Mapping records criminal-group presence in 768 Amazon areas

What you need to know

• The survey covered 1,310 second-level administrative areas in six Amazon countries. The project uses “municipalities” as a convenient label, although the units are provinces in Bolivia and Peru, cantons in Ecuador, and municipalities in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. 2
• The project counted presence when a group was identified as conducting economic activity in an area. Transit through an area alone did not qualify, so the map is not simply a record of routes or reported movement. 2
• Among areas where presence was confirmed, 33% had more than one group. The mapping also identified nine criminal organisations active in at least two of the surveyed countries. 123
• Information was gathered from May to October 2026 through field observations, interviews with local sources, official data and court records. The map combines these sources to identify confirmed presence across a large and varied region. 2
• The environmental and community harms described in reporting provide context for the map, but they are not outcomes measured by its count of areas. Mongabay links illicit economies, including gold mining, with deforestation and mercury contamination, and reports threats to Indigenous communities and environmental defenders. 3

Why this matters

A cross-border picture of confirmed criminal presence can help practitioners understand the governance context in which forest protection takes place. The reported links to deforestation, contamination and threats to communities underline the stakes, but the map does not establish the scale or location of ecological impacts. 123

What happens next

The sources reviewed do not set out a specific next step for the mapping. Future editions would need consistent boundaries and methods to show whether changes reflect shifts in confirmed presence or expanded geographic coverage, while independent measurement would be needed to attribute ecological impacts to the activities mapped. 2

What we know

• The headline count comes from a single project’s multi-source survey. Mongabay reported the result but relied on the same mapping, so the reporting does not amount to independent validation of the dataset. 23
• The reported 59% is the share of surveyed areas with confirmed presence, not a complete estimate of where groups are absent. 2
• The mapping distinguishes confirmed absence from areas where information was insufficient to determine presence or absence. 2
• The reported environmental and community impacts are contextual reporting, not ecological outcomes measured by the municipality-count map. 23

What we don't know

• The sources reviewed do not specify how many surveyed areas had confirmed absence and how many had insufficient information. 2
• It is unclear how differences in source availability and verification between countries affect the findings. 2
• The reviewed sources do not establish whether future editions will use consistent boundaries and methods that allow changes in presence to be compared over time. 2
• The map does not establish which ecological impacts can be attributed to the criminal activities it records; the sources reviewed identify this as an unresolved evidence need. 23

Read the reporting

This WildNews briefing synthesises and summarises reporting from the sources below. WildNews did not produce the original reporting. Learn more about how we use AI