A 3-Year Intelligence Operation on the Criminal Drivers Behind Amazon Deforestation. Cattle Ranching, Cocaine and Gold
2025 was for ELI the culmination of more than 3 years of intelligence operations in the Colombian Amazon.
Since 2022, through Operation ENCANTO, ELI has undertaken an extensive field investigation in Colombia to gather intelligence on the main players and the criminal, financial, and logistical systems driving large-scale deforestation across the region.
The operation aims to strengthen national and international’s capacity to understand, investigate, detect, and prevent environmental crime in the Amazon region, while also uncovering its links to transnational organized crime networks and exposing those responsible.
Through advanced investigative operations and the collection of Human Intelligence (HUMINT), ELI’s teams gained access to some of the most remote regions of the Colombian Amazon, including the borders with Brazil and Venezuela, documenting how organized criminal networks exploit environmental resources for profit.
ELI’s field operations investigated cattle ranching, coca plantations, and illegal mining (gold and coltan) across multiple departments, with Meta, Caquetá, and Guaviare emerging as the most heavily affected by illegal land grabbing and other organized criminal activities.
ELI’s teams met with local communities, traders, park rangers, political and military officials, and FARC dissidents, gathering first-hand intelligence that revealed how these criminal markets overlap and reinforce one another.
We identified dozens of Persons of Interest (POIs) and documented links between Chinese transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), FARC dissident groups, and legally registered livestock companies.
Our teams also obtained a sensitive list of 300 ranches operating inside protected areas under guerrilla control, critical intelligence that reveals the true scale of the illegal cattle trade and its convergence with other criminal markets.
Narco-trafficking remains the biggest source of illegal revenue in the region, provides much of the capital for criminal groups’ expansion into environmental crimes.
These findings illustrate a wider pattern of environmental crime convergence: across Latin America, powerful TCOs are infiltrating and controlling illicit economies—illegal mining, logging, ranching, fishing, and wildlife crime—that were once seen merely as conservation issues.
A Confidential Intelligence Brief (CIB) has been shared with government authorities in Colombia and other countries.
The full public report on Operation ENCANTO will be published in 2026.
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Operation ENCANTO was part of a wider research effort in collaboration with IUCN NL and Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development Colombia (FCDS).
