As traditional forest governance erodes in Peru, ‘ghost permits’ fill the vacuum

HONORIA, Peru — Jacqueline Flores sits cross-legged on a wooden platform inside a dim Asháninka maloca, the Indigenous longhouse where her dress, painted with geometric patterns, seems to merge with the resin-sweet smell of plants macerating for ceremony.

Outside, the Boiling River murmurs. Inside, her voice rises in a long, trembling ícaro, part prayer, part medicine, part declaration of her identity. This South American ancestral colloquialism for ‘magic song’ serves her a specific purpose, she says: to anchor herself to something older than memory.

“I’m a student of the plants,” she says, “to help humanity and people who need to ‘heal’.”

In the ‘80s, Jacqueline’s ancestors were forced to leave their Asháninka territory in Peru’s central rainforest to escape the violence of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) terrorist group. “A lot was lost,” she says. She sees it in the fragmentation of neighboring communities, internal divisions and the disappearance of shared points of reference. Her work — improving her own healing center, Pumayaku, recovering her language and reconnecting with her territory after displacement — is her answer to that loss.

In the Peruvian Amazon, erosion of traditional governance is reshaping the forest as powerfully as any force of globalization, according to anthropologist Glenn Shepard. Ancestral culture fades, languages are forgotten, rituals weaken and community guidance fractures, while internal corruption can concurrently become the driving force behind deforestation and the quiet dismantling of Indigenous stewardship.

As elder-based authority, ritual discipline and long-term leadership degrade, collective decision-making gives way to document-based control, with permits and certificates stepping in to fill the gap.

While other media reports have documented issues in Peru’s forestry regulation, this Mongabay article exposes the phenomenon of “ghost paper forests,” forestry concessions that only exist on paper, and recent cases of fraudulent concessions within permanent production forests (BPP). It also details how the erosion of traditional Indigenous governance systems is widening the door to these problems.

Internal cracks within Indigenous communities have led some apus (elected traditional leaders) in Peru’s Amazon to the sale of communal land, fraudulent forestry concessions and deals with both illegal loggers and extractive companies, driven by economic precarity and political co-optation. Similar issues are playing out in healing centers run by outsiders in the Boiling River’s BPP, where possession certificates and overlapping permits are used to claim forest land, clear it and legitimize deforestation.

Traditionally, Indigenous cultures and peoples tend to maintain forests intact, Shepard says, but, “when capitalist extraction enters [the picture], the ecological and social systems collapse.” That breakdown can open the door to timber laundering networks, predatory land-grabbing and cattle farming.

“Cultural degradation generates deforestation, and deforestation generates more cultural degradation,” says senior program director of the Andes Amazon Fund Enrique Ortiz. He warns against romanticizing communities as inherently protective, noting: “Don’t fall for the ideological vision of the ‘pure’ Indigenous person. They’re just like us.”

Ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin, president of the Amazon Conservation Team, ties much of cultural change impacting forest governance to the disappearance of elders who once carried the stories, protocols and plant knowledge that kept both the community and forest in balance. “Every time an elder dies, a library burns down,” he says.

Linguist Roberto Zariquiey also traces language loss to the social pressure young Indigenous people face when they move to cities, mostly shaped by discrimination and the need to “blend in.” The result, he says, is entire communities where “only a few elders speak the language, and the rest no longer do.”

How do you launder a tree?

Mongabay spoke with a dozen Shipibo-Conibo, Awajún, Asháninka and Kakataibo individuals, across both urban and ancestral settings, and one important point came up: Even within communities, governance no longer rests on a shared set of rules. In that authority void, the erosion of traditional governance can become operational, opening the door to forest crime through the Amazon’s dullest villain: paperwork.

Prosecutor Eduardo Nina Cruz from the Specialized Environmental Prosecutor’s Offices of the Ucayali department explains to Mongabay that timber laundering often begins with the fraudulent use of forest permits.

Every authorized logging operation generates a forest transport permit (GTF), a document that allows cut wood to be transported legally. In several cases, Nina Cruz says, follow-up inspections from the Agency for the Supervision of Forest Resources and Wildlife (OSINFOR) revealed that the authorized area had never actually been logged, while the transport documents had instead been resold to third parties.

These permits, in practice, created a ghost paper forest, a legal shell used to print legal documents for wood that, however, came from completely different, unapproved areas.

“That transport guide is worth a lot of money,” he explains. “It’s like a blank check,” which can be used to legitimize timber coming from protected areas, the prosecutor says.

This scheme can plug directly into the governance systems of Indigenous communities.

According to OSINFOR reports collected by Mongabay, the Native Community of Santa Rosa de Sarayacu, a legally recognized Amazonian community reachable after some eight hours of navigation from Contamana toward Loreto, held an intermediate forest management plan (PMFI).

On paper, they were managing their forest; in reality, their name and permit were being used as a laundering machine.

An urgent OSINFOR supervision in December 2023 stated that 635 logs and 500,047 cubic meters (17.7 million cubic feet) of capinurí (Maquira coriacea) had been extracted under the community’s plan. When OSINFOR cross-checked the GTF and its log lists against the approved trees, none of the codes matched; in the field, inspectors found that only two trees of that species had actually been cut and moved.

Another 15,609 m³ (550,000 ft3) of capinurí appeared in the operations book as “extracted” from trees that were still standing. In total, 515,656 m³ (18.2 million ft3) of wood was deemed unjustified and classified as unauthorized extraction, a “serious damage” over 8.6 hectares (roughly 20 acres), triggering sanctions against the community.

Nina Cruz is blunt about how this happens: Communities with “green-listed” permits don’t log at all, and it is often their leaders who rent or sell their permits, or even individual GTFs, to outside loggers, who then use them to launder timber cut illegally elsewhere.

Once the documents say the wood comes from an Indigenous community with an approved PMFI, every log entering Pucallpa, the sawmill capital of Ucayali and the gateway to both Lima and export markets, passes as legal.

The community’s governance is then traded for cash. “Those leaders only care about one thing: money. Easy money,” he says. In the same case tied to Santa Rosa de Sarayacu, he investigated a single transport guide sold for 10,000 soles ($2,917), paid into the apu’s wife’s bank account. “The wood doesn’t talk,” he says, so the documents have to tell the truth.

Reached by phone, Wagner Guayllaba Huamán, the current communal president of Santa Rosa de Sarayacu, tells Mongabay the irregularities occurred “behind the community’s back,” without the knowledge of most community members. The comuneros, the participants in the general assembly, did not know what Ulises Arimuya Silvano, the former representative under whose tenure the illegal timber extraction happened, was doing “for his own interests,” he emphasizes.

Guayllaba adds that when he entered leadership in September, he discovered the situation and moved to strengthen internal oversight. “I committed, as current head of the community, to establish a 250-hectare [618-acre] conservation agreement and create a monitoring committee,” he says, explaining that the community is now organizing surveillance efforts to prevent similar situations in the future.

The Peruvian agency’s chief, Williams Arellano Olano, remarks that communities are pulled into these networks not by greed but by structural vulnerability: No access to credit, no machinery, no bargaining power. “I give you 20%. I keep 80,” is the deal that many communities end up accepting, he says.

Between 2019 and 2025, OSINFOR inspections across multiple regions show that Santa Rosa de Sarayacu is not an isolated case where permits function as legal cover for illegal supply chains.

Other Indigenous and peasant communities across Loreto, Ucayali and Amazonas — including Nueva Esperanza de Tabacoa, Sol de Oriente, Comunidad Nativa de Fátima, Bancal, San Juan de Abejaico, Alto Pajakus and Alto Wawas — were sanctioned or placed under precautionary measures after supervisions found large volumes of timber reported as transported without authorization.

For these communities, Mongabay tried to reach out for comment to the regional Indigenous federation in Ucayali (ORAU) and the national Indigenous organization representing Indigenous peoples across Peru (AIDESEP), but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

In each case, OSINFOR identified the same core mechanism: illegal extraction and mobilization of timber through paper-based laundering of wood sourced from protected or unlicensed areas.

Illegal logging has moved from something that happens “out there in the forest” into the governance structures of some Indigenous communities for income, Arellano Olano tells Mongabay.

“Up to 80% of the logging inside official management areas in the last year was illegal,” he said.

The Amazon’s ‘boiling’ point

Variations of this phenomenon take hold in Honoria, one of the key hubs of plant medicine centers and spiritual tourism driven.

The city, near Pucallpa, is the gateway to the Boiling River (Shanay Timpishka in the Yanesha´ language, meaning “boiled by the sun”) a hydrothermal anomaly once considered legendary. Its waters can reach 99° Celsius (210° Fahrenheit), forming one of the largest documented nonvolcanic thermal rivers on Earth, a “natural laboratory” into the Earth’s deep subsurface and geologic processes, geologist Andrés Ruzo tells Mongabay.

Locals describe the river as an ancient center of shamanic learning. Yet tourism pressures, the rise of contemporary non-Indigenous shamans and community fragmentation have been reaching into the area too.

Here, Jacqueline spent years trying to reverse that drift by articulating what a reconnected place should look like: rituals embedded in daily life rather than staged for visitors, elders teaching consistently, Indigenous languages spoken across generations, secure land tenure and outside actors who adapt to local authority instead of bending it.

However, deforestation has advanced so quickly, fueled by document-based corruption, that “if the zone stays as it is,” — neglected, forgotten — “we could reach a point of no return within three years,” Ruzo warns.

On paper, the Boiling River sits inside a mosaic of protected and regulated spaces. In reality, those overlapping regimes pull the land in opposite directions. The area is seeing unregulated settlements, land trafficking and illegal logging.

Below the forest, the area now falls inside Perupetro Lot 87, a hydrocarbon concession under evaluation by Upland Oil & Gas that grants subsurface mineral rights but no control over the surface.

Aboveground, large swaths are classified as BPP, where the state can issue 40-year concessions for logging or agroforestry, though this does not grant ownership rights to the concessionaries.

Running through that patchwork are pockets of titled lands, parcels that individuals or communities have bought outright and legally hold in perpetuity.

But even titled land, the strongest category of ownership in Peru, is never safe by itself. Every legal landholder interviewed by Mongabay in Honoria says the same thing: If you don’t put guards on your borders, someone else will come and steal your land and its resources.

This is because, according to José Carlos Monteagudo, a former geologist for Maple Gas Corporation del Perú S.R.L. — the company that for decades held the hydrocarbon concession in the area — local landholdings fall into a third category: possessions, where settlers and squatters occupy land without any real legal right. This can become the gateway for land trafficking, cattle expansion and extraction carried out under the radar.

Similar dynamics have been documented far beyond the Boiling River: a previous Mongabay investigation and a 2017 report by Peru’s Ombudsman’s Office (Defensoría del Pueblo) show that permanent production forests across the country have been repeatedly occupied and traded through illegal certificates of possession, turning protected land into a platform for land trafficking and agricultural expansion.

Felipe Koechlin, founder of a tourism company focused on conservation, Amaraka S.A.C., tells Mongabay that his ecotourism concession process in the Boiling River area was warped by this kind of corruption.

He applied for it in 2019, after first approaching authorities as early as 2016, and complied with every legal step. “No one opposed it,” he says, “and the concession should have been granted within 15 days.”

Instead, their file disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole. And twice, the local Technical Administration of Forestry and Wildlife (ATFFS), responsible for processing the concession, burned down, destroying every document submitted.

Documentation reviewed by Mongabay shows how the administrative inaction matches the formal complaint filed by the company, which alleges abuse of delay and evidence that officials may have begun processing another concession using the same coordinates.

The vacuum created by state paralysis has been exploited locally not only by Peruvians entering the area, but also by foreigners who were sold land that the state cannot legally title.

Among those, according to Koechlin, there is David Wheeler, an American citizen who allegedly purchased land illegally in a state-owned forest zone and aggressively cleared trees to build structures in the concession area.

Mongabay talked to Wheeler, owner of the International Ancestral Medicine Institute in the Boiling River area, who calls himself a “facilitator,” a chimera between scientist and ‘brujo’ (a sorcerer).

Wheeler denies the allegations. He says he is a legal occupant and controls eight lots: six with private property titles registered through the Peruvian public registry (SUNARP) — used for cattle and cacao, according to photos provided by sources — and two inside the BPP through concessions for research.

However, Mongabay reviewed the public concession records available through Peru’s National Forestry and Wildlife Service (SERFOR) and OSINFOR’s official registry of forestry concessions, finding that the two concessions Wheeler says he controls do not appear in the database. When asked to provide the documents directly, he failed to produce any. Among the species deforested were Shihuahuaco (Dypteryx micrantha) and lupuna (Ceiba sp.), all giant trees on which the ecosystem depends.

Michel Douglas Rivera, one of the four local entrepreneurs who legally holds an ecotourism and conservation concession in the Boiling River corridor, has watched this pattern unfolding around his property.

According to public prosecutor’s office files from Ucayali and ATFFS inspection records, Rivera’s concession was repeatedly targeted by local land traffickers led by a person accused of selling state forest land to sawmill operators without contracts and issuing false “residence certificates” to enable illegal occupation.

In 2022, SERFOR documented that squatters connected to this network logged more than 15 hectares (37 acres) inside the protected sector, caught on site while felling trees like cedar, ishpingo (Ocotea quixos), caoba (Swietenia macrophylla) and copaiba (Copaifera spp.).

“They come in with fake papers, cut everything they can sell and leave the territory broken,” Rivera says. “We’re the ones who have to fight to keep the forest standing.”

Interviewed by Mongabay, a former ATFFS regional agriculture director points the finger at this entrenched system of collusion driving deforestation around the Boiling River.

“The laws and decrees are there; everything is written to protect the forest,” he says, “but the problem is people’s attitude.”

However, current officials argue that the picture is more complex. Sixto Arce Cárdenas, director of the Puerto Inca Agricultural Agency, tells Mongabay that deforestation is often fueled by distorted information and flawed land-titling practices that incentivize clearing.

“If a farmer has 100 hectares [247 acres] but only works 5, only those 5 are considered for possession,” he says. “So what does he do? He clears everything,” fearing only cultivated hectares will be recognized for titling.

In Peru’s BPPs, he adds, similar dynamics occur: Producers clear more land than they actively use in order to demonstrate occupation and strengthen future claims to possession, though accelerating deforestation.

“Perhaps only 50% of what appears in official documents matches what exists on the ground,” he says, suggesting a growing gap between formal forest zoning and de facto occupation.

According to OSINFOR officials, some Indigenous and peasant communities whose titled or managed forests fall within BPPs are beginning to divide these areas into individual plots, renting sections to criminals or entering “pseudo-sales” of land under economic pressures they face.

“The main cause of forest loss is the poverty of the people who are there,” says Franz Orlando Tang Jara, head of Ucayali’s regional forestry and wildlife office under the regional government (GORE) of Ucayali.

“They pay 10,000 Peruvian soles a year,” he says, turning trespass into a shadow rental market. Tang Jara points to the case near the Shipibo-Conibo Indigenous community of Caimito, where Mennonites occupied land overlapping a community’s expansion request and later argued they had been charged monthly by the Indigenous authorities themselves.

This dynamic reached the Boiling River area after it gained international visibility in the 2010s, reshaping the forest and recasting claims over eco- and ancestral tourism.

It’s the case of places like Santuario Huishtin, a traditional plant medicine retreat run by mestizo master healer Enrique Paredes. He says he is there for conservation and ecotourism after having worked as an apprentice for Jaqueline’s father and acquiring his plot legitimately.

However, the process he described closely mirrors illegal land sales in the Boiling River’s BPP: “You go to the notary, the documents are drawn up, and that’s it,” a private transaction that, however, carries no legal weight on state-owned forest land, he tells Mongabay.

Similarly to David Wheeler, no concession for Santuario Huishtin appears in OSINFOR’s data set, even though Paredes says he is in the process of securing one.

“The Boiling River is turning into no-man’s-land,” says Glen Larson Arriaga Silva, a tour operator who has worked around the area for years.

He tells Mongabay he himself was once offered “10 hectares [25 acres] for 5,000 soles [$1,460],” even though “all natural resources belong to the state. … There is no ecotourism there anymore,” he says. “They’re selling green, but they’re not doing it.”

He says foreign clients are charged $80 a night for 10-day retreats, yet “there is no equitable work with conservation,” no reinvestment in trails or habitat restoration, while foreign organizers and non-Indigenous shamans increasingly mediate the rituals.

In response, Peru’s modern forest system has increasingly turned to institutional reforms that aim to counter these pressures by formally involving Indigenous communities in forest governance, monitoring and decision-making.

OSINFOR’s La Mochila Forestal is an intercultural training tool created to strengthen Indigenous and rural communities’ ability to manage forests legally and sustainably, addressing the severe information gaps that help fuel unauthorized extraction.

Through participatory modules on community forest management, vigilance against corruption and traceability, the initiative has trained 9,460 people across 11 regions — 79% of them Indigenous — and formed 652 community trainers, measurably improving compliance in multiple communities whose performance shifted from “deficient” to “good” after repeated workshops.

And while institutional protections inch forward on paper, on the ground, some people like Jacqueline are involved in the slow, invisible work of trying to hold and reconnect a cultural line.

Jacqueline says she recognizes the forest governance erosion around her but refuses to accept it as final. “[An identity rebuilding] can be achieved,” she insists, “but it has to come from within.”

It is not a miracle fix, but “a cultural duty” that, she says, holds open another storyline for this land.

Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Michele Calamaio is a 2025 Columbia University–Pulitzer Center Post-Grad Reporting Fellow.

Banner image: Portrait of Jacqueline Flores. Image by Heinz Plengue Pardo. Design by Emilie Languedoc.

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