Mongabay Series: Forests of the World
Inversiones La Oroza, a corporate investigation since 2015 for alleged timber trafficking, has just won $380,000 from Reactiva Peru, a Peruvian government stimulus program to revive the forestry sector affected by COVID-19.
In November 2015, La Oroza and 10 other forestry corporations were investigated operation Amazonas, when the government seized the shipment sending Yacu Kallpa carrying more than 1,300 cubic meters of wood – for 60 cargo trucks – of alleged illicit origin.
This is the largest seizure of woodenen in Peru, an emblematic case that showed how official documents containing false data were used to “bleach” woodenen that they allegedly extracted illegally. Currently, two prosecutors specializing in environmental instances in the Loreto region are at a rate of 52 instances involving more than a hundred people.
Loreto Regional Governor Elisbon Ochoa and Regional Director of Forest progression and wildlife Kenjy Teron seem to have overlooked La Oroza’s joy by granting him 1.36 million suns ($380,000) recently as part of an attempt to revive the forestry sector. . They chose the company’s operational plant, in Iquitos, capital of Loreto, as a launching pad for the restart of the forestry activities of the program, which will involve the investment of thirteen million soles ($3.6 million) in the regeneration of this sector.
“It is that the regional government of Loreto has announced the regeneration of the forests with the assistance of a company persecuted and concerned in the emblematic process of crime of Yacu Kallpa,” said Julio Guzmán, a lawyer for the Ministry of the Environment.
Guzman said there was a minimum criterion for deciding on the beneficiaries of a program of the Peruvian State.
Guzman also said he regrets that the Reactive But program opens to corporations that were criminally prosecuted and had been charged through the state, as is the case with La Oroza.
“This is a corporate investigation into the acquisition and export of illegal timber,” said Alberto Yusen Caraza of Loreto’s Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Environmental Affairs (FEMA), on Inversiones La Oroza.
Caraza has a rate of 35 cases related to the Yacu Kallpa case. The ship loaded with wood seized in Iquitos in 2015 is believed to be bound for Mexico and the United States.
According to reports through the Forest Resources Monitoring Agency (OSINFOR), 97% of the wood came here from illegal sources. The research also determined that 80% of the shipment belonged to Inversiones La Oroza.
FEMA in Loreto is in the last phase of the investigation. In October 2017, the U.S. government He also sanctioned La Oroza for removing illegally discovered extracted timber in its source chain. The consequences are valid for 3 years.
Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, ordered Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to block imports of La Oroza timber. “The Timber Committee — composed of officials from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, as well as the country’s Departments of Justice, State, Agriculture and Interior — asked Peru to verify if a specific shipment of wood from the company Inversiones La Oroza complied with all Peruvian laws and regulations,” the USTR said in a statement. “The verification process carried out by Peru revealed that significant parts of the La Oroza shipment did not comply with the Peruvian law, regulations and other measures on the extraction and trade of wood products.”
“I was surprised,” Caraza said of the recent resolution of the governor of Loreto to include La Oroza in his program. “The weakness of regional government management was reinforced through this assembly with the corporations surveyed.”
Mongabay Latam contacted the regional forest manager, Teron, to ask if they had taken into account the company’s history before opting for their amenities to launch the forest regeneration program in the area. “For us, research is not important, we are convinced of the intelligent religion of industrialists,” Tron said.
He said the regional government did not need to continue to give the forestry sector a negative light. “This is an opportunity for corporations involved in intercepted shipping in the United States to have another image. Here, we don’t judge whether a company is under investigation or anything like that, however, it’s vital that we have competitiveness,” Tron said.
Julia Urrunaga, Peruvian director of the Environmental Research Agency (EIA), told Mongabay Latam that since the US sanctions, La Oroza has not shown that her chain of woodenen is perfectly legal. “In October 2017, they announced the embargo on La Oroza’s investments based on the amount of illicit woodenen discovered in its Array chain and to date, the corporate has not publicly demonstrated that this no longer happens,” Urrunaga said.
Rolando Navarro, former executive chairman of the Organization for Forest Resource monitoring and wildlife (OSINFOR), said it is regrettable that the government has not put in place the appropriate control measures to prevent corporations from receiving a criminal investigation of the public budget. “Cash deserves to be given to those with an impeccable record and we will have to give the impression that there is impunity in Peru,” said Navarro, who participated in the break-in of Operation Amazonas that helped recover the wood.
He also asked why Peru had already sanctioned La Oroza, when the United States had already done so. Instead, he says, “what you notice is a reward.”
Mongabay Latam contacted Luis Ascencio Jurado, a leader of Oroza of Los Angeles, who cited non-public reasons for refusing to answer questions.
Mongabay Latam also contacted the Ministry of Economy and Finance about the inclusion of the company in the Peru Reactiva program, which did not gain a reaction at the time of publication of this article.
From the overall recovery plan for the Loreto forestry sector, 8 million suns ($2.2 million) will be invested in 169 forest concessions, while the remaining five million suns ($1.4 million) will be reserved for medium-sized enterprises producing wood products for public use. contracting through the regional pass government. These products will be passed to the school sector and other public bodies.
Caraza, the prosecutor, expressed his fear that part of the budget would go to concessions that had been granted in the first place without meeting all the legal requirements.
Between 2016 and 2017, the Loreto regional granted 43 concessions in territories where designation programs are pending as indigenous reserves for peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact, according to the Regional Organization of Eastern Indigenous Peoples (ORPIO). The organization and others recently filed a complaint against Loreto’s forest regeneration program.
In 2019, the Loreto administration granted two forest concessions to La Oroza through an accelerated procedure that distributes land that has returned to state control. “Last year, rights were illegally granted to this company, as the regional government did not comply with all situations to grant such concessions,” said Caraza, who opened an investigation into the case.
Tron stated that the 169 concessions included in the regeneration program have been granted since 2003 and were selected from a total of 334 concessions granted through the regional government.
He said his administration’s interest is to find that timber shipments are legally sourced and “come from controlled forests,” regardless of the legal requirements that corporations face.
Urrunaga said there were threats in seeking to encourage the forest rector in partnership with corporations that have a history of illegality and have shown that they comply with the law. He added that indigenous organizations had also complained about the danger posed by the passage of foreigners through their territories, creating a genuine threat of coronavirus spread. “We are involved that they are complying with protocols and regulations. The state does have the capacity to deal with the fitness emergency in the Amazon, but it is obliged to open the doors of economic regeneration,” Urrunaga said.
Former Chief Affairs of the National Forest and Wildlife Service (SERFOR) Luis Alberto González also criticized the loreto government program. It stated that in its recent mandate it had sought to exclude the Loreto and Ucayali regions from this level of the forest regeneration programme due to the threat of the spread of coronavirus to communities in those areas. Now, González said, the implementation of forestry activities in the regions of San Martín and Madre de Dios deserves to be postponed also by the accumulation of coVID-19 contagion in that country.
“The forestry sector in Peru is 80% informal. Therefore, the policy of economic regeneration will have to be very careful. In other countries, they have done so by ignoring the basic detail of protecting people’s health, and the pandemic has burst again,” he said.
Cover image: Illegal wood in the Loreto region of Peru, with EIA agreement.
This story was first reported through the Latam team on Mongabay and was posted here on our Latam online page on July 23, 2020.
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