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Blood Wood (Cont.)

THE LAST LINK IN THIS TRAIL of blood and sawdust is up the Xingu in the Middle Land, so I buy 120 liters of gasoline, two blocks of ice, and some food and head for the disgusting Altamira waterfront, where I hire the thrashing, twisting, leaping, jumping, jigging, half-Indian Jump to take me into the rainforest.

Upstream the banks begin to rise up. Clear-cut hills are visible, the trees replaced with cattle. In midafternoon we round an island and come across about a thousand mahogany logs floating patiently in the river. These were chainsawed from the upper reaches of the Xingu, skinned, cut into 20-foot lengths, and then started downriver roped into rafts of 50 trunks each. But the shipment was impounded here by IBAMA as illegal, or "precarious," last fall. Two wiry old men, Luciano and Pedro, are living here in a puny houseboat, paid by IBAMA to watch the logs, which are tied to the lee of the island.

"Jump, you devil!" Pedro shouts. "Tudo bem?" Everything good?

"Everything legal," Jump replies, and we all shake hands.

We clamber across the blazing tin roof of their boat and hop down onto a forest's worth of mahogany. Barefoot, I pick my way over one cluster, skip to the next, and work my way along the future coffee tables of America until I am hundreds of yards into a sea of mahogany, most of it stolen from land simultaneously claimed by Kayap- and Arara Indians, private landowners, and the government. IBAMA isn't quite sure what to do with it. The middleman who bought the logs and paid to have them rafted downriver has sued to reclaim them. If he wins, this mega-raft will be worth several million dollars.

The trail of blood wood circles back and leads me to Belém. A few days after Brazil's President Henrique Cardoso boasts on the radio about the mahogany moratorium, I take a taxi to the port. I have been inside the front gate only a few seconds when a harried inspector from IBAMA, Senhor Coimbra, happens by, carrying a tape measure. "We just found some mahogany right now," he tells me, dragging me past antique iron sheds that line the docks.

The wood is stacked in plain sight, by the road: 264 pallets of boards, a monstrous display of illegal wood. Coimbra, a small, sunburned, middle-aged man, runs a tape measure over a pallet, does some math, and then swats the wood with a swagger stick of discarded mahogany. "All the measurements are false," he says. The shipping papers describe it as 262 cubic meters; by his calculations, it is 328 cubic meters. I ask if he will impound it.

"We already did," he says. IBAMA discovered this wood months ago in a sawmill up-country and put it under injunction, but a "substitute judge" was miraculously found to release it. Now a forklift closes in, picks up the first pallet, and carries it toward the Amazon, and we watch as load after load is lifted onto a cargo ship named the Bluarrow. The wood is plainly marked mobile, and is going into the hold alongside cedar equipped with Forest Stewardship Council stickers certifying it as legit. By the time the Bluarrow reaches the U.S., it will be hard to tell the shipments apart.

With Latin flourish, Coimbra slaps a big rubber stamp onto the shipping documents. "This export was determined by precarious judicial decision (injunction)," it reads in precarious English. The message is intended for customs inspectors in the United States. One after another, European, British, and now U.S. customs officials have begun impounding suspect mahogany. In a move supported by the White House, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has seized close to $20 million worth of Brazilian mahogany, estimates Greenpeace, at five ports of entry. Five of those 25 shipments have since been released, and in July, the U.S. timber industry sued the federal government for the release of 16 more. Still, there's a chance that Senhor Coimbra's "precarious" mahogany will never reach market.

As we turn to leave, a couple of cops on scooters whiz up. Coimbra looks nervous and signals for me to keep walking, but they cut us off, and a cruiser arrives. We are invited into the back of the police car, taken to the air-conditioned office of the port police captain, and given two cups of coffee and a lecture on interfering with the vital business of loading ships. Despite the fact that Coimbra works in this port every day and is wearing his uniform and badge, the officer leans across the desk and explains that we could be personally liable for the cost of any delays.

There's a picture of him under the glass of his desktop, taken at a customs conference in New York. He's standing in front of the Twin Towers, smiling.

"A terrible tragedy," he says. And then, done humiliating Coimbra and scrutinizing me, he lets us go.

Hours later, a local shipping executive drives up to the port's front gate. A volley of bullets shatters the windshield. He dies in the driver's seat. Somebody owed somebody some money. This is how business is done in the Amazon.

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