“In Peru, a corrupt land-titling scheme sees forests sold off as farms”, 12 August 2021

...Some authorities from the departmental government participated in this process by using their positions to grant titles to forested land illegally. Some of them are now under investigation and under house arrest...More than 1,000 hectares (about 2,500 acres) of forests in eastern Peru were demarcated as private properties and later registered in the names of people who do not recall becoming owners of the land...Mongabay Latam determined that 29 of them overlap with the territories of two Indigenous Shipibo-Conibo communities: 25 of them with the community of Buenos Aires, and four with Caimito...This story begins with the group of DRSAU agriculture officials in the field, filling in dozens of land registry files according to what they were supposedly observing at that moment. One plot of land, for example, was separated into sections: 20% each for corn, plantains and cacao; 10% for yucca; and 30% for purma, or fallow land. This is how the DRSAU technicians were completing each land registry document, according to a former employee whose name is not being revealed for security reasons...However, satellite images contradict this. Experts from the Common Good Institute (IBC, or Instituto del Bien Común in Spanish) analyzed the 47 land registry files, which contain information on a total of 1,136 hectares (2,807 acres). The team determined that on the dates the properties were registered as being used for agricultural activities, the same land was actually still covered in primary forest...The investigation focuses specifically on the illegal titling of properties owned by Indigenous communities and by the Peruvian government, in a way that favors the relatives of DRSAU officials and of mayors in Ucayali department. Some individuals also simply lent their names to facilitate the titling process, and planned to later sell or transfer the properties...Mongabay Latam reached out to Gambini Rupay for his version of how these public and Indigenous forested lands were ceded into private ownership. As of the time of this article’s publication in Spanish, however, we did not receive a response...