How They Did It: Investigating Organized Crime Networks in the Amazon Rainforest

by Santiago Villa • October 31, 2023

The Amazon rainforest harbors an underworld network of criminal economies that range from drug and wildlife trafficking to illegal mining, fishing, and logging.

Although these activities have been taking place in the Amazon rainforest for at least two decades now, three factors have recently exacerbated them: the COVID-19 pandemic, which lowered the budget states had available to improve security and oversight in the region; former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who tacitly supported deforestation and land grabbing and was indifferent towards illegal activities in the Amazon; and the failed implementation of Colombia’s 2016 peace accords, which atomized the FARC guerrillas into a myriad of criminal transnational networks.

Journalists and civil society organizations received a brutal wake-up call about the extent to which the Amazon has been occupied the underworld when the Guardian correspondent Dom Phillips and Indigenist Bruno Pereira were murdered in 2022 in the Javari Valley, an area in Brazil that borders Peru and Colombia.

“The deaths of Dom and Bruno were a tipping point for journalists. We never thought the Amazon was a conflict region. We never thought it would be dramatically more dangerous for journalists to conduct work in the Amazon than in other areas notorious for violence,” said Bram Ebus, an investigative journalist who has more than a decade of experience reporting from all the different countries that compose the Amazon basin.

More:
https://gijn.org/how-they-did-it-investigating-organized-crime-networks-in-the-amazon-rainforest/