Journalist Glòria Pallarès won the Anti-Corruption Excellence (ACE) Award for her investigation into corrupt forest finance schemes published in collaboration with Mongabay. The award ceremony was held in Doha, Qatar, on Dec. 16. The investigation, published in January 2024, exposed a scheme in which companies registered in Peru, Bolivia and Panama were using false claims of U.N. backing to win contracts with Indigenous communities, some lasting several decades. The contracts granted the companies economic rights to a total of more than 9.5 million hectares (23.5 million acres) of Indigenous forested land. The agreements were signed without following the correct procedures to guarantee full community consent and were often based on murky promises of jobs and local development. In some cases, the agreements also promised a financial return from carbon credits and green bonds. Referring to Pallarès’ investigations over a decade, the award wrote in a statement, “She has led major cross-continental investigations exposing corruption in forest and carbon governance across Central Africa and Latin America.” It added, “Her reporting uncovered a fraudulent scheme targeting over 9.5 million hectares of Indigenous forest land in Peru, Bolivia, and Panama, empowering the Matsés Nation to reject it and prompting international action.” Following Pallarès’ investigation, several Indigenous communities in Peru, Bolivia and Panama that were misled into handing over their rights to millions of hectares of forest were able to challenge or terminate their contracts. Most notably, the Matsés people in Peru scrapped a contract that had granted a sketchy shell company, Get Life,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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