Deep in Peru’s Amazon rainforest, tens of thousands of struggling wildcat miners use backhoes, pickaxes, and high-powered hoses to rip the metal from pristine jungle riverbanks and toxic mercury to strip it from rock. Violent drug traffickers and other criminal gangs control many of the mines and smuggling routes. Mining camps are overrun by vermin and disease. Women and children are coerced into the sex trade to serve the hard-living miners, who travel from Perú’s mountains and coasts to find some of the most lucrative work available in this country of 32.5 million people.

Produced in association with Jigsaw Productions, Emmy award-winning filmmaker Stephen Maing helms an immersive telling of the problematic dealings of a U.S. based company called Elemental LLC and its Miami-based subsidiary NTR Metals’ law-breaking foray into the world of illegal gold mining in Madre De Dios, Peru. Led by salesmen Samer Barrage, Juan Granda and Renato Rodriguez imported more than $3.6 billion worth of illicit gold to their employer in just three years. A vacuum of greed that transforms humans into smugglers. Sneaking every bit of particle across the border where they are melted and entered into the legitimate market—and like that, resold throughout our entire supply chain in the name of the US Mint, Apple, Google, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Dow Jones, Lockheed Martin, and the Walt Disney Company.