Convergent Crime in the Amazon: A Systems Risk Every Board Must Own

Written by Elisa Garbil – 31.10.2025

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The Amazon is not simply a forest. It is a vast, transnational market in which criminal networks monetise land, timber, minerals, cattle, and people, and launder those proceeds into mainstream supply chains. This convergence of environmental crime, organised crime, and corporate procurement creates a composite risk that is far bigger than any one compliance silo. It threatens climate transition pathways, human rights commitments, and the operability of global brands in food, fashion, and finance.

Over the past two years, new analyses, field reporting, and civil society investigations have clarified both the mechanism and the magnitude of this threat. Together, they leave little doubt: unless companies and governments treat Amazon crime as a systemic market risk, one that links deforestation, violence, modern slavery, and illicit finance, promises on climate and nature will keep getting arbitraged by criminal actors faster than they can be delivered. Listen to César Muñoz Acebes‘s experience!

The new criminal operating model

Criminal groups now run the Amazon’s ‘extraction frontier’ as an integrated business. Cocaine routes, clandestine airstrips, riverine logistics and political capture double as the infrastructure for land grabbing, illegal mining, timber trafficking, and cattle laundering. These markets reinforce each other: burn and clear a protected tract, extract high-value timber and alluvial gold, seed the clearing with pasture, and launder the cattle into formal plants that export to global consumers. The same networks intimidate communities, corrupt local officials, and use violence as an operating expense. 

The climate externalities are immediate. In 2024, mass fires across the Brazilian Amazon, where many deliberately were lit by land grabbers and illegal miners, destroyed more than 11 million hectares and generated an estimated 31.5 million tonnes of CO₂ in just three months (from June to August), nearly the equivalent of Norway’s annual emissions. Hotspots overlapped Indigenous territories, with operations uncovering fire-setting tied to illegal gold excavation. What had looked like a promising fall in deforestation in 2023 was swamped by the fire-driven emissions spike of 2024. 

These outcomes are not natural disasters. A recent analysis highlights that the 2024 spike in forest loss was driven by one of the worst fire seasons on record, interacting with governance failures and organised criminality. A survey of government data concluded 91% of forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon is linked to illegal activity, such as land-clearing for agriculture and artisanal mining. These are often orchestrated by well-structured international criminal enterprises. 

The human cost is equally systemic. The killings of Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and journalist Dom Phillips in 2022 were not isolated tragedies: they exposed the entrenched power of illegal fishing, logging and mining mafias in frontier zones and the capacity of organised crime to control territory. Subsequent investigations warned that the Brazilian Amazon risks “mafia” capture if this convergence is not reversed. 

From forest crimes to boardroom risks

For global companies, these dynamics translate into five interlocking risk channels:

1. Climate and nature transition risk. Deforestation and fires in the Amazon directly jeopardise corporate science-based targets and nature-positive pledges, because the forest is a planetary carbon sink. When organised actors orchestrate mass burn-offs and land grabbing, corporate emissions and biodiversity strategies become contingent on law enforcement efficacy in places far from boardrooms. 
2. Legal and regulatory exposure in end markets. Importing jurisdictions are tightening due diligence expectations on “forest-risk” commodities, with enforcement pressure rising most where civil society has documented repeated failure to delink supply chains from Amazon crime. In the UK, new analysis found that 2024 imports of beef, soy, palm and other commodities were still linked to forest destruction the size of cities such as Liverpool. Years after Parliament passed the Environment Act (2021) intended to stop goods grown on illegally deforested land. Delay in secondary legislation has left a compliance vacuum, and reputational minefield, for firms trading into the UK. 
3. Reputational risk from investigative exposure. Investigations continue to show how cattle from illegally cleared ranches in the Amazon launder into formal plants that ship to global markets. Watchdogs have chronicled patterns across the beef complex, including name-brand producers, and the hidden exposure of ‘downstream’ sectors like luxury fashion that purchase Brazilian leather. These findings have proved durable: when one commodity is pushed out of the spotlight, others (hides, tallow, gelatin) keep the same deforestation embedded in different products. 
4. Human rights and modern slavery risk. Academic and NGO work now documents how modern slavery and forced labor can contaminate global beef and leather supply chains tied to Brazil. Where cattle laundering intersects with criminal control of territory, workers face debt bondage and coercion. Indigenous communities face displacement and deadly violence.
5. Operational risk from criminal capture. On-the-ground violence deters auditors, disrupts logistics, and deters legitimate investment. In the zones where Brazil, Colombia and Peru meet, organised crime flourishes precisely because actors can hop jurisdictions faster than agencies can coordinate, eroding the rule of law and making corporate control systems fragile by design. 

These are not fringe cases, they are structural features of how illicit economies colonise new frontiers.

The beef and leather nexus: why ‘clean’ claims keep failing

Consider the cattle-leather complex that links Amazon deforestation to supermarket meat cases and luxury handbags. Investigations and watchdog analyses show how cattle raised on illegally deforested land are moved (i.e. laundered) through intermediate ranches before arriving at slaughterhouses with formal compliance paperwork; the hides then feed leather supply chains serving global fashion brands. This is a cheap, scalable arbitrage of weak traceability that weaponises opacity: while direct suppliers may pass a check, indirect suppliers, where the forest was cleared, remain off-screen. 

The result is predictable. In any market without enacted, enforceable due diligence rules covering all forms of the commodity, whether raw or embedded, deforestation risk migrates rather than disappears. In the UK, Global Witness estimates that since the Environment Act passed, the deforestation footprint linked to direct imports alone has surpassed 39,300 hectares, with Brazilian cattle products the dominant contributor. These numbers exclude embedded deforestation in processed goods. That is a built-in compliance and litigation overhang for retailers, packers, and fashion houses alike. 

Violence is not a by-product – it’s a business model

Frontline defenders have paid the highest price for confronting this convergence. As mentioned before, the murder of Phillips and Pereira, which was carried out by illegal fishers in the Javari Valley, exposed a regional economy in which illicit fishing, mining, and logging are protected by intimidation, guns, and corruption. Their deaths catalysed a multi-newsroom investigation into criminal control of the Amazon’s resource economy and underscored that impunity at the forest frontier translates directly into risk in corporate buyer markets. 

Civil society and Indigenous patrols continue to fill enforcement gaps, but they cannot substitute for a functioning state. Where government budgets and environmental agencies are weakened or delayed, criminal groups expand. Where impunity recedes, deforestation falls. The signal to noise is now clear enough that climate-committed companies must treat civic-space protection not as philanthropy but as core supply-chain risk mitigation. 

Why current corporate toolkits underperform

Traditional ESG playbooks, such as policy adoption, supplier codes, and periodic audits, were designed for linear supply chains and cooperative counterparties. They assume rational compliance incentives and access for verification. None of that applies when organised crime is deliberately engineering opacity and when key nodes are physically dangerous to visit.

Three factors explain the gap:

1. Traceability silos. Many brands trace to the slaughterhouse but not to calving or fattening farms. That leaves the critical laundering interface unmonitored. 
2. Narrow legality screens. Focusing solely on illegally deforested land ignores that illegality is often laundered through forged documents or jurisdiction-hopping. It also ignores embedded deforestation in processed imports (e.g., leather goods, tallow derivatives). 
3. Insufficient alignment with public enforcement. Private audits cannot replace interdiction when criminal groups control logistics. Without synchronised action with states and regional bodies, corporate programs become speed bumps, not roadblocks.

What works: convergent responses to convergent crime

There is no purely private solution. But there is an effective architecture: align corporate due diligence with regional cooperation and frontier technologies that make criminal arbitrage harder and costlier.

• Regional collaboration and frontier tech. Multistakeholder platforms emphasise precisely this mix: cross-border coordination, data sharing, and deployment of tools (high-resolution satellite monitoring, machine-learning fire prediction, risk overlays with Indigenous territories). These capabilities already exist and are being operationalised to forecast wildfire spread and map convergence hotspots. Corporate programs should consume, fund, and be accountable to these tools. 
• Follow the money. Nature-crime alliances highlight financial-flow tracing as a strategic priority. That means banks, traders, and buyers screening for patterns consistent with land grabbing and laundering, not just sanction lists; and it means terminating relationships where counterparties cannot provide farm-level origin with credible geospatial evidence.
• Embedded-deforestation accounting. End-market regulators and buyers must close the loophole that allows embedded products to slip past due diligence. If a jurisdiction’s law delays create a vacuum, leading firms should self-adopt no-conversion/no-deforestation verification that covers both raw and processed forms, think of beef and leather, soy and animal feed, palm and consumer goods, with cut-off dates and retrospective checks for indirect suppliers. 
• High-risk geofencing. Use independent datasets to geofence sourcing away from current convergence hot spots, including Indigenous territories experiencing fire, mining invasions, or rapid pasture expansion. Pair this with accelerated exit protocols and grievance mechanisms for whistleblowers on the ground. 
• Human rights integration. Treat forced labour red flags (debt bondage on ranches, coercion in mining camps) as leading indicators of environmental crime, and vice versa. Screening for one without the other will fail. Commission independent labour rights audits in tandem with geospatial deforestation checks. Escalate to law enforcement where credible indicators appear. 
• Public accountability for major buyers and packers. Where watchdogs have documented repeated exposure among dominant packers, downstream buyers must condition contracts on farm-to-gate traceability. Soft commitments are now price-in risk. Global buyers who continue sourcing from plants with persistent laundering exposure should disclose why their controls are different, and they should be ready to face activist scrutiny.

Materiality for different sectors

1. Food retail and foodservice. The most immediate exposure is to cattle products, but risk migrates via gelatin, tallow, and leather in private-label goods. Retailers should assume that any product containing Brazilian bovine derivatives carries a non-trivial risk of deforestation and forced labour unless proven otherwise with farm-level geodata and indirect supplier coverage. UK-facing retailers face the added burden that watchdogs can benchmark them against the Liverpool-size footprint narrative. An easy shorthand for consumers and litigators.
2. Fashion and luxury. Leather has quietly become the vector through which deforestation reputational risk enters high-margin categories. Investigations into the hidden price of luxury have already mapped how Amazon-linked leather rides into European ateliers. Brands should treat Brazilian bovine leather as presumptively high-risk unless counter-evidence includes traceable ranch-level origin and independent verification.
3. Financial institutions. Exposure runs through loans, bonds and equity in packers, traders, and retailers; through farmland funds active in Brazil; and through clients in logistics and mining near the frontier. Risk teams should integrate convergence indicators (e.g. proximity to fire clusters that overlap protected lands; sudden pasture expansion following burn events; frequent farm ownership flips) into E&S covenants. Clients unable to demonstrate remediation on such indicators should face pricing, limit, or exit.

Governance actions to adopt this quarter

1. Name the risk. Update your enterprise risk taxonomy to include convergent environmental crime as a distinct risk with cross-functional ownership (sustainability, procurement, legal, security, and finance). Clarify the escalation path to the board.
2. Switch the burden of proof. For Brazil-origin cattle and leather, move from “we’ve seen the supplier policy” to “we have verified farm-level origin and all indirects”. Require geospatial polygons, not just certificates.
3. Adopt embedded-deforestation controls. Expand due diligence to cover processed and composite goods. If your legal team is waiting for your country’s regulations to “go live”, treat the Global Witness footprint estimates as the de facto public benchmark you must beat. 
4. Synchronise with public tools. Integrate early-warning systems (fire projections, illegal mining alerts, Indigenous territory overlays) into procurement blocks and price adjustments. Fund third-party nodes that maintain those datasets and disclose how they change purchasing decisions.
5. Contract for consequence. Insert termination-for-cause clauses linked to verified deforestation or forced labour, including in indirect supply. Use escrowed performance bonds for high-risk counterparties.
6. Protect defenders. Establish and publish a grievance channel for Indigenous and local communities; commit to non-retaliation; and co-finance community patrol training/monitoring with credible NGOs. Companies that benefit from the forest’s ecological services should help pay the security premium borne by those defending it. 
7. Public disclosure on Amazon exposure. Report annually on: (a) Brazil-origin commodity volumes (raw and embedded); (b) share with farm-level polygons; (c) number of indirect suppliers mapped; (d) escalations to law enforcement; (e) cases exited. If your exposure depends on leather, publish your hide/skin origin breakdown and audit methodology. 

What to watch next

Civil society is not standing still. New investigations keep quantifying how much forest loss rich-country imports are still underwriting. Campaigns are increasingly naming and ranking laggards by sector. In August 2025, Amazon Watch spotlighted the widening overlap of environmental crime, public security collapse, and corporate exposure. This will continue through shareholder seasons ahead. Boards should expect tighter investor resolutions tying climate metrics to verified deforestation-free supply chains and to clearer policies on sourcing from criminally-contested territories. 

At the same time, some governments and alliances are investing in frontier tools that make it harder for criminals to hide. Machine-learning fire forecasting overlays with Indigenous land maps are already operational, and financial-flow tracing and supply-chain forensics are maturing. Companies that wire these capacities into procurement decisions and disclose the outcomes will be better placed when regulation finally closes loopholes on embedded deforestation and indirect supplier coverage. 

Bottom line

The Amazon’s criminal economy is not a fringe sustainability issue, it is a direct challenge to how global markets price risk. When networks can turn public forest into private assets and launder the proceeds into beef, leather, timber and gold, the climate transition is arbitraged at the forest frontier and laundered across your balance sheet. The last two years’ evidence is definitive: organised crime is a primary driver of forest loss; the emissions impact is colossal; the human toll is intolerable; and the legal and reputational risks in buyer markets are mounting. 

Boards should not wait for regulators to finish writing the rules they already say they want. Treat convergent crime as an enterprise risk with C-suite accountability. Fund and adopt the frontier technologies that make laundering costlier. Close traceability gaps, including for embedded products and indirect suppliers. Protect those who protect the forest. And disclose, with the same rigour you apply to financial controls, how you are delinking your business from the criminal economies driving the Amazon’s climate emergency.

Because in a market where crime sets the price of land and carbon, delay is not neutrality. It is complicity.