How do cow hides from illegal farms in the Amazon end up in American SUVs?

My colleagues in Brazil, Manuela Andreoni, a reporter, and Victor Moriyama, a photographer, went deep into the Jaci-Paraná reserve in Rondônia State to investigate a complex supply chain that links the leather used for seats in high-end trucks and cars to illegal deforestation.

Traveling hours on a leaky boat and on winding dirt roads, they found and interviewed rubber tappers who are being driven from their homes, cattle ranchers profiting from the stolen land, and middlemen who help obscure the animals’ links to deforestation. They also tracked the leather to slaughterhouses and tanneries operated by some of Brazil’s largest corporations.

Then, with Albert Sun, a graphics editor at The Times in New York, we crunched a wealth of data and followed the leather trade through Mexico and the United States to auto showrooms where luxury vehicles are sold.

Key numbers: In the Jaci-Paraná reserve, global demand for leather is helping to sustain a growing herd of 120,000 cattle on ranches where forest once stood.

Quotable: “If all the cattle were sold,” said Aidee Maria Moser, a retired local prosecutor who spent almost two decades fighting illegal ranching, the government would have enough money “to reforest the whole reserve.”

You can read our full investigation here.