Brazil once again leads the world in the loss of primary tropical forests. New data shows the country accounted for 42% of global primary rainforest loss in 2024, largely due to widespread fires throughout the nation and in neighboring Bolivia, Colombia and Peru.
The 2024 spike in Amazon forest loss was due in large part to one of the worst fire seasons on record. But what’s often missed is the fact that recent fires in tropical primary forests are by no means a “natural” disaster. Rather, the conflagration represents a perfect storm of climate change-induced environmental conditions, governance failures and unchecked, organized criminality.
Fires in the Amazon are largely started by arson1 and related criminal activity accompanying agriculture, logging, mining and road building. In fact, a recent survey of government data concluded that 91% of forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon is linked to illegal activity like land-clearing for agriculture and artisanal mining, often orchestrated by well-structured international criminal enterprises.
Nature crime has long been an overlooked but growing driver of deforestation in the Amazon — one that’s pushing into new territories.
Borderlands: Criminal Threats to the Amazon’s Most Remote Regions
Forest loss in the Amazon has historically been greatest in the “arc of deforestation” stretching from east to west along the southern flank of the biome. This is also where the majority of the 2024 fires took place, where most forest conversion to agriculture and cattle ranching has occurred, and where most people in the Amazon live. But it is not the only part of the Amazon that’s threatened.
The twin cities of Leticia, Colombia and Tabatinga, Brazil lie at the heart of the thinly governed tri-border area of the northwestern Amazon, where Brazil, Colombia and Peru meet. A metropolitan area with a population of 110,000 lying just across the Amazon River from Peru, the two cities are the commercial center for a criminal economy that has boomed over the past 25 years. The proximity of these cities to their resource-rich rainforest hinterlands, connected to the wider world by the planet’s largest river system, has been fertile soil for the growth of organized crime.
It largely began with cocaine.
Cocaine Blues: Drugs Take Root in the Amazon
Criminal groups from Brazil and Colombia were initially attracted to the Amazon decades ago because of the trade in illicit drugs, principally cocaine. The coca plant (Erythroxylum coca) has traditionally been cultivated in the Peruvian Andes for thousands of years. More recently, coca cultivation has spread in the lowland Amazon to supply the illicit drug trade. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported in 2023 that cocaine’s use worldwide was at an all-time high.
Seizing on this insatiable global demand, a shifting constellation of Brazilian, Peruvian and Colombian organized crime enterprises have, over the past 25 years, systematically expanded coca cultivation and cocaine production in the tri-border area, including the critical transport route to Manaus about 1,000 kilometers downriver and onward to urban Brazil, Europe and elsewhere. A 2025 report by investigative journalism outlet Ojo Público determined that criminal organizations dominating the cocaine trade in the tri-border region were present in 54 of 75 border towns. While the razing of the rainforest for coca production in the tri-border area is not on the scale of clearing for agriculture and cattle in other parts of the Amazon, it is locally significant — particularly in the Peruvian border Province of Mariscal Ramon Castilla and in the neighboring Department of Putumayo in Colombia.
But moreover, cocaine development leads to other nature crimes that also fuel deforestation. In the tri-border area, Ojo Público found, for example, that drug trafficking is linked with the illegal timber trade — a sort of criminal “economy of scale.” Government suppression of airborne smuggling routes has also increasingly displaced drug trafficking and associated violence to the river routes, and hence to the Amazon border area.
Here, the criminal infrastructure built principally for cocaine is increasingly facilitating illegal deforestation, timber trafficking and illegal gold mining, via control of transport routes, corruption and intimidation of local authorities and communities, as well as the fear of violence.
The convergence between nature crimes and drug trafficking in the Amazon is also greatly facilitated by the “flying money” rackets run by Chinese organized crime groups. Essentially, this is a combined barter-and-money-laundering system where precursor chemicals from China for the manufacture of fentanyl and other illicit drugs in Latin America are traded off the books for Amazonian wildlife, gold and other products of forest crime, thus serving as both a payment system and a method of laundering illicit funds.
Among those most impacted by this crime wave are Indigenous Peoples. The Amazon is home to some 1.5 million Indigenous People, whose ancestral territories are some of the most effective forest conservation areas. However, many Indigenous territories in the Amazon are not effectively protected by law or government authorities. This, in combination with their relative abundance of valuable timber, wildlife and gold, makes these areas attractive targets for illegal mining and logging.
All That Glitters: Illegal Gold Mining Fuels Environmental Destruction
The price of gold has skyrocketed in the past 20 years, and annual illegal gold flows now total more than $30 billion. Gold mining is a massive part of the illegal economy in the Amazon’s tri-border area and beyond, generating greater profits than cocaine. While some mining directly clears forests, other mining is river-based. It affects the entire forest ecosystem, including the Puré and Cotuhé rivers that traverse protected areas on the Colombian side of the border.
Gold mining directly damages forests through clearing and dredging rivers with heavy equipment. The widespread use of mercury, a potent neurotoxin, as an amalgamation agent to separate gold from ore not only poisons people, but also harms trees, birds and fish. Human health problem often persist even when mining stops, as has happened in Brazil’s Munduruku Indigenous territory.
Criminal groups are involved with gold mining in various ways. It is a main revenue source for Colombian non-state armed groups. Others use gold to launder illicit proceeds from the drug trade, bankroll massive dredges and other mining equipment, extort money from small-scale artisanal gold miners, or establish their own mining operations, often relying on forced labor. Criminal networks across Latin America are also involved in the trafficking of mercury.
Illegal gold mining is also prevalent in another Amazonian tri-border area where Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela meet; the illegal gold trade there has been openly promoted by Venezuela’s Maduro regime. The criminal utility of porous borders is well illustrated here: As recently as 2022, illegal Venezuelan gold was regularly smuggled into Brazil and onward to the United States and other international markets. After Inacio Lula de Silva assumed the Brazilian Presidency in 2023 and cracked down on illegal gold mining, the flow reversed, and traffickers began to smuggle illegal Brazilian gold into Venezuela, as well as into Guyana and Suriname.
Gold is not the only valuable mineral found in the Amazon. Organized criminal groups are reportedly seeking cassiterite, a chief ore of tin and a critical mineral for the green energy transition — sometimes called “black gold” — including in the Yanomami Indigenous territory of Brazil’s Roraima state.
Fishy Business: Overharvesting the Pirarucu
The Amazon is both a forest and the world’s greatest river system. Given the Amazon’s rich fisheries, it is not surprising that a booming illicit trade in high-value fish such as the protected pirarucu (Arapaima gigas) has become yet another criminal profit center in the Brazilian Amazon. The world’s largest freshwater fish is taken for its meat, scales and for the aquarium trade. It was pirarucu traffickers who in 2022 murdered British journalist Dom Phillips2 and Bruno Pereira, a member of Brazil’s Indigenous protection agency FUNAI, to thwart their investigation into illegal activities in the isolated Javari Valley on the Peruvian border. The region is home to one of the largest populations of uncontacted Indigenous People on Earth, but is also now a haven for drug and environmental crime. While some Indigenous and riverine communities fish sustainably for pirarucu and have helped fish populations rebound in some areas, the illegal trade still flourishes, having surged during the COVID-19 pandemic.
New Frontiers: Ecuador’s Nature Crime Crisis
And nature crime isn’t limited to the Amazon’s tri-border area. The Ecuadorian Amazon was largely spared the scourge of natural resource-related crime until recently. This changed dramatically in the past five years; there are thought to be at least 22 organized “narco-terrorist” groups operating in the country as of 2024. As in neighboring countries, narco-trafficking gangs in Ecuador have rapidly expanded into illegal logging and gold mining, often in national parks and Indigenous territories.
The global wind energy boom has also fueled organized crime in Ecuador, which holds large stocks of balsa (Ochroma pyramidale), the preferred timber for wind turbine blades. Ecuador produces over 90% of the world’s balsa, but booming Chinese demand over the past decade has decimated the country’s stock and spurred a wave of illegal logging that’s spilled into Peru.
Strategies for Reducing Nature Crime in the Amazon
In such a vast, resource-rich and thinly governed region, natural resource crime cannot realistically be eradicated, particularly given the entrenched durability of the trade in cocaine and other illicit drugs. But governments can reduce crime if they work together on deterrence and protect Indigenous People’s territories and rights.
Strengthening Cooperation on Nature Crime Among Amazon Nations
Nature crime thrives in thinly governed border regions where criminals take advantage of countries’ siloed jurisdictions by border-hopping to conceal crimes and evade capture. States need to cooperate more effectively than they do today to change this situation, particularly in the vulnerable borderlands.
An August 2023 summit of the heads of state of eight members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) issued the Declaration of Belem, committing signatories to “promote the exchange of information and policy and intelligence cooperation to combat illegal activities and environmental crimes affecting the Amazon region.” Brazil followed up in 2024 by establishing an international policing and security center in Manaus that will eventually host officers from all ACTO member countries.
To make good on this commitment, countries need to strengthen and harmonize their laws pertinent to forest crime; increase information-sharing in real time among intelligence agencies, including remote-sensing information; and organize cross-border operations on trafficking in narcotics, timber, gold and wildlife. Cooperation among national financial intelligence units to detect and sanction money laundering and other financial crimes is also critical.
Brazil has already shown some success in thwarting illegal gold mining in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory that straddles the Venezuelan border. The country launched more than 4,000 suppression operations since 2024, which reduced illegal mining in the territory by more than 90% by early 2025.
Countries also need to strengthen their national legal frameworks. In April 2025, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the federal government to seize private properties where owners cause illegal deforestation or wildfires. Although likely to face appeal, the ruling is a major step towards blocking “regularization,” the process by which illegally cleared and acquired public land in the Amazon becomes legal, a main driver of deforestation. Unfortunately, that same month lawmakers in the Amazon state of Rondônia passed legislation granting amnesty to hundreds of cattle ranchers who had illegally cleared rainforest, in direct opposition to the Supreme Court ruling.
Effectively Protect Indigenous Rights and Territories
Approximately 163.8 million hectares — nearly 20% of the Amazon basin — consists of officially recognized Indigenous territories, home to an estimated 1.5 million people from more than 350 ethnic groups. These areas are comparatively better conserved than the rest of the Amazon and are also major carbon sinks. But legal recognition, by itself, is no talisman against invasion. Effective protection requires the removal — by force if necessary — of non-Indigenous gold miners, loggers, traffickers and other outsiders. Only the state has the legitimate authority to do this. And historically, the state has often come down on the side of the invaders.
With valuable resources in the sights of organized criminal gangs, territorial control will remain a struggle, with Indigenous Peoples often on the front lines. Allies can support Indigenous communities in monitoring their territories against incursions and securely reporting intelligence to trusted national and regional enforcement authorities.
Civil society organizations in Peru have made progress in this area by equipping Indigenous communities with geospatial monitoring tools and training, leading to a dramatic decrease in deforestation. Unfortunately, this promising approach was recently undermined by the Peruvian government itself, which effectively legalized deforestation in the name of “economic development.”
A more hopeful example comes from Colombia, which in early 2025 created a one-million-hectare territory to protect isolated Indigenous groups and the pristine forests they inhabit. This follows on a wider process to formally recognize 25 territories of more than 45 Indigenous Peoples as Indigenous Territorial Entities, together covering 36% of the Colombian Amazon.
Protecting the ‘Lungs of the Earth’
As we think about the future of the Amazon, it’s instructive to reflect on the lives of two people whose fates have been intertwined with it. Marina Silva, who worked closely with rubber tapper and rainforest activist Chico Mendes until his murder in 1988, is now Brazil’s Minister of Environment, her second time in the post. She will play a critical role at the upcoming UN climate summit (COP30) in Belem, Brazil and is a champion of Amazon conservation.
Then there is Darci Alves Pereira, the man who confessed to murdering Chico Mendes on the orders of his father, a violent land-grabber in the Amazon state of Acre. Father and son were sentenced in 1990 to 19 years in prison, but “escaped” a few years later and, when recaptured, received early release. By 2024, Alves had changed his name, become an Evangelical preacher, and briefly served as local head of the political party of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right president well-known for his opposition to Amazon conservation and hostility to Indigenous Peoples.
Footnotes
1 Under drought conditions, a fire deliberately set to clear one area easily expands to adjacent areas. “Arson” may intentionally target a certain area, but spread to a much larger territory. If the original act of arson is deliberate, the perpetrator is culpable for all of the ensuring damage, whether caused intentionally or by reckless indifference to the likely consequences.
2 Dom Phillips’ posthumous book, How to Save The Amazon: A Journalist’s Fatal Quest for Answers was published in June 2025.
