Zooming in on the Peruvian jungle, many hectares of deforestation can be seen amid the thick vegetation, like huge scars hidden among the foliage. They’re dispersed between the forests in the departments of Ucayali, Loreto, Huánuco, Madre de Dios, Pasco and Cusco. Some are very close to rivers, others just meters away from tracks or roads, and many are in the middle of protected areas. After more than 10 months of research, a team coordinated by Mongabay Latam confirmed that these openings in the middle of the jungle are clandestine airstrips. Many of them are built in or around native communities’ territories, close to protected areas or inside Indigenous reserves. With information obtained from the Peruvian police’s antinarcotics unit, DIRANDRO; the departmental government of Ucayali, GORE Ucayali; OpenStreetMap; and an AI algorithm, we identified a total of 128 illegal airstrips across six departments in the Peruvian Amazon. We confirmed the presence of 76 of these through approximately 60 interviews with Indigenous leaders, community members, prosecutors, experts and civil servants. Of this number, 45 are in Ucayali and were built for drug trafficking. “We found drug laboratories and clandestine airstrips mostly in the [province] of Atalaya [in Ucayali],” said Pedro Velásquez, deputy prosecutor of the Ucayali Special Prosecutor’s Office for Illicit Drug Trafficking. “Drug traffickers often use native communities or hard-to-access areas with no land registry and position themselves there; they know which areas have airstrips. This is their modus operandi.” Logging, both legal and illegal, occurs along rivers in Atalaya…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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