By Andrea Zarate and Shayla Harris
Tomas Munita for The New York Times
Policing the Amazon: With vast territory to cover across Peru, government authorities are working hard to fight the illegal timber trade that often goes on deep in the jungle.
PUCALLPA, Peru — Afraid the police would tip off suspects, Francisco Berrospi kept local officers in the dark when he headed into the rain forest as a prosecutor to investigate illegal logging. Sometimes it hardly seemed to matter, though.
Even when he managed to seize trucks, chain saws or illegally harvested trees, judges would often force him to give them back, he said. Bribes were so common, he said, that one anticorruption official openly encouraged him to take them.
"The power of the logging industry here is very strong," Mr. Berrospi said. "The corruption is terrible."
More than half of Peru is covered by dense forest, including a wide stretch of the Amazon basin, which spreads across South America. Its preservation is considered central to combating global warming and protecting the many species of plants and animals found only in the region.
In recent years, Peru has passed laws to crack down on illegal logging, as required by a 2007 free trade agreement with the United States. But large quantities of timber, including increasingly rare types like mahogany, continue to flow out, much of it ultimately heading to the United States for products like hardwood flooring and decking sold by American retailers.
The World Bank estimates that as much as 80 percent of Peru's logging exports are harvested illegally, and officials say the wood typically gets shipped using doctored paperwork to make the trade appear legal.
It is a pattern seen in other parts of the world, including the far east of Russia, where environmentalists have documented the rampant illegal logging of oak and other kinds of wood bound for the United States and elsewhere.
By The University of British Columbia School of Journalism
Hardwood timber from Russia's Far East is being illegally cut and shipped to China to feed huge consumer demand for cheap wood products globally.
In September, federal agents in Virginia served search warrants on Lumber Liquidators, a major American retailer, in what the company said was an investigation into its importation of wood flooring products.
The company has been accused by environmentalists of regularly buying from a Chinese supplier that traffics in illegally harvested Russian oak. Lumber Liquidators disputes the claims, saying that it carefully monitors the origins of its wood.
Here in Pucallpa, a city at the heart of Peru's logging industry on a major tributary of the Amazon, the waterfront is dominated by huge sawmills piled high with thousands of massive logs. They are floated in from remote logging camps, pulled by small motorboats called peke pekes, while trucks stacked with logs and lumber jam the roads.
A military officer stationed here to patrol the Ucayali River said that he had largely stopped making checks of the riverborne loads of timber, though the checks are supposed to be mandatory. In the past, he said, he had repeatedly ordered loads of logs to be held because they lacked the required paperwork, only to learn that forestry officials would later release them, apparently after creating or rubber-stamping false documentation.
In some cases, he said, loads of mahogany, a valuable type of wood that has disappeared from all but the most remote areas, were given fake documentation identifying the wood as a different kind.
"It's uncontrollable," said the officer, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Referring to local forestry officials, he said, "The bosses give jobs to people they trust and then take a cut of the bribes they get."
Mr. Berrospi, who worked as an environmental prosecutor until August, recited a bitter catalog of frustrations. The local authorities are paid off by loggers to create or approve false paperwork, he said. On one occasion, he said, he was offered about $5,000 to stop an investigation. He reported it to a local prosecutor who specialized in corruption cases, but said he was dismayed by the response.
"Listen, in one year here you'll get enough to build yourself a house and buy a nice car," he recalled the other prosecutor saying. "So take care of yourself."
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