The U.S. Mint Buys Drug Cartel Gold

By law, the U.S. Mint must buy American gold. Instead, they are buying drug cartel gold while assuring us it is American gold;

Chet Nagle ——Bio and Archives--May 10, 2026

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“To hold a coin or medal produced by the Mint is to connect to the founding principles of our nation,” the U.S. Mint declares. That is a lie. In 1985 Congress passed a law prohibiting the Mint from making coins and bullion bars from foreign gold because it wanted to divorce that process from human rights abuses like South African apartheid practices.

An investigation team of reporters from the New York Times, Justin Scheck, Simón Posada, and Federico Rios, have exposed the Mint scam in an article published on 27 April. Much of my data here is taken from that article.

The Mint currently mints several gold coin programs in two categories, investment coins and collector numismatic coins. Below are investment and commemorative coins.

Because of the current gold frenzy, the Mint sells more than a billion dollars of these coins every year, including small bars of gold. But the Mint buys gold to make those coins from a Colombian drug cartel mine. It also makes coins from gold that originated in Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and even from a Congolese mine that is partly owned by the Chinese government. Some Mint gold comes from a company in Honduras that dug up a native graveyard for the gold beneath.

When the investigating reporters approached the Mint with these facts the Mint said America was its “primary” source and assured them that the Mint was taking steps to better track its gold sources.

The person who oversees the Mint is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and he said that he would investigate gold procurement practices. In a subsequent written statement he said, “This review is focused on ensuring that the U.S. Mint’s gold suppliers comply with the law and strictly satisfy their obligations, and that the Mint takes every step possible to continue to vigorously safeguard our national security and uphold market integrity.” The enforcement steps that the Treasury Department should make to backup that statement are still known.

For illegally mined foreign gold to become a Mint coin, two acts of magic must happen: First, illegal gold must become legal gold, and second, it must become American.

To begin to see how that magic was done the reporters went into the heart of the drug dealing Clan del Golfo territory in northwestern Columbia. They visited a ranch the miners called La Mandinga, the name of an evil spirit. Clan del Golfo is Columbia’s biggest cartel, and it traffics in cocaine and gold. To mine gold the hundreds of mining teams must get permission from the cartel that subsequently “taxes” them.

The magic of making Mandinga gold legal is buried in paperwork

The magic of making Mandinga gold legal is buried in paperwork. Before a mining group goes to work it must be licensed by the Columbian government. The miners must state that they will mine........

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