Police from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru seized 280,450 cubic metres of illegally harvested timber in joint raids across the Amazon Basin, a volume above the biggest timber haul police anywhere have ever taken. That is according to the International Initiative of Law Enforcement for Climate, the UAE Ministry of Interior platform that ran Green Shield 2026 from a command centre in Bogotá between 15 and 31 July.
“Protecting our natural resources requires a shared response,” William Oswaldo Rincón Zambrano, Director of the Colombian National Police, said of a campaign that turned shared intelligence into raids in five countries at once.
Brazil’s Federal Police needed months of work and army support to secure 226,760 cubic metres in Operation Handroanthus, the largest timber seizure in that country’s history, a total the five Amazon forces say they passed inside 17 days. Earlier runs of the same UAE platform never came near it, with Green Justice taking 10,498 cubic metres across three countries in 2024 and last year’s Green Shield taking 3,800 cubic metres across four countries in a fortnight from 23 June.
Adding Bolivia and stretching the raids to 17 days took the timber count 74 times past last year’s total, a number released through the UAE state news agency, with no country breakdown from the five forces. Timber led the haul by volume, with officers also taking more than 195 tonnes of minerals, 32,000 pieces of illegal mining gear, and 3,079 live animals bound for the wildlife trade.
Officials put the value of everything seized at over US$280 million, a total that covers minerals, machinery, fuel, wildlife, and wood.
“By working together, law enforcement agencies can achieve stronger results,” Dana Humaid, Director General of the International Affairs Bureau at the UAE Ministry of Interior, said of a platform she has run in the Amazon since 2024.
Checkpoints on national roads, bus terminals, and sawmills carried much of the work on the ground, with the Colombian National Police in Meta reporting 36 cubic metres of timber taken in the second phase of the operation. Officers there also rescued 36 wild animals, recorded 40 finds of protected plants, and shut down eight illegal quarries.
Enforcement records elsewhere in the Americas show nothing near it, with Mexico’s environmental prosecutor taking 11,094 cubic metres across 28 states between January 2024 and February 2026 while cartel-run sawmills moved $172 million of Mexican timber a year. Green Shield claims 25 times that Mexican total in under three weeks, in a trade the US Justice Department ranks third among cross-border crimes by value.
Two agencies own the platform between them, the UAE Ministry of Interior and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which created it in 2023 to treat these crimes as organised and run for money rather than one-off breaches of the rules. Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister, announced the results on Tuesday and said the work turned global partnerships into hard results on the ground.
It comes as forensic science moves the same fight from the wharf to the lab, with a Brazilian oxygen map published last week ruling out 92 per cent of the Amazon as the source of any seized log and leaving an area the size of the UK in play. Researchers who read 184 Brazilian forest management plans found that up to 70 per cent of timber traded from the Amazon may be illegal, with false credits washing cut wood into legal supply chains.
European buyers face the sharper test, with the EU Deforestation Regulation covering large and medium traders from 30 December 2026 and asking for the map point where every load grew. Five national forces now hold 280,450 cubic metres as evidence, and no lab method yet published can place a seized log on one plot.
Environmental crimes “do not respect borders,” Peruvian police environmental chief J. Manuel Cruz Chamba said of networks his officers followed through the same Amazon border country that grew the Bolivian hardwood behind Chile’s record drug seizure.
The 839 people arrested now face charges across five countries, and the only country-level timber figure any national force has published is the 36 cubic metres reported from Colombia’s Meta department.
