The Sand Hill mill closed in 2009, the year I graduated from Adams-Friendship High School. The same extractive logic that closed it — a timber economy that pays men with guns when paperwork fails — is what got a 50-year-old Kichwa grandfather named Quinto Inuma Alvarado shot on his boat ride home from a meeting of land defenders in Peru’s northern San Martin region on Nov. 29, 2023. A court in Tarapoto on Monday handed down sentences for that killing that almost never come down.
The numbers are real: 35 years each for the two men prosecutors say pulled the trigger, Genix Saboya Saboya and Limber Ríos Ruiz; 28 years and four months for the timber operator they say put the contract on Inuma’s head, Segundo Juan Villalobos Guevara; 15 years for an accomplice, Jerly Saboya Saboya. A woman traveling with Inuma was shot and wounded in the same attack. The men paid to kill him didn’t bother to scope the collateral. Three years after the killing, his family has the names of the men who pulled the trigger and the name of the man who paid for them. That almost never happens.
Inuma was 50. He was doing exactly what the international community now tells Indigenous leaders to do — gathering, organizing, making his community’s claims inside the formal political spaces the Peruvian state built for that work. He had come from a national meeting of environmental and land defenders. He was on his way home to his community of Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu. He died on the river. The timber economy’s answer to a meeting about logging permits was a 9 mm pistol at boat-launching distance.
These convictions are the closest thing to accountability the Amazon’s Indigenous forest defenders ever get. They are also, in the order of magnitude that matters, almost nothing. Peru’s pattern of killing land defenders is well documented, and almost every other case looks like this one except for the verdict at the end. The hired guns are interchangeable. The timber operators who retain them are the bottleneck, and they almost never sit in the defendant’s chair. Villalobos Guevara’s 28-year term is the part of this verdict that touches the actual machinery of defender killings in the Peruvian Amazon. He is not the trigger; he is the upstream buyer of violence — the kind of figure who sits behind a desk and arranges for Indigenous grandfathers to disappear.
The reason this matters here, on the sand in Adams County where the Sand Hill mill never reopened and where the timber economy’s collapse is the air my neighbors breathe, is that the same machinery is the same machinery. The Menominee Forest, in northeastern Wisconsin, has been logged continuously since 1856 and is still standing. It is the gold standard for sustained-yield forestry in this country, and it is still standing because the Menominee have managed it as a continuous trust rather than as a finite resource to be liquidated. Forests managed by the people who live in them persist. Forests managed as raw material for the next quarterly statement get cut down, and the people who try to defend them get shot.
When Indigenous defenders in Peru are killed for doing what the Menominee have done in Wisconsin for 170 years, the political permission structure for doing it here gets weaker. That is not abstract. The Ho-Chunk Nation holds land throughout central Wisconsin and has managed this landscape since long before there was a state. Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, the rural electric co-op headquartered here in Friendship, was organized in part on lands the Ho-Chunk and other tribes were pushed off of, and the co-op’s territory today is the landscape those nations still steward as best the law lets them. Wisconsin Act 31, the 1989 statute that requires every public school in the state to teach the history and sovereignty of Wisconsin’s eleven federally recognized tribes, is the kind of political permission structure the Inuma killing erodes when nobody answers for it. You do not defend your own co-management institutions by telling the rest of the world that killing Indigenous land defenders is the cost of doing business.
And the rest of the world is, this month, telling them exactly that. The conviction came down about a month into Keiko Fujimori’s presidency, a transition that has yet to publicly signal how it will treat the wave of organized-crime and extractive-industry killings in the Amazon, even as Indigenous federations petitioned the UN just three months ago to confront that wave rather than militarize a response to it. Organized-crime networks have turned Indigenous territories into logging corridors and cocaine transshipment routes. They murder with impunity, and the states meant to stop them usually look away. The new government in Lima has not yet said which side of that it intends to be on, and the first month is not encouraging.
The verdict’s force is shadowed by what it does not touch. Illegal Amazon timber undercuts legal U.S. timber and depresses the prices Wisconsin sawmills and paper mills receive for wood they cut under actual state forestry rules. That is not theory. It is the market the Sand Hill mill was working in when it closed and that the Verso mill in Wisconsin Rapids was working in when it idled in June 2020, putting roughly 900 paper-economy jobs on the shelf within driving distance of Adams County. Every illegal board foot that crosses a border is a board foot that did not pay the Wisconsin loggers, the Wisconsin truckers, the Wisconsin millwrights, the Wisconsin family-wage math — and a board foot cut without the consent of the people whose forest it came out of.
Peru’s broader pattern, the steady drumbeat of assassinations and criminalized persecution of land defenders, remains intact. Inuma’s family now has prison sentences for the men who pulled the trigger and for the man who paid for them. They do not yet have a verdict on the system that made his murder worth ordering. Neither do the rest of us. The next timber baron weighing whether to settle a land dispute with a pistol should be reading this week’s docket and counting his own years. The next Wisconsin forester watching the price of stumpage drop against undercut illegal supply should be asking who is doing the undercutting, and on whose land, and at whose cost.