But the region also registers some of the world’s highest rates of deforestation and biodiversity loss, affecting key ecosystems like the Amazon Basin, the Gran Chaco — shared by Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay — and the Maya Forest.

It is also the most dangerous region in the world for environmental defenders. In 2023, Latin America accounted for 166 murders of land and environmental activists — 85% of the global total and the highest figure since 2012, according to the NGO Global Witness. Nearly half of the victims were Indigenous.

Extractive economies such as mining, fishing, and logging — where legal and illegal activity often intersect — along with crimes like wildlife trafficking and drug production, pose some of the gravest threats to the survival of the region’s ecosystems and the people who defend them.

Below, InSight Crime examines the main criminal economies driving the degradation of forests, rivers, and oceans across Latin America and the Caribbean.

1. Illegal Gold Mining

Latin America is in the grip of a modern-day gold rush, driven by record prices and soaring international demand. Rampant illegal mining has caused severe environmental damage and is taking a heavy toll on local and Indigenous communities, who are being slowly poisoned by mercury used to separate gold from sediment and targeted with violence when they oppose the advance of illegal miners.

Peru, the region’s top gold producer, has long been an epicenter of illegal mining. Much of the activity is concentrated in the southeastern department of Madre de Dios, where vast swaths of primary rainforest have been destroyed. In response, the Peruvian government launched crackdowns such as Operation Mercury in 2019 and the Restoration Plan in 2021. These efforts have reduced mining in Madre de Dios but pushed illegal miners into new areas, including the Tambopata National Reserve, Bahuaja-Sonene National Park, the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, and along the Pariamanú River near the borders with Brazil and Bolivia.

In Colombia, illegal gold mining is centered in the northern departments of Chocó, Antioquia, and Bolívar, though the practice is spreading deeper into the Amazon River systems. An estimated 73% of gold mining in the country is illegal, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

In Bolivia and Venezuela, mining often operates under the protection of the state and loose regulations that blur the line between the legal and illegal trades. In Bolivia, for example, mining cooperatives control 94% of national gold production, yet their activities are frequently linked to illegal actors who operate without environmental licenses and in partnership with questionable companies from China and Colombia. The country is also the main entry point for mercury smuggling, which is then trafficked into Peru and Brazil to fuel illegal mining operations.

In Venezuela, the 2016 decree creating the Orinoco Mining Arc has opened the floodgates for new mining ventures along the Orinoco River. These operations enjoy the backing of authorities and military forces aligned with President Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

SEE ALSO: Stolen Amazon: The Roots of Environmental Crime in the Tri-Border Regions

Illegal mining has also reached deep into protected areas. In Ecuador, criminal group the Lobos has moved into illegal mining and is extorting miners operating in Podocarpus National Park, where deforestation connected to mining jumped by 125% between 2023 and 2024.

Throughout the Amazon Basin’s Indigenous territories, illegal mining has left deep scars. One of the most striking examples is the Yanomami Indigenous community, whose territory spans the border between Brazil’s Roraima state and Venezuela’s Amazonas state. An estimated 30,000 illegal miners invaded the area in 2022, according to Brazil’s police. The plundering began more than 40 years ago with help from corrupt local politicians and has been intensified over the past decade by criminal groups such as the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC), a powerful criminal organization based in São Paulo.

The environmental and social fallout from illegal mining on Yanomami lands has been devastating. Mercury poisoning, malaria, and child malnutrition are widespread, and Indigenous leaders opposing mining have faced threats and assassinations. In 2023, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched operations that managed to expel many of the miners, but some illegal activity persists, with garimpeiros — as illegal miners are known in Brazil — setting up new extraction points along the Amazon borderlands.

2. Drug Trafficking and Its Infrastructure

While coca cultivation is not the leading driver of deforestation in the region, it has had significant impacts on forest loss in national parks, protected areas, and key coca-growing zones in countries like Colombia and Peru. Drug trafficking has also acted as a catalyst for deforestation, as proceeds from the drug trade are often laundered and reinvested into other environmentally destructive ventures like agribusiness, cattle ranching, land grabbing, and illegal mining.

In Colombia’s Putumayo department — a major coca hub that reported 50,342 hectares of coca crops in 2023 — coca cultivation has been a major driver of deforestation. This contrasts with other parts of the Colombian Amazon, where land grabbing, pasture clearing, and cattle ranching are the main culprits. Nearly half of Colombia’s coca crops are found in specially designated zones, including national parks, collective territories, and forest reserves protected under a 1959 law concerning areas originally meant for conservation and sustainable development of forest, soil, and water resources, according to the UNODC’s Integrated Illicit Crop Monitoring System.

In Peru, coca cultivation has expanded well beyond its traditional heartland in the Apurímac, Ene, and Mantaro River Valleys, pushing deeper into the Amazon. In the Amazonian departments of Huánuco, Loreto, San Martín, Madre de Dios, and Ucayali, forest is being cleared to make way for coca crops, which grew from 8,766 hectares in 2019 to 33,384 hectares in 2023 — a 280% increase, according to the country’s anti-drug agency.

Drug trafficking infrastructure is also driving deforestation. In Peru’s Ucayali, Huánuco, and Pasco departments, 67 clandestine airstrips used to transport drugs have been identified, most of them located within or near Indigenous territories, reserves for isolated communities, and logging concessions, according to a joint investigation by Mongabay Latam and Earth Genome. The pattern repeats in Bolivia, where authorities have identified 440 illegal airstrips across the departments of Beni, La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz, 180 of them located within national parks, Indigenous lands, and reserves.

Beyond deforestation, drug production seriously contaminates ecosystems. In Mexico’s “Golden Triangle,” a region in the northwest of the country, methamphetamine labs use chemical precursors such as methylamine, sodium cyanide, and phenylacetic acid, which degrade soils, pollute water sources, and poison local wildlife and human populations.

3. Timber Trafficking

From Central America’s forests to the Amazon Basin, criminal networks have targeted high-value hardwoods such as cedar, mahogany, ipe, and rosewood to supply national and international markets for luxury furniture, flooring, and musical instruments. These coveted woods have been logged nearly to extinction, leading to major biodiversity loss and forest degradation.

Timber mafias exploit weak oversight and transparency gaps in the region’s logging supply chains. Their methods include harvesting unauthorized species, logging in restricted areas, and extracting volumes that exceed what is reported in their annual operational plans—documents that are supposed to provide geo-referenced data on the species and quantities to be harvested.

Corruption lubricates every link in this criminal chain: from falsified transport permits to the laundering of illegally sourced wood that is ultimately sold as a legitimate product.

SEE ALSO: Beneath the Surface of Timber Trafficking in the Peru-Colombia-Brazil Border Region

In the tri-border region of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, those who coordinate timber trafficking operations are known as patrones. They often deceive Indigenous communities with extraction rights, offering them jobs, generators, or education in exchange for control over their forest management plans. Under the guise of these permits, the patrones launder illegal timber. Many Indigenous communities have been fined for irregularities committed by traffickers operating on their lands or under their concessions.

In recent years, timber mafias along Ecuador’s borders with Peru and Colombia have capitalized on the global boom in demand for balsa wood, which is used to manufacture wind turbine blades in China and the United States. Amid the balsa craze, loggers have invaded Indigenous territories in the Ecuadorian Amazon, violating land rights and degrading local ecosystems. Between 2019 and August 2024, Ecuador exported over 163,000 metric tons of balsa to China and is believed to supply 90% of the world’s balsa wood, according to a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency.

4. Land Grabbing

In the Amazon Basin, land grabbing — also known as land trafficking — has become a key mechanism for privatizing and transforming Indigenous territories and public forests, driven by agricultural expansion and rising global demand for commodities like soy, beef, and palm oil.

The pattern is consistent across the region: land traffickers clear and burn forests to create pasture for cattle ranching or plantations. To secure land titles, they exploit legal loopholes and collude with corrupt officials. The lands targeted for illegal clearing are often protected areas, forest reserves, or ancestral Indigenous territories, leaving local communities vulnerable to displacement and violence.

In Colombia, land grabbing has affected Chiribiquete National Park and the Llanos del Yarí – Yaguará II Indigenous Reserve in the heart of the Amazon. Both have suffered deforestation due to land speculation, road building, extensive cattle ranching, and grassland conversion.

In Brazil, so-called grileiros, or land thieves, exploit weaknesses in the Rural Environmental Registry to claim unallocated public lands, even deep in the Amazon, and later sell them to investors. Across the border in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz department, government-led land regularization efforts in favor of agricultural settlers have accelerated deforestation and land concentration. Meanwhile, Brazil’s neighboring state of Mato Grosso has become a major agricultural powerhouse and the country’s top beef producer, pushing the agricultural frontier ever deeper into the rainforest.

5. Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing

IUU fishing thrives in Latin America and the Caribbean due to legal loopholes, corruption, and strong demand for seafood, generating as much as $36 billion annually in global revenues. It is also linked to other crimes such as labor trafficking aboard fishing vessels and maritime drug trafficking.

Common IUU practices include harvesting undersized fish, exceeding seasonal catch quotas, and using destructive methods like bottom trawling. These actions pose serious threats to marine biodiversity. Illegal fishing puts pressure on marine sanctuaries such as Mexico’s Revillagigedo National Park, Colombia’s Yuruparí Malpelo zone, and Ecuador’s Galápagos Marine Reserve. It also targets protected species like sea cucumbers, totoaba, and several species of sharks prized on the international market.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which protects over 40,900 plant and animal species, has struggled to curb the illegal fishing of protected marine life.

SEE ALSO: At Uruguay’s Port of Montevideo, a Deadly Circle of Fishing and Labor Abuse

In 2024, CITES imposed trade sanctions on Ecuador and urged member states to reject its exports of 12 shark and manta ray species. Although shark fishing has been banned in the country since 2004, hundreds of thousands of sharks continue to be caught under the pretext of “incidental capture,” a legal loophole that allows the sale of these species. Despite sanctions, Ecuador was the world’s third-largest exporter of shark fins in 2024, according to the international trade database Abrams. The illegal shark trade remains active, as shown by the seizure of 15 tons of shark fins and dozens of seahorses in the coastal city of Manta on April 9.

Globally, laundering illegally caught fish through legal supply chains is a major concern. NGOs estimate that around 20% of all fish sold worldwide is linked to IUU fishing. In Mexico, that figure may reach 40%, according to the National Commission for Aquaculture and Fisheries (Conapesca).

6. Wildlife Trafficking

Latin America and the Caribbean host six of the world’s most biodiverse countries, home to a vast array of birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and plants. The region shelters some 60% of the planet’s wildlife, making it a prime target for trafficking networks that profit from the sale of wild species or their body parts.

Demand is rising for wildlife and its derivatives — for use in traditional Asian medicine, exotic pet markets, hunting trophies, and tourism-related activities — fueling a global black market worth up to $23 billion a year.

SEE ALSO: A Poacher’s Paradise: Bolivia’s Amazon Pillaged for Wildlife

Iconic species such as the jaguar are under siege from traffickers. The big cat, whose range spans 18 countries, is being hunted for body parts used in traditional Asian medicine. Deforestation caused by mining and logging, Chinese investment in extractive industries, and weak law enforcement have created a dire scenario for jaguars in countries like Bolivia and Suriname, where they once roamed freely through vast jungle expanses. A single jaguar carcass can fetch up to $3,000 on the local black market.

Other species, such as scarlet macaws captured in Honduras’ Moskitia rainforest or spider monkeys threatened in Mexico, are trafficked to be sold as exotic pets in international markets.

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