At least 2,400 metric tons of tin moved from one Brazilian smelter to a single American alloy maker over four years. That is the headline number in an investigation Repórter Brasil published on 18 September 2026, and it comes with an uncomfortable detail: the smelter, White Solder, is now a defendant in a Brazilian criminal case over cassiterite dug illegally in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory.
Repórter Brasil, working from customs records, reported that White Solder shipped at least 525 metric tons to Indium Corporation in the United States between May 2023 and August 2025. Indium sells solder to Raytheon, which builds radars and precision-guided missiles and holds several U.S. government contracts. The outlet noted that Raytheon reported US$88 billion in revenue for 2025.
The second buyer is Nathan Trotter, which calls itself North America’s largest maker of tin and solder alloys. From August 2021 to August 2025 it received at least 2,400 metric tons from White Solder, the customs data showed. In September 2024 the U.S. Department of Defense gave the company US$19 million to set up a tin smelting, refining and recycling plant in Pennsylvania. The department’s own release framed the money as a way to counter “Chinese efforts to monopolize the global supply.”
The case in Brazil
In August 2026 a federal court accepted a complaint from the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office and named White Solder and its managing partner as defendants. The charges are criminal organization, money laundering and illegal cassiterite mining. Prosecutors say the company paid R$166 million to Coopertin, a cooperative they describe as a shell that gave a legal paper trail to more than 525 tons of cassiterite taken from the territory in 2021 and 2022. Prosecutor André Luiz Porreca, who led the inquiry, said the ore went to the company’s branch in Ariquemes, in Rondônia state, where it was smelted into ingots. “Thus, cassiterite extracted from unauthorized locations can easily be inserted into the legal market,” he said.
A separate Repórter Brasil report, produced with Greenpeace Brasil and published on 17 September, looked at purchases of more than 2,300 metric tons of cassiterite between 2020 and 2025 that White Solder tied to two areas in Campo Novo de Rondônia. Satellite images, flights and field visits found no signs of mining there. Greenpeace called the sites “ghost mines.”
What the companies said
White Solder, Nathan Trotter, Raytheon, Coopertin and the Defense Department did not answer the outlet’s questions. Indium said it buys tin from smelters that meet the standards of the Responsible Minerals Initiative, and that White Solder was on that group’s compliant list while the metal was delivered. It did not say whether White Solder still supplies it. The initiative told Repórter Brasil it would review the evidence before deciding whether to keep the company listed.
Emily Iona Stewart of Global Witness warned that the U.S. military’s growing appetite for raw materials will bring more mining harm, legal and illegal, unless safeguards and due diligence are put in place and followed. The prosecutors have also opened a civil inquiry into buyers of White Solder tin, and the document names Brazilian units of ten multinationals. Repórter Brasil stressed that appearing in a company’s conflict-minerals filing does not show White Solder tin ended up in its products.
