Mahogany's Last Stand - Scott Wallace

Timber mafias havealready snatchedmahogany for pennieson the dollar, ifthey paid anythingfor it at all.cops often face smear campaigns, even outrightdismissal, if they overstep boundaries. What’smore, the government in Lima recently shiftedforest enforcement responsibilities back to theregional governments, where officials are oftenmore susceptible to arm-twisting. “The protectedareas are going to be reduced to fragmented forestif we don’t take a more proactive approach,”says Calle, who fears loggers will now have evenmore latitude to undermine the rule of law.The bad guys won’t have any freedom at allin Edwin Chota Valera’s territory, not if he canhelp it. Chota—a sinewy, 52-year-old firebrandwith rakish, jet-black hair and a hawk’s beak ofa nose—is the leader of the Ashéninka villageof Saweto, some 60 miles northwest of the PurúsConservation Complex. Since 1998, when localAshéninka established Saweto, they have stoodby helplessly as, season after season, loggingcrews floated colossal trunks downriver fromthe headwaters of the Alto Tamaya and PutayaRivers to sawmills in Pucallpa.In the face of these trespasses, a decade agovillagers undertook a quest to get the regionalgovernment in Pucallpa to grant them legal titleto their land—more than 250 square miles ofriver-laced forest stretching from Saweto all theway to the Brazilian frontier. Their claim wasensnared for years in red tape, while poacherspillaged their forests. It appears their petitionmay finally be resolved later this year.The illegal logging epidemic prompted U.S.lawmakers in 2007 to require a series of reformsas a condition for approving a free-trade agreementwith Peru. The agreement committed Peru,among other things, to implement a plan of actionon big-leaf mahogany that would complywith the Convention on International Trade inEndangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora(CITES). Officials in Lima say they are experimentingwith other measures, including anelectronic monitoring system, that will helpmodernize Peru’s timber industry. Changeshave been slow to take effect and have broughtlittle relief for many remote communities likeSaweto, victims of timber mafias that have alreadysnatched their mahogany for pennies onthe dollar, if they paid anything for it at all.But this is a new era for the Ashéninka of theAlto Tamaya. At a meeting in Saweto’s one-roomschoolhouse, a woman named Teresa LópezCampos urges her people to stand up to the loggers.“Where are we going to go if they drive usaway from here?” she says vehemently. “This iswhere we will die. We have nowhere else to go.”Two days later ten or so Ashéninka men andwomen have come together under Chota’s directionto follow illegal loggers into the headwatersof the Alto Tamaya and demand their departure.Since dawn we’ve been following the twists andturns of the emerald green Mashansho Creekthrough dense jungle along Peru’s eastern borderwith Brazil. Poling dugouts through sand-rippledshallows, pausing to spear catfish in crystallineeddies, my Ashéninka hosts are biding their time,confident that somewhere upstream we’ll confronta band commanded by an elusive man theyA park service guard (at left) andan Ashéninka guide size up an oldgrowthmahogany, highly valuable tocriminal loggers. Because individualtrees can’t be protected, this giant isalmost certainly doomed.call El Gato—the Cat. The expedition is fraughtwith risk, likely to incur the wrath not only of theloggers but also of their paymasters in Pucallpa—the sawmill owners and timber brokers, who areclosely connected to the city’s power elite.The men of Saweto were away when El Gatomotored upstream past the village a week earlier.Ignoring shouts from the women on the embankmentto stay out of their forests upriver,120 national geographic • april 2013 Mahogany’s Last Stand 121