“Greed for jaguar tusks, trafficking of turtles across borders or trade in wood from endangered trees are some of the crimes against the environment in the Andes-Amazon region. Addressing them requires cooperation between sectors and countries.”
“Marcos Uzquiano, then acting director of the Madidi National Park, Bolivia, posing as a merchant of jaguar tusks, went on time to the appointment with a Chinese buyer, set at a terminal in the north of the country. He showed her his merchandise. "This is garbage." Marcos asked him what he wanted. The Chinese buyer took real fangs out of his backpack.
Marcos said he was going to get what I asked for. That he was coming back. They separated. Marcos notified the police, who, given the evidence, detained the businessman. From this first case, Marcos, today head of protection of the Pilón Lajas Community Land and Biosphere Reserve, discovered “a network of micro-traffickers”. It reached the person who collected the tusks in San Borja and sent them to a "chief" in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, who shipped them to China.
They stalk the jaguar. Since 2014, 786 tusks have been seized in Bolivia, representing the death of at least 197 individuals. Marcos believes that the problem continues, but now the traffickers are taking better care of themselves.”
Not only jaguars are at risk. “Monkeys, birds and reptiles, taken from their environments and trafficked, alive or in parts, as pets, ornament, medicine or for consumption in national and international illegal markets….As with other crimes, traffickers take advantage of the fragility of borders to illegally transport wildlife species.”
“In the case of timber trafficking, the dynamics is similar in the countries of the region. Miguel Pacheco, natural resources coordinator at WWF Colombia, explains that, normally, a person finances the preparation of a technical document to take advantage of wood in authorized areas. They can be peasant or indigenous territories. However, once said safe conduct is obtained, it is used as a blank check to remove wood from prohibited places…Traffickers take advantage of this situation to mobilize protected species, even in large volumes.”
“The companies dedicated to the illegal commercialization of wood are not registered in tax or social security systems and their costs are lower. We assume that the impact of informal activities in the domestic market is around 30% ”, says Jorge Ávila, general manager of the Bolivian Forestry Chamber.”
“Crimes against fauna and forests are not isolated events: they tend to be linked to other illicit acts, such as arms and drug trafficking, which occur within the framework of phenomena such as corruption, institutional weakness, lack of awareness, and low specialization in dealing with them. or lack of economic alternatives for the population in areas of greater biodiversity. The impacts of these crimes range from economic, public health, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services to national security, which can be undermined; without forgetting the social: human communities constantly threatened by the entry of criminal networks into their territories.
Traffic dynamics need to be better understood to formulate more effective strategies and policies. In 2019, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), supported by the European Union, formed the Alliance for Wildlife and Forests, which seeks to boost civil society engagement in law enforcement and cooperation with and between the authorities of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and the two tri-borders: Brazil - Colombia - Peru and Bolivia - Brazil - Peru.
“Our countries must strengthen collaborative actions to combat wildlife and timber trafficking, through a process that involves authorities and civil society. The overexploitation of resources, often motivated by illegal actions such as the trafficking of species, breaks the natural balance causing consequences such as the extinction of species and even the emergence of new diseases, ”says Yovana Murillo, director of the Alliance for Wild Fauna and Forests.”
You can access the original Spanish language article with short video here.