a what we are doing let me share my screen just a moment before of telling

and showing you some cases this is the map of the corruption the last ER map of Transparency International transparency ER and you can see that we in Latin America live in a region very corrupted ER it reminds me look at the look at the point of Venezuela deep red so it reminds me when we when we participated in the Panama papers ER it could the Panama papers could be a mirror of the of the world I REM I remember that the Russian colleagues found a some a companies of approximate of Putin and at the same

time there was a very interesting story about a an offshore company of a that was involved in war crimes in Syria and we in Latin America we found mainly mainly corruption we found some politicians of Venezuela that were hiding their money in the offshore in in tax heavens and I remember as well that some cartels some mafias of the drug cartels of Mexico were discovered through those tax Heavens but a in some cases we think that the corruption is just for ours and what we have think in the last time is that some of our

money at the end end up in Europe and in the so-called North Global so let me show you a an example this is a case thanks to the finsen files we could a prove that the money that was a invested or that was a going to to the to build the line five of Metro the kakas at the end finish in Amsterdam in the Netherlands so if there here in the audience H there is a Dutch colleague we need you we have tried to ER find this money and at that time we haven't have answers

anyway the the flow of the money went to Amsterdam through anti way bar budha a uh tax heaven in the Caribbean I am going to tell you more after that but before of that we are investigative journalist so how we do our work remember that Venezuela a don't have Freedom of Information Act we don't have a even press conference the government don't give even a official figures about covid even the population we don't know right now how much how many Venezuelans we are so er I think that we have three main methodologies methodology um networks

a data and Tech and traditional journalism it's not going to death anymore anyway so we triangulate information if there is a information that is not in our country we can look for it outside in C with custom records bill of Landings Import and Export databases things like this at the same times networks Teamworks a I am I mean talking about Panama papers things like this and if there is any information that we cannot find in our country we can look for allies outside interviews of course I am telling you that traditional journalism is not going

to that so it's important a term that we usually refer and call widows of power these people that was in the place and we can find them in order to find the information judicial court documents things like this leaks as well and thanks to aite we've finally found some a transactions some transferences that went from antiu baruda this Bank of the Caribbean to Switzerland and there we saw that it was a a a deposit some deposit 67 deposits of petroio the Venezuela a we found this in the finsen files that um where documents from the

US Treasures Financial crimes informant Network and there ER we found these transferences anyway ER we didn't know we could know the that the company that received in Switzerland this money was involved in another case that five years before we were covering in the OD Scandal I don't know if you know that o Scandal was one of the most important cases of corruption in Brazil mainly in Brazil it began in Brazil with a a company of construction that paid bribes even two prime ministers presidents and two ministers in order to get the best contracts and the

and the best yes constructs of the region it began in Brazil but it was also in other 12 countries mainly of Latino America so a with the support or or it was an alliance between some journalist and Regional media like reporteros in Peru sudestada in Uruguay La pra of Panama and la na of Argentina in Brazil it began in the judicial power but in the other countries we didn't have access to this information so we joined es forment in order to H find some information and because of this we could be p years before of

the fins and files that this H company were involved was involved sorry in a receiving was a vehicle in order to get this one but five years later thanks to other leak we could see that the money arrived to Switzerland so er Switzerland and H the Netherlands so see that the corruption began in our countries nobody steal money in Caracas in order to deposit this in the bank but I think that the the investigative journalism basically we don't cover a source we don't follow a source we have to prove methodologies and hypothesis and it's important

to understand how the world works and sometimes minut Joseph sorry one minute more okay okay ER this is one the look The the flow of the money the first document is from Brazil the bank of Antigua iar bua you can see here and then we found this H money in Switzerland and at the end we found that Switzerland permitted to a Brazilian guy involved in this trauma a they showed us how the money finish look at this in South Boston ER in the bank accounts of the son of elando ASO that was the Brazilian guy

involved in this story yes I think that we can finish here thank you so much Joseph I I just want to underline you know how the traditional techniques are very useful to connect information around the world how Armando info translate information and connect couston records with bow Landings and core core documents you know to understand how the business works thank you Joseph uh before I going to continue remember that in the Q&A box you will uh send the asking questions and thean Andrea SAA who is our editor of yen in Spanish she's going to moderate

the questions and in the chat box you can see the links related with the with the presentations well great uh we are going to continue now with Lilia Lilia sa she is an investigative reporter with ocrp she's based in in Mexico and she's an award winning journalist with more than 50 years of reporting experience she was editor in connectus too and in 2023 she was part of the team that work on naries on the global spanning business on drug trafficking Lilia thank you 10 minutes yeah this is a naril project uh and thanks thanks a

lot for uh having me and thanks for Global journalist and I will introduce you to the narice project Corin by ocrp if you don't know which is organized ocrp is organized crime and Corruption reporting project we are a Global Network of journalists and I am based in Mexico City in Mexico City and I have the honor for of showing the great work of so many journalists who participate in in this transnational investigation and only show the IM mat because it's not the sound but it's a little video and well maybe I can how we did

it uh naril the new Criminal order is an international investigation into the current situation of organized crime um those uh who fight it this collaboration which include more than 40 uh media Outlets is the largest research project on this topic born in Latin America a region hit by drug trafficking as well as associate violence and Corruption H in this project show how criminal groups operate how they collaborate with each others and Innovations in criminal practice ER this um project originated in a leak from the attorne general office of Colombia and you know um in the

past the years uh have a different leaks about of Colombia and Mexico at the same time and the secrets can be uh to realize this project because they share uh the data with ocrp and other outlets and other organizations but uh what's uh the challenge uh for works with this leak about of a lot of information uh well at first time uh confirm the authenticity of the leak 7 million emails from the Colombian prosecutor's office uh reporters compar the data with public information uh for example say or looking for reference numbers of court cases property

or company data among others and obviously contains uh sensitive materials like for example uh video ER and that's information never used because it's was a a very sensitive material uh in addition H they sent more of hundred of requests for public information reviewed hundred of public and private documents databases and interview authorities and criminals and experts and victims of uh drug trafficking and well it's a a very very uh great challenge for or ocrp because was an organized collaborative ecosystem uh as I say 40 media Outlets uh 23 countries and the coordination was a response

big response for ocrp and clip the organization to in Latin America um that's all the outlets to um work with us uh if you can see it's a lot of of outlets media by Latin America but in Europe too and uh United States um and and that's all the the the the outlets you can you can see uh well uh six main themes were explored in our profiles uh criminal Empires Global criminal expansion narcos SAA H criminal Innovation uh ports very important H discover different issues about of the ports in in in different parts of

the world uh dark money Financial flows Echo crms crime sorry and uh police and theves and well um some findings in our stories er a s of a drug trafficker in the shark F fin export Venture er a narco shareholder in a strategic port in Colombia uh the expansion in the United States of the Venezuelan bound trender AWA which has had an expansion on the continent you can see the imag uh by the CN CNN because they made a um uh like a documental um very very very important to see if you can see um

and the relations of the Italian mafia with banana exports the expansion of Coca crops beyond the traditional areas like Colombia and how drug lords uh live in Dubai or how drug cartels in Mexico have multiplied their presence in South America and Europe and offer Service as broker to promote the export of drugs to distant countries like Australia it's very funny to see like in this this this map uh funny in in this case for example find a man to sell uh tequila the bottles of tequila with metanfetaminas uh met for distribute in Australia for example

and well or in this case for example ER shows the different dots of connects of different H in different countries by the by the same criminal groups to Works uh together for a a laundry money for um um make a a different uh drugs in Laboratories for example in this case in a rural dut bage and um in in the connection between the different countries uh can see or proof uh with the documents for the prosecutors of Colombia but uh in our our investigation uh well and and another criminal Innovations for example H the criminals

use uh encrypted Communications uh like the police uh the police in in different countries or Interpol services and that's uh all uh the different uh things to to to know now and how do we build the the collaboration uh the project was collaborative from the beginning plus we wanted to go in depth uh with the investigations use uh different infrastructure uh make our rules communication coordination uh organized ocrp is a a global uh Network and that's the the best uh for us because can work with our colleagues in uh Netherlands or in Spain or H

even in in emiratos arabes or in in Mexico in Colombia or different countries uh use a different tools like uh you can see Alp it's a a a beautiful and amazing tool for us uh for all the journalists if you don't know you need to know because it's all of of the data data sets and and and and different H documents you can find it and uh very use ful for for for us to do the investigations um well different challenge fac it collaboration climate uh cross boarding issues for example in my case I'm in

Mexico but sometimes ER to uh speak or to try to in in to collaborate with another colleagues from other countries exist a different time some uh different hour to work or the people have a lot of work in a different uh Outlets media and needs to uh put in in in different moods for continue to collaborate and well uh obviously H have a security um uh different topics for example uh a digital side uh physical side and editoral side for example in um experience the physical side is very important because for example for the colleagues

to see the videos for delete uh it's a a very worst thing to do because the videos was a very very um content violence content uh um um issues to that difficult to hard to to see them uh digital side because all of the journalist investigative journalist knows about of the treats and uh need to to use a different tools like bpn or bgp or uh signal for communications and it's very very important to to to sign for example an NDA for H cover all of us uh and and and that's all the the the

work to do and editoral side because it's very important to to have a coordinate a do uh we agreed to have a project leader in this case it was uh Natan jart or editor for Latin America and security coordinator like David Gonzalez is a coordinator to in Latin America region uh and have a different um er manage to all the information for security reasons and a clear protocol uh inductions to the journalist for understand all the the different topics to to involve in these investigations and ER obviously um have a security commit because for example

if you having risk or feel to risk or if you have a receive a um email for um um exchange email ER you can to talk with us and uh goes to to maybe to to to know about of uh more information if you have or maybe you you still in risk and that's all the the continue to to to work um that's the reason I think you know ccrp and different Outlets continue of for several months to work for because it's not too easy to coordinate and works with the security and er find the

different er er er investigations and uh the most important uh when final uh days the of this investigation needs to do a a different ER rsal response because needs to talk with uh criminals and lawyers and uh prosecutors and that's very important to feel safe and to to to communicate all the the the the information sensitive information and well um um challenging reporting ER if it's a very common I don't know in other countries but in Latin America it's very difficult to to to have access of different documents like in Mexico or Colombia uh and

for a request it's very hard to obtain uh important documents or in in the in a little uh weeks to obtain the documents and er obtain uh answers to the um um public uh Service public because in sometimes it's preferred to to to to keep in silence uh well uh organized journalist from Latin America Europe and the United States with the same objective U um in in our case break down the blockage that exist from judicial Source in different Latin America countries ER address the secrecy of information and the risk of reporting in dangerous sites

taken over by organized crime uh it's important to say about that because for example in white case uh in Mexico obviously uh it's very very um hard to do uh reporters uh goes to Fields because it's very dangerous and it's not too say not not safe to to to do the reporting H in in different uh states of in Mexico and drug traffickers and organized uh use new techniques for even for uh um knows about of the information to cover for example in this case for a h journalist in in different uh Outlets media and

well ER about of conclusions uh uh drug traffickers and organized crime in general use new techniques and tools as well as Innovative Communications to continue increase their business no matter the rivals rivalries at a transnational level they are part of a large company with the same objective to distribute drugs to loan their money and to obtain multi-million dollar profits and well if you have uh any questions um you can write me or maybe say something in this chat thanks great thank you Lilia this is an amazing work around the world originated in in Latin America

and uh before before we're going to start with the this Fernando H do you remember in the Q&A uh chat box in in in the bottom of the of the screen you can you can find and send the your questions uh Andrea she will moderate the questions after L Fernando to live L Fernando is in a Brazilian investigative and data journalism he lets data fixes. org it's a nonprofit organization specializing in data and public records to support investigative journalism and he is the former director of Abra and in 2023 he was part of global team

that use data to interrogate green claims resulting in a impactful investigation called deforestation in welcome L Fernando and you have 10 time 10 minutes thank you thank you can you hear me yes perfect okay so thank you for the presentation thank you for having me in this presentation uh I'm going to talk about the forestation link this project with uh more than 35 News RS across the world it was coordinated by the International Center for of investigative journalists uh in in this specific presentation I'm going to focus on the Brazilian part of the story so

the main the main goal of this project was to assess if this uh environmental certifications are actually uh accurate if the companies that hold environment certifications are not uh destroying forests in other countries are not committing environmental crimes in other countries and uh we found that in several countries they are doing really really bad like the owners of some some of these companies are arrested for we we're arrested for environmental crimes and the company still holds a certificate so uh we worked with actually 39 Media Partners in Brazil we had three Media Partners p p

magazine Ag and in Brazil we analyzed one specific environmental certificate called FSC uh in their own words it's called the forest Stewardship Council an international no government organization dedicated to promoting responsible management of word forests they were found in 1994 uh and they they are pioneers so uh their main goal is to to make business and consumers to choose wood paper and other Forest products made with materials that support responsible forestry so if you are buying something from a company that holds an an FC FSC uh certificate you you can be sure that you are

doing you are doing business with someone who is not committing environmental crimes at least that that's what they say so we found this database online where you can see all the companies that hold this certificate we scrap it that that database and we divided every country had their their own Google spreadsheet uh and starting from that uh in in Brazil we have and it's we are very fortunate in Brazil because we have access to all the environmental uh sanctions made by the Brazilian government it's a ailable online uh and I invite you if you are

interested in in looking up a company from your country that has some business in Brazil it's very very useful because you can find the company's names you can see a description of the environmental crime that they did when it happened if they have been saned or not how much money was uh they had to pay in in that specific case for the government so our idea in this project was to cross reference these two databases so if I have FCC certificate I shouldn't be on this database because uh I I wouldn't be a Brin company

I wouldn't be uh sustainable so what we actually found was like 300 different many many companies that were actually in that database so they committed several environmental crimes The Next Step was to send F requests to get access to the specific documents where we wanted to see details of each uh environmental F in the database I just mentioned you can see uh just like data you you can you cannot see like details but if you send a for a request you can get pictures you can get specific details from the person who from the government

agent who was in the in the field so you can see things that are very important when you are going to write your story uh then we publish the story uh explaining the the most relevant cases the cases that were more harmful to the environment uh we found several several environmental Primes in companies that had the F FSC certification land grabbing in indigenous lands illegal deforestation uh one thing that we found very interesting was that several companies had been fined 10 times 15 times there was one company that was find like 30 times for years

not just one case it was it was not an exception it was almost like their pattern they are always committing environmental crimes to make profit uh one of those guys uh that we found was arrested because for environmental Prime which is something very very rare in Brazil because the environmental law here is uh people pay fines but they are not arrested it's not considered like a a serious crime uh so it's very very rare but we found one person that was arrested for that and we also formed several fraud schemes including Timber laundry uh one

thing that I want to I think Lilia already mentioned uh alive I think that this is a very useful database even in Brazil to to look up Environmental finds we have a partnership between ocrp and ABI the Brazilian Association of investigative journalism so if you want to look up a company from your own country you know that this company has some business in in Brazil in in the Amazon region uh there are two ways where you can do that maybe you can just look uh go to ALF and look up for the company name because

the data is in this platform and you can also look up in the I Government website I'm going to show the the link in a minute uh one other thing that I think it's important to mention is that in Brazil we we we have a very strong foyer so uh and it it works for for for this kind of project so you know that a company was sanctioned for doing illegal deforestation or let grabbing things like that you can send a fire request to iama the environmental agency in Brazil and within 30 days you are

going to receive a copy of the document you requested in your email in this project we receed like 50 different copies of the different uh cases and uh they denied like two or three due to because the cases are still like being appealed on the courts things like that so they couldn't send us uh and I think one very important lesson here is that sometimes companies are uh green and they they they they do lectures in Europe and the us talking about how sustainable they are but people don't know that here in Brazil they are

doing several harmful environmental crimes in the not only the amaz region but also in other regions so if you want to download this data you can also go to the ibama website and it's just one CSV file it's very easy to to explore you can just look up the name of the company that you are interested sometimes if they have a Brazilian company the name could be a little bit different but you can find that easily on Google and then you can start your investigation from there that's what I have thank you great L Fernando

I just want to underline how you know an effective way to collaborate across borders is through data sharing and and how in this case was very key to to obtain good results and to identify the the best Partners you know well I I invite Andrea Andrea saava she is our editor of G in in Spanish uh to join the screen to moderate the question we have a lot of questions now uh but before before give you the word Andrea I would like to inform that connectus has an open registration for a free virtual course about

how to investigate environmental crimes in the Amazon uh this course is focus in Peru Ecuador and Colombia and the course is meant to provide tools for everyone who are interested in investigating this topic in in these countries I leave the registration Link in the chat box and Andrea please go ahead thank you all so thanks everyone for all of the questions that you have shared uh we will have two rounds of questions so in the first round I'm going to mention specific questions for each of the speakers and then in the second round I will

ask general questions that I would like everyone to to answer and these are all questions from the public so thank you once again to the audience so I'm gonna start with Bianca so Bianca some of the questions for you are um what did you Pro how did you protect yourself during the investigation from armed groups and also other parties involved in the gold mining like can you talk about how you protected yourself or just people reporting from your team then uh which countries of the EU play the most important role in the illegal mining industry

are the Emirates an intermediary to wash the gold to later export to Europe for example if you can give some insights of what you learned and then if you can shed any line light on what kinds of information requests you placed asking for what to what authorities and if you got refusals did you reward any request um so these are the three questions to start with you then we're going to go to Joseph so so Joseph uh did you work with whistleblowers do you have any methods or any tips for that um second question if

there is no press freedom in some of our countries for example for you Venezuela how do you reach the audience or who is your audience for the topic like corruption are you thinking more of a local audience or the International Community can you talk more about audience and then the third one how did you follow the money from Venezuela to Amsterdam if you can give some tips on that um then for Lilia what Le what links have you uncovered between transl transnational drug smuggling and human trafficking if you can talk a little bit about those

issues and also you can mention the security protocol when you cover drug trafficking in a collaboration not only personally and then the last two questions for Luis Luis how do you identify the best Partners to collaborate and also what do you suggest to a young reporter that wants to start investig investigating the issues you mentioned so I'm going to start with Bianca please thank you um so the first question on safety um yes this was this was quite complicated and when we were deciding where we were going to go we based a lot of our

decisions on what um what are some of the reports uh from nodos that are looking into illegal mining uh what are you know some of the authorities um uh like the OAS what you know new places are there looking are they looking at um that where illegal mining has become a growing problem and from there we reached out to a lot of these Nos and asked them about the access you know how easy is it to travel to a certain area um and from there we reached out to local community organizations or indigenous organizations that

are in the hot spots where we were going to go we had a couple of places where we were planning to go that we ended up uh eliminating from our list because of safety issues because we knew that either it was going to be inaccessible like it was going to be too difficult you know I don't know like 10 hours by boat and then you have to to take Charter plane uh and it was going to be too costly or because we knew um just from talking to organizations and Advocates and authorities as well that

um these areas are are very are very dangerous and um I think someone mentioned it in the comments but of course illegal mining has all these other crimes attached to it it's not just the legal mining it's the trafficking of people it is um trafficking of women it is child labor it is deforestation it is drug trafficking so there are all these other very dangerous situations that converge um in in areas where illegal mining takes place in the Amazon so um we took great care in making sure that the places that we were traveling to

were going to be the safe as possible but we also wanted to make sure that we could go to places that were new and were not um had not been as written about in The Press um there are parts for example in the Peruvian Amazon where indigenous people are um cohabitating with illegal mining on a daily basis and we didn't want to just say okay we're not going to go there because it's too dangerous because there are people living there next to Illegal mining every day um so that was something that was part of our

of our rationale and I will also say um I was in the team that went to labamba and labamba is this place where illegal mining has been happening for over a decade and um the safest way that we could go in was with prosecutors um and that was the only way that journalists could go in without you know exposing ourselves to Great risk so we actually went with um authorities and prosecutors to to the areas where where we knew illegal mining was happening so we had to make some consessions that maybe in another situation you

would say oh no like you don't go with authorities but that was not necessarily the calculus in this situation um the other question so about the EU um the EU has made greater efforts to try to um address some of the due diligence problems that they've these companies have had in the past but what we have seen and again if there's anyone from Dubai or someone here who would like to collaborate in the future I would love that because um it what we found was in fact that the uh UAE was is becoming an intermediate

for a lot of European companies and that's because as we know the UAE does not have great due diligence laws or or you know companies that operate there do not have um grade due diligence processes or you know they're not compelled to do so so it has become a place where uh illegal gold from the Amazon but also from the DRC from Sudan is going to the UAE and then being uh imported into into Europe and this is a big problem and this is something that Advocates and lawyers talk about constantly you know it's not

it's not that uh miners in the Amazon are saying okay well we're going to legalize ourselves so that we can sell to the us or we can sell to Europe they're saying I'm going to sell to the UAE so that you know this gold is I'm not going to have any problems for it to be laundered and entering the formal uh markets in in Europe or or the US so that's definitely something that that we saw happening a lot um and just in terms of quickly public records um so we asked for a lot of

different records from especially the mining authorities in our countries um and actually as L fando was saying a lot of the Foya some of the Foya laws are pretty good in Peru and in Brazil they are you know they're very responsive and there's very strong laws where you know within 10 days they have to get back to you or acknowledge your request in some cases we did have to rephrase but what we asked for um was above all on um investigations that authorities are conducting on specific um companies or you know or miners locally and

some of that included seares for example you know how much has been seized in a period of time what are the companies that were implicated where are they based um but a a lot of it was also just trying to get as many figures as we could you know how much was actually exported in Brazil like I said we couldn't find the names of the company so we had to go to many lengths to find uh as as you know the best figures that we could to show this is how much is being produced and

this is how much is being exported because if we looked at just you know what what it looked at on the surface it looked like Brazil was not really exporting a lot of gold uh of of suspicious origin but we know that's not the case so we had to go through um university studies we had to go through you know what surveys our research is doing we had to use a lot of different sources to combine them and analyze them ourselves um and and figure out how to um how how to uh give the best

picture possible but you know this is not at all a complete picture right because for example we had to use the harmonized code 71.8 uh to figure to uh narrow down the investigation as much as possible um we know for example that you know these companies that are operating um in the UAE and India that you know there's records that we don't understand there um so you know there's there's definitely a lot of holes and gaps that we didn't fill but um that's the general idea thank you so much bian H Joseph yes thank you

Andrea the first question about the with bloggers I am going to brief in two in two ways first of all as I said I think that a investigative journalist ER we don't cover a source we don't follow something specifically but we have to prove and and to find an hypothesis and to find the best way in order to prove it we we don't say in that way but we are experts in methodologies so in some way ER with bloggers are necessary they are they are main they are key sorry anyway we have used in some

other cases artificial intelligence for example in order to pinpoint thanks to thanks to satellit imaginary um to pinpoint illegal mindes and clandestine air streps things like this but but in some other cases you need these people so how can you find these people and I think that one of the best things to be a journalist is to to live and to yes to live and to exercise some careers in some ways you are a social scientific if you are going to use a data journalism or Precision journalism um but in other ways you can be

an actor and a detective and also a psychologist a psychology and you have to understand why who is this guy and how you can tackle him and abort and to get the best information usually before to to appro approach them I used to I am accustomed to to look his or her ER social media in in order to see his Circle and also to see if there are people in common between us ER about the the audience and how we manage these ER because first of all you have to know that a for sure in

Caracas right now the capital of our country some people maybe in the west they have access to our web page but in the east at the same time maybe we have a sophisticated censorship so maybe they cannot access to our web page and it's a challenge because it's not just about to get the best information I think that a good journalist um have to have an an audience and er it has affected also our business model imagine in the country of the highest hyperinflation of the world how can we Su sustain an operation with that

situation so we use a lot social media ER in order to put the information there and as it is changing ER always so we are changing the Strategic in order to ER put the information to the PO and I have to to say thank you to our team to our social erh media team ER and our partners that are in charge of this ER task [Music] um talking about the case of of of Amsterdam how the money arrived to the Netherlands it was just a an example in order to H for us in Latin America

you Europe ER is one of the most ordered and best place in order to fight against the corruption and inside Europe the Netherlands it's a good country but we are accustom in Venezuela to ER that the authorities close the doors in our faces so they the fat the prosecutor Office of the Netherlands have do the same and I am sharing with you our surprise in order to see how the world work really yes thank you Joseph lelia yes about of um human traffic H there are many links uh but difficult to prove because organized crime

uses even Ordinary People to traffic people without knowing that these people are working even for organized crime leaders a clear example is that of the SoCal poos who in Mexico are dedicated to charging migrants who use a bus to reach their final destination to United States usually uh they just receive the money and give it to a person they don't know nor want to know uh who they work with and that's uh the question it's very very difficult and um the videos about of I was talk about the the videos show a different ER topics

of the human trafficking and it's uh even the prosecutors ER can't uh follow the origin of the organized crime in this in these cases ER I I want to answer about of question about the privacy and data protection because it's very important to to say about on in Narco files we were very carefully H with the issue of privacy H we only publish information on people who were already convicted or sentenced and in most cases uh what we South uh was uh the to show the mechanism and process that organized crime groups um now carry

or Raider than to share for or resolve on unfinish invest vation case because the most important thing we must uh remember as investigative journalists is that we are not authorities nor the police or the prosecutor and in our cases ER all in the investigations it's about of show the the the the the the network the connections and sometimes the names of these people are very anonymous because it's not the top level and in the case uh of the publish public investigations the top levels are published but the names are the very very knower uh criminals

nowadays you very know in the different news and another questions I see about of the um tips from personal safety ER and I can answer to because uh for example in our case in ocrp is very important to to the security because all the journalist is very important for us and maintain constant uh communication with editors between reporters it's the first um um advice to to can I I I say uh do not do any reporting in the field without warning uh for example in our cases er uh sent like a schedule and hour by

hour uh I need to say uh I stay in a coffee station or in a park and I interview with uh that person and come back to my home and this is my security number and that is my number of my family if I have dangers ER and all the the information uh as I possible to to have because it's very important for all of of us uh and do not um do not see any Source without others knowing that you are going to interview someone because it's very common to to for I don't know

young journalist or any without experience oh I see a source and no one no one any any any knows and it's very dangerous because you need to to to cover your your back you need to other people say knows about of you interview with another people another person and in particular ER last do not comment even with other journalist outside of the investigation about your work ER because it's very important to uh cover only between the journalist to to participate in in this investigation and maybe for me it's that that's all thank you Lilia finally

Luis okay so the first question was how to find best Partners to collaborate about this I have two comments uh first the best partners are the ones who are actually interested in working with you uh make sure you are offering something that interests them do some research before check what they have published and what they might be good at collaborative journalism is about trust radical sharing and availability if some of the things do not exist there's no successful collaboration and second people who can contribute with something that you don't have data skills being a different

part of the world having different sources or access uh the other question was uh suggest to Young reporter who wants to start investigating uh for someone who's starting now learning something about spreadsheets and how to get public records in your region is always something valuable to offer in any team uh practice whatever you learn in a project it doesn't matter if it's a short project one blog post one video for Tik Tok a newsletter the best way to learn is to do it uh when you're are looking up for a specific Story look up companies

that are showing off on the internet nowadays everybody's talking on podcasts on YouTube conferences and uh it's always interesting to look up these people who are showing off because they're usually doing that because they trying to hide something about what they do or what the companies do and uh read independent news outlets not just the major newspapers attend conferences online like this there's always something new to learn thank you so much Lise um so I will now we're gonna go back now I'm GNA start with Lis then Lilia then Joseph and then Bianca and so

I will ask we have a couple of general questions so I will just ask two to each of you so I will start with you L now H the questions that people have asked is can you elaborate how AI has supported your investigations and if there are any particular topics or areas that you would like to dig next so let's start with Luis to be honest in this specific project we didn't use AI maybe we use it like CH GPT to check some code when we were cross referencing data but that was all I don't

remember remember like a very complex use of AI uh I think like the I I don't work for ICI I don't know exactly what they are doing uh but I'm always using uh this data from from environmental sections they are useful for several stories so one of the things that I have been looking up is environmental crime in indigenous areas because it's something that is not really covered uh uh some independent news outlets covered in Brazil but not the major newspapers in in Brazil so I think looking up for this kind of environmental crime and

how people from other countries benefit and and explore indigenous communities in Brazil with something uh that you can also find in this database that I presented you can find like of course you won't find the whole story but you can see the the starting point of a story in that database thank you Luis now I will go with Lilia so we have a couple of assistant of of people from the Middle East and North Africa we have a couple of journalists asking questions so one of the question is as journalists from the Middle East and

North Africa that want to collaborate with Latin American journalists what issues do you think that could be uh investigated together transnationally nothing only I think in in maybe the language but if all speak in English maybe it's very very easy to to do um sometimes the the the time to works because it's a very different time zones it's it's a hard to work with for example in my case Mexico it's a eight or nine hours but the difference between my colleagues in Europe and sometimes it's like uh I need to answer quickly or or I

need to sleep more or I need to wake up up very early because I need to work with my team but sometimes H and and the difference between the um um the the uh the source the sources because uh for for example in in Latin America uh obtain documents or or files or access to different files sometimes it's very hard to obtain and maybe it's the same situation in that countries or and I don't know maybe it's it's it's worse and needs to to do have a lot of work and working several times several months

sorry but I think and and it's curious because sometimes I saw the the same topics for example the politicians very corrupt corruption corruptus um very uh politicians are the same uh corruption uh laundry money ER smuggling and I think it's very similar the the the culture of the politicians in in that uh cases and maybe it's very very U possible to do a work with that teams right me no mail me thank you thank you Leila Lilia I would like to ask the same to Joseph like what topics do you think maybe Middle Eastern journalists

um and Latin American journalists could work together and also what uh topics are you trying to dig in next Joseph you and Armando info team yeah I've seen that some methodologies that we have used in order to investigate illicit gold smuggling from Venezuela ER to some other countries through our neighbor it is happening also in Africa in the same way actually we found a case that ER it's very difficult to investigate how some e Venezuelan gold ended up in in Uganda and in an opportunity we were looking for allies there so ER but talking about

cooperation collaboration ER I would like to remark ER what Lilia said about the protection of the sources and what Lis said about the trust a collaboration is based in trust at the beginning when we participated at the beginning with the with ICI the international Consortium of investigative journalist I have to acknowledge to confess you that ER it was so weird for me to sign an agreement now I understand the trust begin with an agreement if you don't know people in Latin America we are not accustomed to that but it could be a good beginning thank

you Joseph um finally bian like I want to ask the same question because people want to know like what of the wrongdoings you think are similar where do you see opportunities for uh for collaboration and also if you can tell us more about your next ideas for investigations are you going to stay in the same topic or do you want to uh go into something different yeah I think um and like Joseph was saying with um illegal mining uh there are so many parallels um I'm not sure about North Africa but I know that in

other African countries the mechanisms are the same and we know a lot about these mechanisms because we because there have been companies that have been investigated for the same uh type of um you know illegal gold Machinery so we know how it happens and we know that that it is replicated in many different parts of the of the world so I I think you know there is a lot of opportunity to collaborate with colleagues from the DRC for example there's you know a lot of regulations and this is something that I that I was that

really caught my attention when we were doing the investigation there's a lot of um attention and there's been regulation in the US regarding illegal mining from the DRC and there have been you know even laws that are passed uh to regulate how companies deal with companies in the DRC because it's considered to be a conflict region and you know the way that gold uh ends up financing uh you know armed conflict is is something that there's a lot of attention to it in the DRC but why is there not the same type of attention when

it comes to how illegal mining funds um illegal criminal organizations in Colombia or in Ecuador where illegal mining is becoming a a you know greater problem um and that those are questions that that I don't really have the answer to and I think that you know having more International collaboration can help um in terms of topics that I'm looking to investigate more about I think that um there's uh a big problem with the carbon carbon credit certifications and that's something that really interests me I think that um like L was talking about you know the

environmental crimes in indigenous communities and I think that carbon crediting is is something that an industry that is very clearly has a lot of opportunity for fraud um and I think that that's something that I would like to to learn more about and look into um and these are again stories that have supply chain uh you know links to Europe or to um North Africa and the Middle East or to the US so I think those environmental crimes are uh very good opportunities for collaboration excellent Bianca thank you so much now I will pass the

word to Carlos uh thank you Andrea well unfortunately uh we have run out of time before we close I would like to thank the global investigative journalism Network and and all of you our audience today and a very big thanks you to our speakers Bianca thank you Joseph the same Lilia and Miss Fernand thank you thank you so much for your participation some of you ask me in priv about the free course about how to investigate environmental CRS in Amazon focus in Peru Ecuador and Colombia are going to share again the link into the chat

box and uh finally we be sure to watch gn's Twitter fits in G and the website for details on future events H once again thank you all and goodbye thank thank you guys thank you