Puraquequara, a district of Manaus, Brazil, where commerce and illicit cocaine trafficking overlap in the Amazon.
Photographer: Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg
Energy
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Murilo Sampaio stood on a camouflage-painted boat on the Amazon, scanning for smugglers, when three oil barges appeared on the horizon.
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The military police chief had been told to check for drugs on every vessel coming down the Solimões, the name given to the upper stretches of the Amazon in Brazil. As Sampaio and his crew reviewed the convoy’s documents, they soon learned its origin: Peru’s biggest oil field, run by Houston-based PetroTal Corp.