Its rectangular grid of roads extends over almost 8 miles and contains a million palm trees.
The smaller property, Zanja Seca, is nearly the size of Manhattan.
But the creation of the plantations came at a steep price.
At least 28 species were new to science.
Since the 1960s, more than 13% of the original Amazonian rainforest has been cleared.
Most of the destruction has been concentrated in Brazil, butPeru is second on the list.
Field reporting was supported by thePulitzer Center.
“All that we have done, we have done without deforesting anything.”
After the transfer, I found, key personnel from United Oils remained in place including Melka.
Melka has not responded publicly to the prosecutors' allegations and did not respond to requests for comment.
Last year, the European Union passednew regulationson deforestation that promised to be the strictest in the world.
But it may not be that easy.
The company was losing buyers left and right.
Spoor was eager to tell his side of the story.
Two months later, he headed to Latin America.
His first stop was Mexico, to run another waste recycler.
Then, in 2019, he joined Ocho Sur to oversee a different kind of cleanup.
Before accepting the position, Spoor visited the plantations with one of Ocho Sur’s shareholders.
Every 10 days, each tree develops a 50-pound cluster of fruits oozing with thick, red oil.
They will keep producing for the next 20 years.
Only a fifth of palm oil sold across the globe was certified by 2022.
After an hour, Doldourov swung onto a dirt road with tire-swallowing holes.
We passed abandoned farms, cattle pastures, and stray dogs, but not much forest.
“We work in harmony with nature,” read one.
“We protect wildlife,” read another.
“We conserve forests,” read a third.
“What is it that people are going to do here in the jungle?”
“They are going to grow coca.”
and, in some weird way, that will have been the result of what we started."
“It’s a vitally important area,” Park said.
Now, according to Park’s friend, a massive palm oil plantation was springing up in the area.
Workers had been conducting surveys and slashing paths with machetes.
Initially, Park was skeptical.
Tamshiyacu seemed too remote to be worth anyone’s while, he thought.
Before long, workers showed up there with two dozen bulldozers and excavators.
They proceeded east, widening and grading a dirt road for some 6 miles until they reached their destination.
First, she found “Plantaciones de Loreto” based in Iquitos, then “Plantaciones de Ucayali.”
Ultimately, she unearthed more than two dozen interrelated companies.
Images online showed a sharply dressed man in his late 30s with a bald head and blue eyes.
“Where is the environmental prosecutor?”
They didn’t yet know that Melka’s clearing and planting was already further along in Ucayali.
He would be flying to Peru a few days later.
“I created thousands of jobs in Peru,” he said.
“Leave me alone.”
In those days, palm oil was booming on Borneo, a 90-minute flight to the east.
“That’s something I want to get into.”
They proceeded to clear-cut their land and plant oil palm, according tosatellite analysesconducted by the Environmental Investigation Agency.
But Peru topped his list.
Under President Alan Garcia, Peru was welcoming foreign investors with open arms.
“Tax free at all levels!”
Melka raved in an email to a London-based investment advisor.
“Labor costs at US$11.50 per day.
And, unlike in much of Southeast Asia, Peru allowed foreigners to own plantations outright.
It was more than a clever line.
The United States later financed a mill that would be run by a farmer cooperative.
Melka worked to take full advantage of the government aid.
“The Peruvian industry needs scale,” he said in a draft report he prepared in 2010.
“All UN & USAID efforts should be focused on growing the productive resource and planting land.”
“I found it crazy.”
Melka promptly hired him as a consultant to oversee plantation operations.
Rivera’s son Julio also came on board, as did another UN employee, Maria Teresa Trigoso.
“Oh, fuck,” he remembered thinking.
“I just put my money with someone who is clearing forest in the Amazon.”
Melka quickly lined up more than a dozen investors.
He had purchased $7 million of the company’s debt himself.
“We’ve been meeting with mid-tier investment banks with positive feedback,” he wrote.
The next challenge was acquiring land for the plantations.
But experts say Melka’s enablers would be the first to carry it out on such a large scale.
“Melka is the game changer,” Dammert told me.
“There is a before and an after.”
Wiese, Ramirez said, “agreed to this or that zone.”
Most of them didn’t even live nearby.
Some 10 miles west of Tibecocha, Melka obtained a second property, Zanja Seca,by different means.
But after a massive fiscal decentralization, the Ucayali government was in need of cash.
A million palm seeds were soon imported from Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Ivory Coast.
Worker camps, dining areas, and soccer fields were erected.
Oil palm spread in the uplands, rice crops in the peatlands.
Land conflicts were on the rise.
The Peruvian state granted the community about 540 acres in 1986.
Now, those forests were being cleared.
They requested a territorial expansion to make up for what was being lost.
Bolivar had helped found a federation uniting nine Kakataibo communities and became an eloquent defender of Indigenous rights.
He was immediately recognizable by his long hair and the beaded necklaces and headdresses he wore for meetings.
Melka tended to move fast, and that held true as he snapped up land.
None of that corner-cutting stopped Melka from working toward his dream of earning environmental plaudits for his palm oil.
In October 2013, a United Oils subsidiary, Plantaciones de Pucallpa,joinedthe Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.
According to roundtable records, Melka’s subsidiary affirmed that it had not cleared any forest for Tibecocha.
“United Oils,” it reads.
“World’s Finest Palm Oil.”
They soon discovered Melka was on the verge of pulling off his most brazen scheme.
Melka’s team had pitched the idea directly to farmers.
“What is oil palm?
Where will it take us?”
“Look, how I have credit cards like a casino!
That is what oil palm is.”
“What alternatives do we have?”
Though he said he had never met Melka, he had longstanding ties to the United Oils team.
He had known Alfredo Rivera since the 1990s.
“That is where the conflict began,” he recalled.
Melka had sought to bring another 12,000 acres into cultivation through this sharecropping strategy.
The process was so haphazard that some of the parcels Huaman approved were partwayinside a lake.
The plan quickly backfired.
Monteluiz and his companions fled into the jungle, leaving behind their chainsaws.
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil followed suit with its own stop-work order.
As for the growing international controversy, Melka responded by lashing out.
For over a year, Melka was able to defy the stop-work orders and operate without consequence.
He could not, however, operate without capital.
“Bank accounts are empty,” Melka emailed his board.
“Suppliers are physically protesting outside the office doors.”
That February, United Oils defaulted on a $5 million interest payment on its corporate bonds.
The $48 million principal would be due in six months time.
Melka wrote his shareholders to say that his attempts to obtain bridge financing had gone nowhere.
The crisis pitted Melka’s investors against one another.
The new company’s name: Ocho Sur.
“We looked at this so many times,” he said.
“It’s not like the investors took it for granted that Melka was right.”
He dubbed the maneuver “covert business succession.”
The company has robustly denied this claim.
“It is incorrect and impossible to attribute to it any alleged actions that occurred before its existence.”
Since 2010, at least 29 environmental defenders have been killed in the Peruvian Amazon.
Ocho Sur kept the same United Oils offices in what would become the Wyndham hotel.
The signs were simply updated.
Pautrat believed that she was witnessing a greenwashing operation of epic proportions.
One of his first acts after taking the company’s helm was to get rid of Melka.
The company bought out Melka’s shares and ended his consulting contract.
In any event, Spoor thought he was making progress toward resolving the outstanding claims against the company.
Spoor took issue with the agency’s findings, saying the officials had “overstepped their legal competence.”
Spoor has little good to say about the environmentalists who have sought to hold his plantations accountable.
One of Ocho Sur’s lawyers made a cameo.
Kene’s annual budget is $160,000.
This third man stood out because his hair was pulled into a high ponytail atop his shaven head.
It was Washington Bolivar, the activist who had helped Ucayali’s Indigenous communities fight the palm oil plantations.
Once Ocho Sur’s most outspoken enemy, he had become the company’s supporter.
“He knows that Ocho Sur is defending the truth,” Agurto said.
“That the NGOs are shit.”
He now frequently appears in the media as an Indigenous voicelambasting NGOs.
Bolivar was not the only one who’d switched sides.
Saldana arranged to take me to visit Santa Clara de Uchunya the following day.
When we arrived, a group of residents were gathered under a metal canopy as a television blared.
We found a quiet place to speak with Barbaran, the newly elected leader.
“We are not going to live like our parents had lived,” he told me.
“We want to better ourselves.”
“Thanks tola empresa,we have a line of communication to the internet,” Barbaran said.
It was a critical final step for Ocho Sur in legalizing its plantations.
“Senor, Ulises,” she said, “why do you deny it?”
“Where are we going to work during the next 25 years?
Where are we going to hunt animals like this?”
she said, gesturing to the stove.
At stake, she said, was the future of the community.
“Life is not bought life is borrowed,” she said.
“It is literally a cash register for farmers,” Spoor said.
“Farmers who used to grow coca leaves are happy to switch to palm oil.”
“It was a devastating surprise,” Spoor said.
He had been hoping, he said, to conserve that land to add to the company’s offsets.
Since Melka’s arrival in 2010, the Ucayali region has experienced the highest rate of deforestation in Peru.
Coca farming, meanwhile, has increased by a factor of five.
In 2022, the UN approved aresolutionprioritizing biodiversity protection in its development work.
“We never advocate for monocultures,” Welsch said.
“I’m puzzled by this ideology that wants to keep people in poverty.”
For Ocho Sur, achieving that dream has meant erasing history.
Rodas' office told me formal charges were imminent.
Fighting in favor of the amnesty is a familiar name: Washington Bolivar.
The forests of Ucayali were among those going up in flames.
The firefighting crews had taken up residence in housing provided by Ocho Sur.
The European Union met the moment by voting last month to postpone its new deforestation regulations for a year.
