The raids began at dawn as the sun rose over the Tapajós river and more than 100 police swooped on a dozen locations in the most sophisticated operation yet against suspected timber laundering in Brazil – a practice that allows consumers in the US and Europe to buy flooring and furniture with what they think is a clear conscience.
More than 30 officials, local businessmen and sawmill owners were arrested in Pará state in the north of the country this morning as prosecutors targeted what they say is a criminal organisation that whitewashes environmental crimes and reveals the flimsiness of Brazil’s logging controls.
The investigation may have international ramifications. One third of Brazil’s timber exports, worth £496m annually, went to the EU (particularly France) and a slightly smaller share to the US. More than half of this wood was from Pará state, which is the main source for the dense hardwoods such as ipê (Brazilian walnut) used in construction, decking and furniture.
Most of the arrests took place in Santarém, a fast-growing city that sits on the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers. Flanked by land that is nominally protected – nature reserves, indigenous territory, and farms that ought to be regulated by sustainable forestry laws – it is in reality the frontline of deforestation and is claimed to be the main source of Brazil’s dubiously produced timber exports.
Prosecutors said that among those so far arrested is a major land owner who earlier this year was presented with a plaque by the a local governor honouring him as a model for agriculture in the Amazon.
Prosecutors say that the investigation, named Madeira Limpa (Clean Timber), began by accident after prosecutors and police started tapping the phone of an alleged drug smuggler nicknamed Paçoca. After two months, they claim they realised he had switched his focus from narcotics to timber laundering.
Investigators said while drugs were highly stigmatised, timber certification is a respectable activity and was also lucrative.
“Like any businessman, he was simply following the money,” said Ildo Gasparetto, the superintendent of the federal police in Pará.
Prosecutors believe he and a partner generated fake documentation for at least 100,000 cubic metres of timber each month.
Public prosecutor, Fabiana Schneider, said she believed that their operation had targeted some of the “biggest illegal traders of timber in Brazil.”
Paçoca used a private jet and recently bought a 500,000 reais (£89,000) Range Rover Vogue. His nephew,– who prosecutors alleged to be an accountant for the syndicate – was the first to be brought into the federal police station in Santarém, his face covered in a jacket. He was followed shortly afterwards by the arrest in Belém of one of the alleged financiers of the group, who tried to hide himself in the bathroom to avoid arrest, according to police.
Most of the laundering was reportedly done through the creation of fake or inflated creditos florestais, a document that defines how much timber a landowner is entitled to extract from his property. In one case, prosecutors say officials changed an approval for 121 cubic metres of wood to 121,000 cubic metres simply by adding three noughts.
The papers are then “sold” to phantom companies that use the dodgy documents to “wash” illegally acquired logs (often from nature reserves or indigenous territories) so they can be purchased by small timber yards, which process and ship them to bigger operations. There are then often several more steps – all aimed at obfuscating the origin – before the timber is sold off as certified on the domestic and international markets.
The scope of the investigation has widened rapidly as wiretaps and other leads according to prosecutors uncovered a chain of financing, land acquisition and official corruption, allegedly stretching embarrassingly deep into the government’s deforestation control system.
The most prominent of those arrested was a high profile official at the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (better known by its Portuguese acronym Incra). The organisation was set up to oversee land distribution but prosecutors claim that corrupt officials within it only grant land to those who promise to supply illegal wood in return.
The arrest of relatively senior officials is considered significant. “If we didn’t have corruption inside these public organs, this business would not be possible,” noted Schneider.
Most of Brazil’s timber exports are certified as sustainably logged, but according to police and prosecutors in Pará state at least 80% is illegally felled. Producers who stick to the rules simply cannot compete with criminal organisations that avoid taxes, ignore environment controls and use slave labour, yet can fraudulently wash the wood clean for export to the US, Europe, Japan and other markets.
Police also detained several other bureaucrats, including the head of the local environment agency and four officials from the state’s Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama). According to prosecutors, wiretaps revealed how the latter – who are supposed to be guardians of the forest – were providing tipoffs about inspections to sawmill owners on an almost daily basis for between 500 and 5,000 reais (£92 to £920) for each piece of information.
Incra was given no advance notice of Monday’s raids. Ibama was informed only that there would be a routine inspection. So secret were the preparations that most of the 190 police officers in the operation were drafted in from other parts of the country. They were flown in on a chartered plane the previous night and many slept at a military base near the airport to avoid detection at hotels.
Moving in the last hour of darkness, they got in place for coordinated raids on homes, offices and a sawmill allegedly associated with the syndicate.
“It was very difficult and very dangerous so we had to keep it secret,” said Gasparetto. “We couldn’t tell anyone because the chain of corruption is so huge, especially in Santarém.”
Monday’s detainees also included the father and son owners of a large timberyard, which police swooped on in a helicopter.
In the Amazon, arresting suspects is one thing but putting them behind bars quite another. Judges in this region are lenient with environmental crimes so prosecutors aim to use a relatively new law that prohibits membership of a criminal organisation with prison sentences ranging from three to eight years.
Police want the courts to set an example. “We’ve already seen the land cleared in the south of Pará. We must stop the deforestation here or there’ll be no forest left in the state,” said Gasparetto.
Last year, Greenpeace revealed massive problems with Brazil’s timber certification system for ipê, jatoba and other rare hardwoods.
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