Five South American countries on Tuesday announced a joint law enforcement operation targeting environmental crimes in the Amazon rainforest. The campaign, dubbed Operation Green Shield 2026, resulted in over 800 arrests and the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in timber, minerals, and livestock.

The campaign was coordinated by the International Initiative of Law Enforcement for Climate (I2LEC), a platform the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched in 2023 with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to help countries share intelligence and align enforcement against environmental crimes. Environmental crime globally has been increasingly treated as an organized and transnational criminal enterprise, with a 2024 UNODC resolution formalizing new measures for enforcement of crimes affecting the environment.

Tuesday’s announcement noted that law enforcement agencies from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru conducted sweeping criminal raids from July 15 through July 31. The raids took place along the Amazon rainforest’s border and river regions. These remote regions are notorious for illegal mining camps, logging routes, and wildlife trafficking corridors. More than 3,600 law enforcement officers were deployed to the region during the 17-day campaign, resulting in the seizure of 280,000 cubic meters of timber along with several hundred tons of mining materials and livestock connected to unlawful land use.

Criminal prosecutions will now move through the domestic legal system of the country where the arrest occurred. Brazil’s Environmental Crimes Law criminalizes offenses against wildlife, forests, and natural resources, establishing both individual and corporate liability. Colombia’s Law 2111 of 2021 established environmental provisions within its penal code to include offenses such as illegal deforestation. Peru and Ecuador address similar conduct under their respective penal codes, with Ecuador’s law establishing no statute of limitations for environmental damage claims.

This development is the latest in a string of multilateral legal and policing actions actively occurring within and around the Amazon rainforests in a bid to eradicate transnational environmental crimes, which regional courts and international bodies are increasingly treating as severe human rights violations. In early 2026, the European Union through its EL PAACTO 2.0 program, which is a regional initiative designed to strengthen criminal justice systems across Latin America, joined forces with INTERPOL and a Dutch police unit to announce that ‘Operation Guyana Shield’ was a resounding success, with nearly 200 individuals arrested in a coordinated effort to address illegal gold mining rampant among crime networks.

Furthermore, judicial bodies have frequently clashed with executive branches over these practices, including past federal court interventions that explicitly blocked orders permitting commercial mining exploitation inside protected rainforest reserves.

The Belém Declaration, which was signed on the 8th of August 2023, acted as the political foundation for this very cross-border enforcement by unifying the eight Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) nations with the main goal of tackling crime and protecting the sanctity and longevity of the rainforest.