From the unique Atlantic Forest to the Amazon, Earthsight and Mongabay's year-long investigation reveals how exotic wood flooring linked to illegal logging, from a firm embroiled in multiple corruption cases in Brazilian courts, has been pouring into the US over the last five years.
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Watch the report's trailer below. The full report can be read in English and Portuguese.
Through a series of case studies, The Fixers chronicles the corruption allegations, illegal logging practices and indigenous rights infringements by Brazil’s biggest flooring company - Indusparquet, and its suppliers.
Beginning in the Brazilian state of Paraná, investigators used leaked wiretap recordings and court records to uncover how a public official in the Paraná Environmental Institute helped Indusparquet employees to illegally procure bracatinga, a wood species endemic to the threatened Atlantic rainforest, to help the firm meet a request from an elusive US client…
The corruption charges don’t stop there. Moving on to a civil case in São Paulo, the investigation offers an insight into how an Indusparquet employee and an analyst at Brazil’s environmental agency, Ibama, allegedly worked together to game Brazil's national timber accounting system on a large scale. The Ibama official confessed to receiving regular bribes from the Indusparquet employee in order to create and revise forest origin credits and to release seized wood stocks using the country’s national timber accounting database, allowing Indusparquet to illegally bypass rules meant to protect climate-critical forests, while all involved continued to profit handsomely from the shady scheme.
From Paraná in the South, and São Paulo in South-Eastern Brazil, the story then shifts to the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Pará state. In the wake of Operation Handroanthus, which took place in 2020 and remains the biggest raid on illegal timber in the Brazilian Amazon’s history, investigators found that Indusparquet continued to source wood from two of the farms embroiled in the scandal. Officials at the highest levels, including the country’s former environment minister, rushed to defend loggers targeted by the raids, interference that would be among the contributing factors for his resignation in summer last year.
Elsewhere in Pará state, investigators were able to trace Indusparquet wood back to a threatened indigenous reserve, Ituna Itatá. Home to some of the world’s last uncontacted peoples, the territory was meant to remain an inviolate part of the country, covered by dense forests, nearly untouched rivers and great biological diversity. Yet emboldened by Bolsonaro’s right-wing government, many individuals have made a shameless grab for the land and forest resources. Estimates suggest that 94 per cent of the reserve has now been claimed as private land. By buying from farms inside the protected territory, Indusparquet is helping to fund brutal indigenous rights abuses.
