"chestnut" is a literal but not faithful translation of "castanheira", it should really be "Brazil nut tree", which is somewhat more imposing than the run-of-the-mill chestnut tree:
It can live for hundreds of years; its wood used to be in high demand, but nowadays it's considered endangered so it's illegal to cut down a Brazil nut tree.
Our Federal Police's operations have names that range from awesome ("Egyptian Plague") to truly bizarre ("Deja Vu", "Titanic"). All in all, Chestnut Tree is a fairly mild one.
They are going to the federal sphere.. which is much more clean to deal with.. We got problems(eg. corruption) here in Brazil specially with regions with low development index, like the ones on the amazon region..
Population here in Brazil use to have a good trust relationship with Federal Police.. because of the things they´ve being doing.. with investigations that are even encarcerating some high profile politicians.. fighting drug cartels, etc..
The problem here is that the law is not as harsh as the US for instance.. and for things like this im sure it should be.. to give this criminals a good example of what can happen to them, no matter how rich they get with the scheme
Looks like the incumbent president is trying to get environmentalist votes. Do you think they might be made examples of and handed harsher sentences, just to make her look good?
Edit: I guess I'm not good at inferring gender of names :p
However, I wonder if they could come up with a more intimidating name for their crackdown than "Operation Chestnut Tree."