This investigation was produced with support from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).

Isabel Alarcón contributed reporting from Ecuador.

BARCELONA — Covering more than 65 million hectares (160 million acres) across Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, the Gran Chaco is South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon Rainforest. Over the last decades, the dry forest ecosystem that fosters thousands of plant and animal species and 9 million people has lost about a quarter of its area to agriculture. In 2024, the Gran Chaco was especially threatened in Argentina’s Santiago del Estero province, where it lost 54,000 hectares (133,000 acres) of forest.

A few years earlier, the province’s forest ecosystem was the object of an announcement at COP26 in Glasgow, U.K. On Nov. 2, 2021, Global Carbon Parks Inc., a Miami-based startup, announced a $200-million carbon contract with the province of Santiago del Estero that, according to several sources, would support nature conservation and decarbonization in the region. The startup aimed to trade in carbon credits from subnational protected areas.

The announcement of the public-private arrangement was hosted by Capital Cities 35 (CC35), a climate alliance of mayors across the Americas that aims to build capacity to tackle climate change, implement the Paris Agreement and the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda. But findings from a Mongabay investigation suggest that the secretary-general of CC35, Argentinian Sebastián Navarro, used his position at CC35 in ways that benefited private carbon businesses like Global Carbon Parks, which he controlled through majority stakeholder Ethic International, Inc, a holding company that invests only in environmental, sustainable and conservation businesses.

As part of what Navarro himself describes as a calculated strategy, he tried to renegotiate the deal with the government of Santiago del Estero before it became apparent that three-quarters of Global Carbon Parks’ staff, including its legal representative, were facing legal complaints concerning alleged fraud in connection to a parallel carbon business that pressured Indigenous representatives in Brazil to sign contracts covering more than 8.5 million hectares (21 million acres) of forest.

This is not an isolated case, this investigation has found. Navarro appears to have capitalized on the growing interest in climate finance through what appears to be involvement in decision-making over key aspects of Global Carbon Parks, using logos of organizations without authorization and not fulfilling CC35’s financial commitments, including an outstanding debt with the government of Ecuador in relation to COP28.

A network of interests

“Navarro organized high-level gatherings, surrounded himself with real people, presented legit ideas. He was charismatic and well-connected,” said Alexis Leroy, founder of Allcot, a company that provides decarbonization solutions in Latin America and West Africa and a shareholder in Global Carbon Parks.

Its majority stakeholder was Ethic International with $510,000, represented by Santiago F. Maldonado, an Argentinian real estate businessman based in Miami. The rest were Freemoni, a customer-loyalty app represented by fellow Argentine Sebastián Torres; Allcot; Equalis, a Colombian law firm; and California-based Community Electricity, an R&D company for decarbonizing cities. The investor group joined Global Carbon Parks at Navarro’s request, according to the shareholders who spoke to Mongabay.

Allcot’s role in Global Carbon Parks, according to sources interviewed, was to lead the development of a carbon methodology in collaboration with Cercarbono, a Colombia-based carbon credit certifier focused on Latin America.

The financial mechanism based on the methodology would allow governments such as California’s to reward urban, provincial or state-level protected areas in lower-income countries for acting as carbon sinks. Recipient governments, such as Santiago del Estero in Argentina, would use the funds to restore degraded ecosystems and decarbonize the local economy.

CC35 supported the scheme. According to several Global Carbon Parks shareholders, as CC35 executive secretary, Navarro’s role would be to connect governments in countries like Argentina, Mexico and Honduras to the solutions offered by Global Carbon Parks, a company in which he officially had no stake.

Yet, according to several company stakeholders and business contacts of Navarro interviewed by Mongabay, he insisted on shaping the carbon methodology to produce a maximum number of credits for the voluntary carbon market (VCM).

The VCM is a decentralized market where private actors voluntarily buy and sell carbon credits; one credit represents 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide reduced or removed from the atmosphere. The Core Carbon Principles, a global benchmark for high-integrity carbon credits, represent an effort of these markets to self-regulate.

A key principle is additionality, meaning that the emissions reduction would not have occurred without the incentive created by carbon credit revenues. Credits from government-protected natural areas cannot be claimed as additional. A government can donate money to another government in support of its nature conservation efforts, but protected areas cannot be the focus of trading in voluntary carbon markets.

For representatives of Cercarbono and Allcot, another concern was the number of credits that the methodology sought to produce. As explained by Maldonado, president of Ethic International and the main shareholder of Global Carbon Parks, the methodology calculated the amount of carbon that was stored in the biomass — e.g., trees — in the protected area, rather than the tons of greenhouse gases that the area captured from the atmosphere over a period of time. According to him, that inflated the number of credits, as well as the estimated value of the contract with Santiago del Estero.

A third concern for Allcot and Cercarbono was Global Carbon Parks’ plan to take this large number of credits and sell half of them in anticipation; in other words, having companies wanting to compensate their emissions invest in credits that had not yet been produced, i.e., tons of carbon that the forest had not yet captured from the atmosphere.

“The whole thing [GCP’s carbon mechanism] was meant to be an arrangement between governments,” Carlos Trujillo, chairman of Cercarbono, told Mongabay. “It was never meant to become a business for the voluntary carbon market, because it does not meet the basic integrity criteria for that purpose.”

Cercarbono ultimately refused to certify the methodology from GCP, which to date has not been vetted by any other certifier.

Allcot also rejected the carbon methodology created by Torres from Global Carbon Parks under the guidance of Navarro, arguing it had no scientific rigor and would flood the voluntary market with junk credits. “What we won’t do is sell smoke,” Leroy told Mongabay. “I made it clear: ‘We haven’t done it in Allcot’s 15-year history, and we won’t do it now.’”

In a written exchange from Sept. 22, 2022, seen by Mongabay, Trujillo had already told Navarro that Cercarbono would support the initiative only if it fully adhered to the principles of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market. According to him, that did not change Navarro’s mind.

This was confirmed by four other sources familiar with the dealings and by Maldonado himself. In an audio accessed by this investigation, Maldonado also said he hopes Cercarbono will come around after Global Carbon Parks has renegotiated the contract with Santiago del Estero based on, he said, a traditional REDD+ methodology.

Cercarbono and Allcot withdrew from Global Carbon Parks during COP27 when, according to Leroy and Trujillo, Navarro refused to let the startup embrace the government-to-government carbon trading as initially planned or pivot to biodiversity credits for voluntary markets.

In an email to Mongabay, without providing further details, Navarro said, “We worked with Cercarbono and Allcot until they did not accept independent governance, as we proposed.” As he told Mongabay, Navarro’s proposed carbon methodology for Global Carbon Parks has yet to be approved by a certifier.

An unexpected complaint

By January 2023, Global Carbon Parks had lost its original allies — including Community Electricity.io. Flying under the de facto direction of Navarro, the company was set on salvaging the contract with the government of Santiago del Estero, seemingly the only deal they had managed to close. But since their proposed methodology had fallen through, they would have to renegotiate the contract, initially valued at $200 million.

Sebastián Torres, then-CEO of Global Carbon Parks and owner of 18.5% of the shares, was expected to sign the addendum to the contract as the company’s legal representative.

Around mid-2023, Global Carbon Parks’ investors, former CEOs, and its allies got an unexpected message over social media from climate tech entrepreneur Alejandro González Fernández. The Spaniard had sued Torres in Spain for alleged aggravated fraud, misappropriation and money laundering in relation to Biotapass, a parallel carbon business that involved two abusive contracts with Indigenous peoples covering an area the size of Ireland in Brazil.

He was now looking to sue Torres in Argentina, too. The individuals linked to Biotapass that the entrepreneur wanted to sue included three out of four Global Carbon Parks staffers. This could threaten the multimillion-dollar carbon deal with Santiago del Estero.

In response, Navarro liaised with the Spaniard, connected him with a criminal lawyer in his circle, and set up a plan to ensure that the impending complaint did not hamper the prospects of Global Carbon Parks.

Mongabay accessed hours of phone business conversations featuring Navarro, two lawyers of his inner group and Maldonado. The audios were shared with Mongabay by a source wishing to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal.

The conversations, conducted between July and December 2023, describe the business ties between Navarro and Maldonado; reference Navarro’s involvement in decision-making over key aspects of Global Carbon Parks, although he officially had no stake in the company; and detail how the actors attempted to close the carbon deal with Santiago del Estero, launched at COP26, as the first-ever public-private carbon contract. 

‘We are the majority shareholders’

In the calls, Maldonado describes himself as Navarro’s right-hand man and as a front in businesses that might otherwise clash with Navarro’s stated independence as leader of the climate diplomacy organization CC35.

Maldonado explains they are both majority shareholders of Global Carbon Parks, with him bringing the money and signing the paperwork and Navarro taking the decisions. “He always tells me, ‘Santiago, sign six contracts, or four or two.’ Afterwards, we get out [of that corporation] and sell it to a big company.”

According to the audio, Navarro, who describes himself as the “architect behind absolutely everything,” defined the business model of Global Carbon Parks, brought together the shareholders and guided the selection of its CEOs.

He also decided to support González in taking legal action against Torres, then-acting CEO of Global Carbon Parks. By his own account, Torres had to go because he had failed to raise money for the company. 

“Now, here’s the ethics of Sebastián,” Navarro says in one conversation. “Do you know what he should have done? ‘Oh, I got $300,000 from Spanish investors and brought it to Carbon Parks. That’s what he should have done.”

As per Maldonado’s statements in one audio, Global Carbon Parks planned to obtain a 15% cut from the sale of the carbon credits with subnational governments, half of which were to be sold as soon as they had renegotiated their contract with the Santiago del Estero government. Despite having no official shares in the business, Navarro repeatedly reassures González that, when the time comes, he could count on part of that money if he still needed it.

When González suggests creating an instant messaging group together with him and one of the lawyers in Navarro’s circle, who also advised Global Carbon Parks, Navarro makes sure his name stays out of any written exchanges: “I’ll have her join,” Navarro says in one audio obtained by Mongabay. “I don’t join groups because I have an institutional position, I can’t get involved in corporate messes. I’m behind the scenes; don’t worry, there’s someone pulling the strings. Don’t worry.” 

‘The prosecutor in his pocket’

According to the audio obtained by Mongabay, Navarro recommended that González hire a particular criminal lawyer and emphasized the need to file the complaint only after Torres had signed the renegotiated contract with Santiago del Estero: “There is a whole issue with the government, you know? There are very sensitive things there, there are very large contracts, so everything has to be done very carefully. Sebastián is not even aware. I mean, we continue to treat him with affection so that he doesn’t suspect anything. So nothing, you know, until the addendum [i.e., the renegotiation of the carbon contract] is signed.”

So, in early November 2023, the day before the criminal attorney pressed charges, Pilar Pinto, a Global Carbon Parks lawyer, called González. Navarro, and later Miguel Torres, the criminal lawyer hired by González, joined the call.

Navarro stated that he controlled the criminal lawyer, whom the entrepreneur had hired at his request, and that González had to respect the timings if he wanted to continue counting on his support and that of his entourage, including the criminal lawyer.

As a result, González decided to put his complaint on hold.

The plan of Navarro and Maldonado was to close the deal with Santiago del Estero first. Then, have Fernández file his suit, and then have Torres leave Global Carbon Parks. With the signed contract, they hoped to receive a 50% money advance from the sale of future carbon credits to StoneX Group Inc., a Nasdaq-listed financial services giant that had recently opened a carbon trading desk.

The money would then allow them to repay debts to entities like Allcot, which had lent money to get Global Carbon Parks off the ground. As explained by Leroy, he had lent money to CC35 to facilitate its participation at COP27 in Egypt. The various debts, according to Allcot’s legal team, are outstanding to this day.

But to move forward with the carbon deal, they had to avoid disclosing the situation to the authorities of Santiago del Estero and find a way to justify it afterward.

“At some point, we have to whitewash it with the government, because otherwise, they might say to us, ‘Well, you were working with us and you knew that you had … [a representative about to be charged],’” Maldonado says in one of the audios accessed by Mongabay. “We have to whitewash it.”

In an email to Mongabay, Navarro did not comment on the content of the audio. Referring to Mongabay’s questions about “the ‘external corporations”, he wrote, “We will not respond and I do not respond about corporations in which we do not have anything to do, neither personally nor institutionally.”

Maldonado did not answer Mongabay’s requests for comment.

Endings and beginnings

The contract with the government of Santiago del Estero fell through in early 2024. In April 2024, Spanish courts dismissed González’s complaint, filed in December 2023. In a written response, Torres told Mongabay he is confident the criminal case against him in Argentina will follow suit.

On Sept. 24, 2024, Global Carbon Parks and Ethic International, its majority shareholder, became inactive.

CC35’s GREEN+ initiative, which Navarro had initially created to govern the disbursement of carbon funds to governments like that of Santiago del Estero, launched as an independent brand refocused on forest monitoring activities. In April 2024, GREEN+ signed a 10-year deal with Germany’s space agency contractor, OroraTech, to monitor 10 subnational protected areas in South America by 2025. In a video call with Mongabay, Navarro said the initiative had not come to fruition.

Parallel business

Alongside Global Carbon Parks, Navarro also pushed for other climate-related initiatives.

In 2023, he met with the government of Ecuador to plan the country’s COP28 pavilion in Dubai. Navarro’s role was to oversee the pavilion as part of an agreement between CC35 and Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition (MAATE). The agreement, which Mongabay obtained through a request for access to public information, was signed with Minister Gustavo Manrique Miranda in September 2022 and committed CC35 to raise funds for the country’s pavilion at three COPs.

“This agreement creates financial obligations for CC35 to cover the costs of design, space, construction, adaptation, as well as the equipment, materials and furniture necessary for the staging of events in the so-called ‘One-Planet’ pavilion,” the document reads. “This amount will be transferred directly to the organization assigned by the UNFCCC,” the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Under the agreement, Ecuador would book the space for the pavilion, register the panelists and participants and organize events with representatives from the public and private sectors, civil society and academia.

Due to issues “beyond the control of the parties” ahead of COP27, the deal would kick in the following year.

The result was Ecuador’s One-Planet Pavilion. Its walls and communication materials featured the logos of private-sector sponsors StoneX and ACX and of The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization.

Although a new government took office in Ecuador one week before COP28, all went ahead as planned. The Ministry of Environment of Ecuador organized events, Sade Fritschi, the new minister, spoke at the pavilion, and the government made the necessary arrangements for CC35 and its guests to enter COP28’s Blue Zone — the high-security official area where formal negotiations and multilateral meetings take place. CC35 also used the pavilion to host its own guests, like the University of Miami.

But although the government of Ecuador fulfilled its obligations, CC35 did not cover the costs of the pavilion, as both the Ministry of Environment of Ecuador and CC35 confirmed to Mongabay. The space alone cost around $183,000.

In a written response to Mongabay, Yolanda Astudillo, head press officer at Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment, confirmed the COP28 pavilion had been built and used. “However, a problem arose as CC35 failed to pay the COP organizers,” she said. “To date, there is no record of CC35 having made the outstanding payment.”

In an email, Navarro told Mongabay that CC35 had lost money as the pavilion was postponed from COP27 to COP28 and blamed the outstanding debt from COP28 on the government of Ecuador.

“All companies withdrew their support due to the ‘mutual death’ and lack of support from MAATE,” he said about the COP28 pavilion, assuring he had not received a single financial sponsorship for the pavilion. “Like the other companies, StoneX did not transfer any amount due to the same situation of uncertainty with the government transition.”

But in a video call with Mongabay, Alfredo Nicastro, senior vice president and head of global carbon markets at StoneX, rejected the claim. “We never pulled out as sponsors, because we never were in the first place,” he said. “Navarro did pitch us the One-Planet Pavilion in mid-2023, but upon reviewing the proposal internally, we rejected it.”

“We never had any exchange with the government of Ecuador and we were not invited to a single event at the pavilion,” Nicastro added. According to him, StoneX would not have wanted to be perceived as using the government of Ecuador to promote its business.

“I was as surprised as any to see StoneX’s logo on the walls when I attended COP28,” Nicastro said. “The pavilion looked just like the mock design that Navarro had shown us upon pitching the sponsorship.”

William Pazos, co-founder and managing director of ACX, rejected the claim that there had not been a single contribution to Ecuador’s pavilion. In a call with Mongabay, he noted that ACX did transfer the agreed sponsorship amount to CC35 on Oct. 20, 2023.

Additionally, a former official at Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment speaking with Mongabay on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, noted that OTCA had played no role in the pavilion. The pavilion’s use of OTCA’s logo was never vetted by the ministry and is a source of misinformation, they told Mongabay.

Former environment ministers Gustavo Manrique, José Dávalos and Sade Fritschi did not answer Mongabay’s requests for comment. Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment did not comment on the possibility of undertaking legal action.

CC35, which also appears to have approached Uruguay to create a “Biocapacity Pavilion,” highlights the One-Planet Pavilion as an achievement to this day.

CC35’s website also highlights its contribution to the creation of the Subnational Climate Fund Technical Assistance facility (SCF TA), a blended finance initiative for local and regional climate initiatives. In a video call, Navarro told Mongabay he got 16 out of 20 governments to sign the no-objection letters needed to set up the fund. Such letters are an official Green Climate Fund procedure managed between the GCF secretariat, the project implementation partners and the partner country governments.

“We got Brazil to sign, we got Mexico to sign. Imagine that at that time they were in denial, because [Brazilian former President Jair] Bolsonaro and [Mexican former President Andrés Manuel] López Obrador weren’t interested in the agenda, but they signed anyway,” he said. In an email response, he reiterated the valuable role played by CC35.

CC35 was mentioned in the GCF Funding Proposal from 2020 as one of the networks that could provide political support and promote opportunities for SCF TA, an IUCN spokesperson pointed out.

The IUCN and Catalytic Finance Foundation provide technical assistance to the fund.

“As project implementation partners, we could not find any evidence to support CC35’s claim of having played a valuable role in collecting the no-objection letters,” an IUCN representative said in an email to Mongabay. “They [CC35] attempted to collect no-objection letters in Latin America, but it was IUCN that managed to secure them. Since then, they have played no role in the fund’s Technical Assistance Facility.”

Misleading websites

After COP28, CC35’s next big milestone for CC35 was its inaugural Climate Week Miami, planned for April 2024: a new annual event that acted as programming partner of the high-caliber Concordia Americas Summit, which convenes executives, policymakers and heads of state to discuss pressing issues affecting the region.

Climate Week Miami was officially welcomed by Miami-Dade County, had Miami University host events and was sponsored by StoneX, which had funded the event, initially planned for 2023. The event was also sponsored by Lockton, a private insurance giant whose head for Argentina and Uruguay, Alejandro Guerrero, is a Navarro associate.

As shown in corporate documents obtained by Mongabay, Lockton also features as one of the members of GREEN+, a program envisaged by Navarro to govern the benefits from the public-private carbon contracts based on the methodology that was being developed by Global Carbon Parks.

The webpages for Climate Week Miami-CC35 2024 and 2025 (the latter didn’t materialize as confirmed by Navarro and other sources) feature speakers such as former New York City Mayor Eric Adams and endorsements from the Mexican Congress and Colombia’s Chamber of Representatives as well as The Nature Conservancy and Passive House Canada.

But each of these entities told Mongabay via email they hadn’t authorized CC35 to use their names and logos. Furthermore, the activities listed under the 2025 edition Climate Week Miami were led by local entities and had no connection to the CC35-led event, as confirmed to Mongabay by Miami nonprofits like The CLEO Institute. In reality, the 2025 edition of Climate Week Miami, devoid of funding, did not even take place, according to sources consulted by Mongabay.

Miami-Dade County and Miami University did not answer our requests for comment. In an email, Navarro wrote to Mongabay that the 2025 webpage had been removed. The page now announces the April 2026 edition of Climate Week Miami.

All of the above came as no surprise to Verónica Arias Cabanilla, an experienced environmental lawyer from Ecuador and former executive director of CC35. She quit in 2023 over disagreements over how Navarro was running the entity — a network that she, as other early supporters, saw as having real potential to do good.

“Navarro’s use of logos: That’s one of the issues we had,” Arias Cabanilla told Mongabay in a phone interview.

Transparency and accountability

Although a not-for-profit, CC35 is not registered as a 501(c)(3) entity, a tax-exempt status whereby an organization cannot serve any private interests and those of a certain size must file an annual information return with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. That forces entities to be transparent about their cash flows.

Arias Cabanilla, who told Mongabay she is still owed most of her dues, said she would ask Navarro about the entity’s finances and how he could afford to travel so much.

Navarro told Mongabay that CC35 is funded by private entities, except when governments host and pay for joint events with the organization. Some of those private entities are based in California, he said, but he did not specify any names. In an email response to Mongabay, he added that CC35 has only used corporate money to fund “Climate Week Miami, COP and actions,” and that Lockton has only contributed financially to the Miami Climate Week.

A series of messages Navarro sent to a creditor, the head of a small nonprofit, between February 2023 and 2024, seen by Mongabay, offer more details. In July 2023, Navarro told the creditor that he would pay him back as soon as he got $50,000 from Lockton; in February 2024, he wrote that the debt was still pending because he had outstanding payments totaling $250,000.

“There was no proper governance, no proper accountability to governments on strategic and financial matters,” said Arias Cabanilla, who worked as an adviser for Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment during COP28, while Navarro was executing the agreement between CC35 and MAATE. “This is not how you manage an organization, especially, when very key partners are involved.”

An open secret

Mongabay received multiple, independent claims of alleged contract breach, misinformation and incomplete or pending payments from public institutions, nonprofits, companies and professionals who have engaged with CC35 and Navarro on climate-related matters since 2021.

Asked about why none of them had pressed any charges, they alluded to the high costs of undertaking legal actions in the U.S. and the likely insolvency of CC35 and Navarro, which would have made the efforts useless.

Other reasons were fear of reprisal, given Navarro’s political contacts across the region, and the desire to protect their own individual, institutional and corporate reputations, since the complainants had voluntarily chosen to associate themselves with the Argentinian — an “ecomarketing genius,” according to a high-level climate political adviser in the Dominican Republic who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

The Ministry of Environment of Ecuador did not comment on the possibility of undertaking legal action for the alleged contract breach at COP28 and the outstanding debt.

Miami-Dade County did not comment on the status of its support for CC35’s Climate Week and the associated Carbon Summit of the Americas.

Navarro, who is reengaging with political climate fora in Argentina, did not comment on potential plans to enter politics.

Banner image: The dried-up river beds of the immense El Impenetrable National Park that stretches across a portion of the Gran Chaco ecosystem in Argentina. Image © Matias Rebak / Rewilding Argentina.

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