From the glacial fjords of Chilean Patagonia to the seashores and mountains of Baja California, Hispanic America, representing Spanish-speaking international locations in South and Central America and the Caribbean, is a biodiversity treasure trove. These embody colourful macaws, showy iguanas, gaudy poison frogs and charismatic cats — animals so lovely that folks need to personal them as pets.
A current report throws mild on what this want for unique pets means for biodiversity in Hispanic America, the place wildlife numbers are already nosediving on account of large-scale deforestation and deliberate infrastructure tasks. The report, revealed by the Worldwide Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), examines seizure and poaching incidents in Hispanic America over a six-year interval and gives the primary region-wide evaluation of unlawful wildlife trafficking, a key contributor to biodiversity loss. Many of the trafficked animals provided the worldwide demand for wild pets.
With detailed analyses of wildlife crimes in 18 international locations, the report offers a “complete image” of the area,” says Polen Cisneros, venture supervisor for the wildlife crime program at IFAW. “My concept was to have the primary report that had all of the baseline info, which individuals can simply entry on-line and examine it, so we’re extra knowledgeable of what’s really occurring within the area.”
Cisneros and her crew scoured by media experiences, revealed between January 2017 and December 2022, on wildlife seizures and poaching incidents in Hispanic America. From every media report, the researchers extracted the date of the incident, its nation and placement, the variety of particular person animals concerned, the geographic origin of the animals, their taxonomic classifications and the transit mode and vacation spot. In addition they checked out entries within the Regulation Enforcement Administration Data System (LEMIS), a U.S. wildlife commerce database, to determine key ports of entry of unlawful wildlife shipped from Hispanic America.
The report recognized 1,945 seizure and poaching incidents involving 102,577 reptiles, birds, mammals and amphibians belonging to no less than 690 species. Greater than half of the species (363) had been solely protected by home legal guidelines and lacked safety below the Conference on Worldwide Commerce in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Of these, 40 had been endangered and 13 critically endangered, in response to the IUCN Crimson Record.
“Wildlife trafficking in Hispanic America hasn’t actually gotten the identical degree of protection and a spotlight as wildlife trafficking in Africa, which is probably going pushed by Africa having extra iconic species being trafficked,” says Religion Hornor, program director of wildlife crimes on the Heart for Superior Protection Research (C4ADS), a U.S.-based nonprofit monitoring transnational organized crime networks. “However that doesn’t imply that wildlife crime in Latin America doesn’t exist — in truth, the numbers are fairly alarming.”
‘Eye-opening’ tendencies in unlawful wildlife trafficking
Greater than half of the wildlife seized had been reptiles (59%); the numbers are defined by two main seizure incidents from Mexico in 2020, involving almost 30,000 mud turtles (genus Kinosternon) and musk turtles (genus Sternotherus). Reptiles are trafficked to provide the home and worldwide pet commerce; for his or her pores and skin, meat or eggs; for taxidermy; and to be used in conventional drugs.
Freshwater turtles and tortoises had been essentially the most seized reptiles, with mud turtles, mata mata turtles (type=”font-weight: 400;”>Chelus fimbriata), Chaco tortoises (Chelonoidis chilensis) and Galápagos tortoises (C. niger) topping the checklist. In some instances, reptile eggs had been smuggled to be hatched, and the hatchlings falsely offered as captive-bred people. Amongst lizards, the inexperienced iguana, an unique pet that has turn out to be a nuisance in some elements of the world, was essentially the most seized.
Birds, which represented greater than 1 / 4 (28%) of the animals seized, topped the checklist of seizures in most international locations. Psittacids (holotropical parrots) and songbirds, trafficked for the pet commerce, topped the checklist. Mammals, representing 4% of all seized animals, had been primarily traded for bushmeat and included deer, rodents akin to lowland pacas (Cuniculus paca) and capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), tapirs, armadillos and sloths.
Primates prominently featured on the checklist of seized mammals, with eight species listed on CITES Appendix I, which prohibits industrial commerce in these species. These included the Yucatán howler monkey (Alouatta pigra), the Central American squirrel monkey (Saimiri oerstedii) and three species of tamarins (genus Saguinus).
Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia had been the highest 5 international locations with essentially the most reported seizures and poaching incidents, with Mexico alone chargeable for greater than 1 / 4 of them. Within the case of Mexico, Cisneros attributes these excessive numbers to the nation’s increased capability to observe the commerce and journalists to report on it. Most animals had been smuggled by street, stuffed in tiny luggage and suitcases and loaded onto passenger buses to flee being caught.
What struck Cisneros most, she says, was that almost 92.5% of the seizures in Hispanic America had been dwell animals, indicating they had been destined for the pet commerce. “That’s clearly eye-opening,” she says. “There’s a whole lot of deaths of animals because of the lack of care and the stress of trafficking. … It poses a very large risk of spreading zoonotic illnesses, and no person desires one other pandemic.”
In contrast to wildlife from Africa and Southeast Asia, that are trafficked throughout continents, a large proportion of wildlife trafficked in Hispanic America catered to home demand, spurred by the age-old observe of getting wild pets within the area. Solely a fraction (2.6%) of all seizures had been destined for or seized within the U.S., Europe and Asia and principally concerned uncommon or endemic species. Knowledge from LEMIS confirmed that El Paso, Nogales and Dallas/Fort Price, all of them in U.S. states that share a border with Mexico, obtained essentially the most illicit shipments of wildlife.
“I at all times considered Latin America as a supply area, however really, we’re additionally a requirement area,” Cisneros says. “That is a world downside, but it surely’s additionally a neighborhood and regional downside.”
The broad tendencies indicated in IFAW’s report coincide with the findings of a 2021 report revealed by C4ADS that checked out unlawful wildlife trafficking by air transit throughout Latin America and the Caribbean between 2010 and 2020. The report additionally checked out media protection of seizures at airports and located that trafficking networks within the area had been tied to 53 international locations, with dwell animals accounting for 40% of seizures. Mexico, Brazil and Colombia topped the checklist of nations with essentially the most seizures, and an enormous portion of trafficked wildlife was destined for the pet commerce.
The analyses of each experiences, which depend on publicly accessible information, “solely represents profitable intervention efforts or failed trafficking occasions that had been additionally reported [in the media] and had been picked up by the analysts doing the analysis,” Hornor says. “So it’s actually only a small portion of the size of trafficking that’s happening.”
Species want stronger legislation enforcement and monitoring
This “tip of the iceberg” information, as Cisneros calls the report’s findings, is already alarming for international locations to behave collectively and cease crimes in opposition to wildlife that push susceptible species towards extinction and trigger better ecological injury akin to elevated dangers of zoonotic illnesses and lack of ecological features akin to seed dispersal.
In line with Ciscneros, main hurdles to tackling wildlife crime embody the shortage of enforcement of present legal guidelines on account of a scarcity of assets and rampant corruption, adopted by inconsistent penalties, authorized loopholes and weak cross-border cooperation. “It goes again to wildlife trafficking being a low precedence compared to different kinds of crimes,” she says. “Sadly for animals, this area has an extended method to go in terms of harmonizing their insurance policies and having assets to battle this crime.”
“It’s the proper storm,” Hornor says. “Having corrupt actors which are keen to maneuver merchandise, or having techniques that aren’t correctly staffed for somebody to have the ability to course of all of this, and that additionally creates an thrilling alternative for legal actors to maneuver merchandise efficiently.”
The IFAW urges international locations in Hispanic America to undertake the commitments of the 2019 Lima Declaration on unlawful wildlife commerce, akin to strengthening home legal guidelines that tackle wildlife crime, strengthening legal justice responses, elevating consciousness and eradicating shopper demand for wildlife. It additionally urges international locations to enhance their monitoring and investigations of wildlife crime, growing surveillance for zoonotic illnesses and constructing services for rescue and rehabilitation of seized wildlife.
Wildlife trafficking is at the moment a high-profit, low-risk enterprise. One method to create an enormous blow to traffickers, Hornor says, is to up the dangers for them and scale back their income. “Should you make the prices excessive, whether or not that’s the precise value to site visitors, paying somebody off turns into increased or more durable, or the chance of getting caught or the jail time going up, the good thing about no matter they’re receiving again by way of revenue just isn’t going to be value it sooner or later.
“It takes demand discount, provide safety and investigations collectively to resolve this difficulty, and that continued strain throughout the availability chain to stop a catastrophic occasion,” Hornor says.
This article by Spoorthy Raman was first revealed by Mongabay.com on 7 February 2025. Lead Picture: A mom and toddler Yucatán howler monkey from Guatemala. The species is among the many eight CITES Appendix I listed primate species trafficked in Hispanic America. Picture credit: Charles J. Sharp – CC BY-SA 4.0.
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