Operation ENCANTO: deforestation and crime convergence in the Amazon

The Amazon Rainforest, home to over half the world’s tropical forests and biodiversity, is greatly imperiled due to increasing environmental crime. Driven by demand for commodities like beef and gold, illegal activities—logging, cattle ranching, drug trafficking, and wildlife trafficking—are converging to fuel deforestation. This convergence accelerates biodiversity loss, disrupts ecosystems, displaces Indigenous communities, and incites violence, posing a global threat.

While coca continues to be cultivated in the Colombian Amazon region, illegal cattle ranching has displaced it as the top driver of deforestation. According to various reports, 80% of agricultural land used for cattle has over the last five years largely been obtained through land grabbing, mostly by wealthy landholders. Much of this land comes from illegal deforestation, with farmers and landholders clearing forests in order to create pasture for their cattle.

Photo credit Earth League International

While illegally cleared land is detectable via satellite and other means, such as fire-spotting, national and local government approaches to illegal clearing of protected areas have been ineffective, and the deforestation continues apace.

Satellites and aerial photos do not help understanding who the key people behind these illegal activities are. Only field investigations and intelligence work can obtain this vital knowledge on the top environmental criminal actors and their modus operandi. The who and how.

Corruption plays a role in either legalizing the behavior via permitting or title granting, or at a minimum allowing it to continue. Colombian authorities told ELI that they do not have enough resources and they need intelligence to better understand how to tackle this issue.

Narcotrafficking, which according to ELI’s sources remains the biggest source of illegal revenue in the region, provides much of the capital for criminal groups’ expansion into illegal ranching, logging, mining, IUU fishing, and other environmental crimes. The origins of illegally obtained beef, fish, timber and gold are obscured and their profits laundered via mixing within the same category of legally obtained commodities. Drug proceeds are laundered via all these commodities. While deforestation for ranching is happening at a more rapid pace than that for drug cultivation, from a financial standpoint, the relationship is symbiotic, and one helps drive the other.

 

Operation ENCANTO, in collaboration with IUCN Netherlands and other partners, is an ongoing long-term intelligence-gathering operation aimed at investigating environmental crime convergence causing deforestation and destruction of the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil and Colombia, particularly as it relates to land grabbing, cattle ranching in protected areas, illegal mining, the displacement of Indigenous communities, and the convergence with other serious crimes.

The operation’s goals are to enhance law enforcement’s capacity to understand, investigate, detect, and prevent environmental crime in the Amazon region, as well as its connection to larger organized crime networks that span the globe. We aim to reduce criminal groups’ ability to profit from the wholesale destruction of the Amazon Rainforest.

The ongoing information-gathering operation spans various sectors, including the Economic Sector, Judiciary, Executive Branch, Indigenous People, and Civil Society.

A truck moving cows in the Amazon region. Photo credit: Earth League International

Through field investigations, extensive meetings and interviews in the field, and online network analysis and company research, ELI identified hundreds of people, properties, and businesses linked or suspected to be linked to land grabbing and illegal ranching and farming in the country’s Amazon region.

As the operation is ongoing, our ability to provide updates or share more information is limited due to security concerns.

The deforestation of the Amazon is not simply a conservation issue. This phenomenon is driven by a complex convergence of criminal activities. These criminal activities include illegal logging, illegal cattle ranching, illicitly harvested timber, drug trafficking, money laundering, wildlife trafficking, incursion into protected areas, mining, and land appropriations. Ultimately, environmental crime and its convergence with other serious crimes underlie and perpetuate the destruction of the Amazon’s biodiversity, ecosystems, and species, as well as the livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

This complex project builds upon ELI’s years of working in the field, especially its operations in Latin America over the past eight years. Our work in Latin America has greatly advanced a deeper understanding of environmental crimes and converging criminal activities in this region. Through these operations, ELI has collected, analyzed, and disseminated large amounts of data and first-hand information related to environmental crimes in the region.