Brazil busts major Amazon logging gang

Brazilian authorities broke up the biggest illegal logging operation in the Amazon yesterday and arrested 89 people, including many from the government agency charged with protecting the forests.

The gang, which was the target of Brazil's biggest crackdown on Amazon deforestation, had illegally cut down an estimated US$370 million of Amazon timber since 1990, police and the environment ministry said.

The crackdown came a few weeks after environmentalists sharply criticised government inaction to save the Amazon in the wake of data showing an area of jungle larger than the US state of New Jersey was cut down last year. The government report said deforestation had reached its second-highest level on record last year.

Federal police said that among the 89 people arrested across six states were businessmen, loggers and the head of the government's Ibama environmental watchdog in the state of Mato Grosso. Another 39 Ibama employees also were arrested.

"Worse than corruption is corruption which is not punished," Justice Minister Thomaz Bastos said.

Four logging firms were shut down in the sweep.

"This is the result of an effort that has never been carried out by the Brazilian environmental sector before," Environment Minister Marina Silva said, adding that it showed the government was controlling deforestation.

Police said in a statement the gang was one of the biggest criminal groups in Brazil, "made up of loggers and specialists in the illegal extraction and transport of timber who corrupted public officials at Ibama."

The gang bribed officials at Ibama, Brazil's main government body charged with environmental inspections and fighting illegal logging, to falsify permits that allowed it to transport timber across the Amazon to markets in Brazil and abroad.

Destruction of the world's largest tropical forest rose to 26.130 sq km in 2003-2004 from 24,597 sq km a year earlier. Environmentalists blamed the destruction on an agricultural boom that has pushed farmers to seek more land to plant crops and graze cattle where forests once stood.

Often illegal loggers precede farmers into the forests, extracting wood for large profits and leaving the land bare.

The Amazon is home to up to 30 per cent of the planet's animal and plant species.

- REUTERS