Whose Gold Is This

And the problem is that once gold hits the Dubai market, its origin gets blurry.

You can't always tell a bar of Sudanese conflict gold from a bar of legitimately sourced gold.

It gets melted, refined, mixed, sold on.

Después, el oro está en joyerías.

Afterwards, the gold is in jewelry stores.

Está en teléfonos.

It is in phones.

Yes.

Gold is in electronics, in jewelry, in financial instruments.

There is a statistical chance that something you own contains gold that passed through this supply chain.

That's not a comfortable thought.

Es como el problema del coltán en África central.

It is like the coltan problem in central Africa.

The Congo comparison is apt.

Coltan, which goes into every smartphone capacitor, came out of mines controlled by armed groups in eastern DRC for years.

The minerals legislation that came out of that, Dodd-Frank section 1502 in the US, was an attempt to force companies to trace their supply chains.

But gold has never had equivalent enforcement pressure.

Las empresas dicen: 'No sabemos el origen.' Pero sí saben.

Companies say: 'We do not know the origin.' But they do know.

That's a pointed observation.

The OECD has due diligence guidelines for gold supply chains.

The LBMA, the London Bullion Market Association, has responsible sourcing standards.

But the enforcement gap between what the guidelines say and what actually gets audited is enormous.

Hay sanciones contra la RSF.

There are sanctions against the RSF.

Pero el oro continúa.

But the gold continues.

The US has sanctioned RSF-linked entities.

The EU has done some of the same.

But sanctions on gold are harder to enforce than sanctions on, say, oil, because oil requires infrastructure, pipelines, tankers.

Gold can be moved by one person in a bag.

El oro es pequeño.

Gold is small.

El oro es valioso.

Gold is valuable.

Fácil de esconder.

Easy to hide.

Extremely portable value.

That's the whole point of it historically, actually.

Going back centuries, gold's physical properties make it ideal as a store of value across borders and regimes.

Which is beautiful when you're a merchant and catastrophic when you're trying to cut off a warlord's cash flow.

En Sudán, hay mucha gente sin comida.

In Sudan, there are many people without food.

Sin casa.

Without a home.

Sin trabajo.

Without work.

The humanitarian numbers are staggering.

The UN calls it one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet right now.

Over ten million people displaced.

That's a number that's hard to hold in your head.

Sudan's economy was already fragile after decades of mismanagement and international isolation.

The war has essentially collapsed whatever formal economy existed.

Pero la guerra continúa.

But the war continues.

Porque el oro continúa.

Because the gold continues.

That's the brutal logic of it.

The resource finances the conflict which allows the resource extraction which finances the conflict.

You can't negotiate your way out of that loop easily, because the incentive to keep fighting is baked into the economics.

Hemeti tiene dinero.

Hemeti has money.

Los generales del ejército también tienen dinero.

The army generals also have money.

The Sudanese Armed Forces aren't exactly innocent here.

They've had their own involvement in Sudan's shadow economy, oil revenues, control of state enterprises.

This isn't a story of clean versus dirty.

It's a story of two elites fighting over who controls the extraction.

La gente normal no tiene nada.

Ordinary people have nothing.

Los dos grupos tienen mucho.

The two groups have a lot.

I spent time in the late nineties reporting in countries where this structure was the norm, not the exception.

Angola during its civil war.

Sierra Leone, where diamonds did exactly what gold is doing in Sudan now.

And what's consistent across all those cases is that the civilian population absorbs all the cost while the armed groups harvest all the revenue.

¿Hay una solución?

Is there a solution?

Yo no sé.

I do not know.

Honestly, the structural solutions are clearer than the political will to implement them.

Better traceability technology exists.

Blockchain-based provenance tracking for gold has been piloted.

Tighter regulation of gold importers in transit hubs like Dubai is technically possible.

The question is whether governments and companies decide the problem is costly enough to actually fix.

El dinero es más importante que las personas.

Money is more important than people.

Eso es el problema.

That is the problem.

I'm not going to argue with that.

The fighting in Kordofan this week, those fourteen people in Umm Arda, they're not dying over ideology.

They're dying over territory that has gold under it, and the gold is going to end up on a market somewhere, and someone is going to profit.

That chain is the story.

Oye, yo tengo una pregunta para ti, Fletcher.

Hey, I have a question for you, Fletcher.

Go ahead.

Dijiste 'hay oro en Sudán.' ¿Por qué dices 'hay' y no 'existe'?

You said 'there is gold in Sudan.' Why do you say 'hay' and not 'existe'?

Ha, you're going to make this a lesson?

Right now?

Fine.

I said 'hay' because...

well, I heard you say it and I borrowed it.

Honestly, I've never been fully sure when to use 'hay' versus something else.

'Hay' significa 'there is' o 'there are.' Es una sola palabra para los dos.

'Hay' means 'there is' or 'there are.' It is one word for both.

One word covers both singular and plural.

So 'hay un problema' is 'there is one problem' and 'hay muchos problemas' is 'there are many problems.' Same word, no change.

Exacto.

Exactly.

'Hay guerra.' 'Hay minas.' 'Hay personas sin casa.' Siempre 'hay.'

'There is war.' 'There are mines.' 'There are people without homes.' Always 'hay.'

English uses 'there is' and 'there are' and makes you choose every time.

Spanish just says 'hay' and moves on.

I genuinely find that elegant.

Though knowing me, I will find some way to use it wrong.

Sí.

Yes.

Hay muchos errores en tu futuro, Fletcher.

There are many mistakes in your future, Fletcher.

Hay muchos errores en mi pasado too, if we're being honest.

Thanks for that.

And thanks to everyone listening.

The story in Sudan is one that deserves more attention than it gets.

We'll link some further reading in the notes.