Gold in its very essence is shiny, beautiful, and ultimately noble. It has long been a sign of royalty, riches, and refinement. Unless, you spend a lot of time looking at how it came out of the ground. Like most industries in the world, there are good guys and bad guys. There are plenty of gold mining facilities and locations that run a perfectly clean operation and improve the socio-economic standing of the region and/or country in which they operate.
Unfortunately, those bad guys are bad enough that they can make the whole industry look and smell really, really foul. Gold mining seems to have joined diamond mining as the business du jour for international slime balls. These slime balls include everyone from drug lords to human traffickers to genocidal guerrillas. A few really bad guys can have an extremely negative effect on the rest of the industry.