Richard Conniff

Chasing the Illegal Loggers Looting the Amazon Forest

For years, timber barons in Peru have sent lumber to the US by the shipload. But many of the groves they harvested were pure fiction.

Ian Allen

The cargo ship Yacu Kallpa rode impatiently at anchor off Iquitos, Peru, a ramshackle city on a bend in the broad, turbulent waters of the Amazon River. She was a midsize ship, a tenth of a mile long, low-slung, with a seven-story superstructure in the stern and plumes of rust fanning down the hull from her main deck scuppers. She was like any other cargo ship in the world, but with a dark history. At that moment, in November 2015, she needed to get out of town fast…