Financial Times Discovers Illicit Gold Mining, Omits Anglo-American Hand
Here's the FT, shaking its corporate head at the 'illicit' gold miners poisoning the Amazon (Source: Financial Times, 'Illicit gold mining leaves Amazonians with mercury poisoning'). How very concerned. One might almost forget that corporations like Anglo-American, Rio Tinto, and countless others, often headquartered in London, have been extracting resources from the global south for centuries,
leaving behind their own toxic legacies—only with more polished PR and boardroom approval. This 'illicit' framing carefully avoids any inconvenient questions about the legal frameworks that enabled prior, equally destructive, resource grabs that destabilized regions and left populations vulnerable to precisely this kind of exploitation. It’s almost as if the only time environmental destruction
becomes newsworthy is when it can be blamed on unorganized, unregulated actors, rather than the systematic processes of corporate capital accumulation that benefit the very nations where the Financial Times is published. How many of these 'illicit' operations are simply downstream—quite literally—of a global economic system designed to extract wealth, regardless of the 'licit' label?