Eden Besieged: Amazonia's Matchless Wildlife Targeted by Traffickers
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Wildlife trafficking casts a toxic net of harmful effects across the landscape it exhausts, and Latin America—home to the last uncontacted peoples in the world, to the carbon-trapping Amazonian lungs of the planet, and to a panoply of species across the taxonomic scale that are, incredibly, just now being discovered—is poised to become the final frontier for trafficking networks in thrall to the international black market.
The nightmarish imagery coming almost daily from the African poaching battlefields has understandably set the tone for the public’s understanding of the accelerating Sixth Extinction, which must be recognized as an obliterating triad of climate change, habitat loss and direct take in the form of poaching (for both foreign and domestic consumption and for the pet trade) as well as through human/wildlife conflict over natural resources. Latin America’s trafficking woes have largely been subsumed in the public eye by other environmental concerns, including deforestation, dam building, oil extraction, mining and illegal incursions into protected areas, but the destruction of the region’s spectacular wildlife is ongoing and accelerating.
Increasingly it is the same pervasive patterns seen in Africa that is being blamed for Latin America’s ills: Chinese money, Chinese extractive industries, and the unappeasable Chinese market for “traditional medicines,” “delicacies” and other frivolous wildlife uses, casually facilitated by endemically corrupt local officials. Meanwhile organized crime, embodied in Latin America’s notoriously powerful drug cartels, has recently recognized wildlife trafficking for the goldmine it’s become: a global black market whose monetary potential rivals that of narcotics, advanced weaponry and modern slavery.
~ Follow the (Lack of) Money
To be certain, elitist consumers and criminal syndicates aren’t the only ones to blame: much of the demand for wildlife being trafficked from Latin America comes from right here in the United States, due both to domestic demand and to the network of international shipping facilities enabling the export of Latin American wildlife across the globe. A study by Defenders of Wildlife released just last month identifies the five most frequently used trade routes for illegal wildlife shipments entering the US from Latin America: Mexico to El Paso; Haiti to Miami; Mexico to San Diego; Mexico to Louisville; and the Bahamas to Miami. Wildlife trafficked through identified points of export may have originated thousands of miles away, illustrating the difficulties involved in tracing illegal imports to their source.
There are 328 recognized ports of entry into the US, but only 18 American cities are designated as intake ports for legal wildlife shipments and staffed by inspectors with the US Fish & Wildlife Service, and of these only three (LA, Chicago and Miami) have the sniffer dogs whose olfactory talents can uncover smuggled wildlife at 100 times the speed of humans. A scant 130 USFWS agents are tasked with processing legal wildlife shipments, intercepting illegal wildlife trafficking and enforcing national and international law, a shameful restriction of resources for the world’s wealthiest country and a blatant shortcoming that plays directly into the traffickers’ hands.
A glance at the numbers from a single port of entry speaks to the depth of the problem. In 2013 hardworking federal agents in Los Angeles were able to examine 22,409 imported wildlife shipments, but the city’s combined import facilities processed more than 1.9 million tons of air cargo, 5.5 million containers and 3.9 million tons of ocean freight that year, so that the minuscule amount of cargo that was actually inspected pales in comparison to that which was not, allowing a staggering percentage of imported freight to enter the country without our knowing what wildlife, living or dead, it might contain.
Wildlife agencies across the governmental spectrum are notoriously underfunded, understaffed and underappreciated, but these are the hardworking people on the front lines of the trafficking wars, and if we’re serious about putting an end to the horrific toll of wildlife poaching the USFWS needs an aggressive restructuring of its funding allotments, with a substantial hiring campaign mirroring that of the US Border Patrol, the establishment of additional checkpoints at points of entry, and the training and deployment of dozens of additional sniffer dogs.
~ The Human Cost of Wildlife Trafficking
As the center of ecological richness for this half of the world, the Upper Amazon and Andean foothills currently stands as the Latin American focal point in the global war for wildlife, with unmatched levels of biodiversity and intact tropical forest. These critical remote areas are also the homes of some of the world’s last uncontacted peoples, Native American tribes whose existence is threatened by the same infrastructural incursions that expedite poaching; these are the human casualties of the poaching crisis.
In certain cases, as in parts of Brazil, indigenous tribes are fighting back, sometimes violently, against the loggers, plantation farmers, oil surveyors and poachers who are destroying the carefully balanced relationship that has allowed them to coexist with their environment. For the native peoples whose cultures have drawn on local wildlife for sustenance and spirituality for ages, the outcome of the trafficking calamity in Latin America is a matter of life and death, of freedom to make independent decisions regarding the degree of interaction to be had with modern society versus the defeated paralysis that contact with industrial culture has wreaked around the world over the last century. Amazonia’s centrality to the commercial exploitation of wildlife: of all New World mammal species being trafficked, 95 percent are found in Brazil.
~ American Tiger
While hundreds of species are threatened by the widening scope of the international poaching epidemic, I will begin this analysis of targeted species with more familiar Amazonian natives such as jaguars, parrots, spectacled bears and giant otters, though truth be told even such common species as vicuñas are now being routinely slaughtered for profit. So let’s leap in, unafraid and resolute as a great cat diving for a caiman, with the resident deity of our American rainforests: the jaguar.
Panthera onca is the largest cat native to this side of the planet and belongs to the same mighty genus as the lion, tiger and leopard. The species currently inhabits 18 Latin American countries from Mexico to Argentina, with occasional forays into sky islands of the southwestern United States; their former range had once included South Texas, southwest New Mexico, much of Arizona and parts of southern California. Jaguars, like all apex predators (except humans), are remarkably sensitive to disturbances to their habitat, and the burgeoning population growth driving clear-cutting, resource extraction, road building and poaching have eradicated these splendid felids from 40 percent of their historic range. Listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as Near Threatened, there are approximately 150,000 jaguars left roaming the wild—which means there’s still time to make informed conservation decisions.
With a chunky head and formidable body spanning five to six feet (not including the three-foot tail) and weighing in at a maximum of around 350 pounds, the jaguar’s diet is remarkably diverse, with 85 species of prey being recorded. It is this capacity for omnivorous adaptation, a perceptible necessity in an environment largely lacking the vast herds of ungulates that sustain its Old World kin, as well as the comparatively robust population for such a large predator, that has some conservationists pointing to the jaguar as an ideal candidate for successful human/wildlife coexistence.
Dr. Alan Rabinowitz is CEO of the advocacy group Panthera. He believes that the relative intactness of much of the jaguar’s remaining habitat, and the low level of human intrusion compared to Africa and Asia, means that the jaguar might serve as a kind of poster child for the long-term retention of megafaunal predators. “The fact that jaguars have been more resilient and, in many ways, more lucky in their survival than other big cats is exactly why we should focus our attention and conservation efforts on them,” Rabinowitz says. “This could be the world’s greatest success story for large carnivore conservation and show how big predators such as these can indeed live with humans.” Panthera’s Jaguar Corridor Initiative spans the entire extant range of these big cats and works with representative governments, businesses and communities to protect critical habitat for the sustained genetic transfer necessary for a species to remain robust and reproductive.
While habitat fragmentation, conflicts with cattle ranchers and the persecution of the jaguar’s prey to fuel the exploding trade in bushmeat remain the primary challenges facing jaguars today, another ominous threat lurks just over the horizon in the form of increasing Chinese involvement in the region, including road building and deforestation, both of which accelerate traffic in wildlife and wildlife products. Groundless belief in the healing properties of large cat bones, perhaps sustained less from medicinal applications than by the arriviste posturing of the newly wealthy, has decimated tiger populations across Asia and helped deplete Africa’s lions by 42 percent in only 21 years; with the money to be made it can only be a matter of time before Asia’s rapacious markets leech the world of yet another of its precarious, irreplaceable big cats.
~ Emptied Nests
The international pet trade is one of the world’s most loosely regulated and ecologically damaging industries, draining habitats worldwide of everything from to turtles to monkeys. As we’ve seen in the Everglades and elsewhere, when these exotics invariably escape they can themselves have enormously harmful impacts to their adoptive ecosystems. One of the most egregiously targeted wildlife families is the Psittacidae, the lovely and notoriously intelligent parrot family, represented in Latin America by budgie-sized conures to the great radiant macaws that outlive us in the wild and are rapaciously sought by collectors.
In 2012 Interpol announced the conclusion of “Operation Cage,” a massive targeting of illegal bird and egg sales in Latin America and Europe. More than 8,700 birds and other animals were been seized and nearly 4,000 people arrested at docks, airports, open-air markets, pet stores and taxidermy shops. Operation Cage had been launched in response to the growing illegal trade in wild birds and eggs, and the increasing involvement of criminal networks in their transit from Latin America to Europe, a tremendously profitably racket that predictably attracts the worst kinds of people. Of the 19 species of macaw—typically the priciest parrots being trafficked—the IUCN lists only eight of these as having fairly stable populations, with the rest ranging from Near Threatened (one species) to Vulnerable (three), Endangered (three) to Critically Endangered (three). For the Cuban macaw, it’s already too late.
~
Jaguars may be the most iconic Latin American animals being targeted, and parrots the most recognized and noticeable of the hundreds of species poached or captured, but they merely skim the surface of the lawless Wild West mentality that is devastating Amazonia’s incomparable biodiversity. Here are some other marvelous creatures being shot, trapped, poisoned, butchered and sold into bondage from the Andean foothills to the sea.
~ Amazonia’s Treehugger
Along with genetic isolation stemming from habitat degradation (often in the service of foreign extractive industries) poaching remains a serious threat throughout the extensive range of the lovely Andean or spectacled bear. The last surviving member of the short-faced bear subfamily (Tremarctinae), the spectacled bear is almost purely vegan, with only around seven percent of nutrient intake being meat, and it shares with the panda a tooth structure and mandibular musculature that allows it to dine on tough fibrous plants. Along with the black bears of America and Asia it is also the most arboreal bear species, and upon encountering humans will quickly scale the nearest tall tree to avoid conflict.
This behavior let it flourish among Amazonian bowmen, but is woefully inadequate to protect against today’s rifles, snares and poisons. Spectacled bears are targeted for raiding cornfields and for allegedly (doubtfully) killing livestock. For both local and increasingly for foreign markets, bear products are used for pseudo-medicinal or ritual purposes; live bears are also captured and sold to shoddy roadside zoos. The species is IUCN listed as Vulnerable.
~ Fatal Attractiveness
Tortoiseshell is a prized luxury commodity and has been since classical times; the subtly mottled scutes, or the armored plating of the hawksbill sea turtle’s shell, were carefully carved into combs, boxes, frames, inlays and veneers by the Greeks and Romans (Caesar felt the vast tortoiseshell stockpiles of ancient Alexandria to be his chief gain from conquering Ptolemaic Egypt) and until the 1970s the persecution of the hawksbill was unabated. In the last century tens of millions of loggerheads were butchered for their shells and meat, and even though trade in Eretmochelys imbricata was prohibited for CITES adherents in 1977, 29 Caribbean and Latin America provided 44.2 percent of loggerhead shells (that’s 460,220 turtles) to the Japanese bekko artisanal industry between 1950 and 1992.
In the face of international law, loggerhead trafficking continues to plague Latin America in what the IUCN terms an “extensive clandestine trade” facilitated by “management and law enforcement (being) inadequate throughout the region.” But trafficking in tortoiseshell and meat is only part of the loggerhead’s dilemma: the illegal harvest of eggs for both food and trafficking often approaches 100 percent; tropical shorelines are being developed and paved over, destroying recurrent nesting grounds; coral reefs—the loggerhead’s primary hunting grounds—are dying off worldwide from seawater acidification due to climate change; oil pollution continues to grow with foreign investment in drilling; and like sharks, seabirds, dolphins and countless other animals lost to “bycatch,” sea turtles are routinely killed by becoming entangled in gillnets, driftnets and the inescapable effectiveness of modern commercial fishing.
While the recent reset with Cuba could build on the steep reduction in loggerhead take there since the 1990s which has spared tens of thousands of turtles from the bekko industry, this hopeful glimmer is a sad exception in a world in which loggerhead populations have sunk over 80 percent in three generations. The pantropical loggerhead turtle, a strangely beatific reptile with broad speckled wings, a shy smile and wide, curious eyes, hovers closer to the edge of the abyss than any other animal reviewed here, with an IUCN ranking of Critically Endangered.
~ The River Wolf
Although widely distributed in South America, the giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) may occupy less than one percent of any given watershed, so that even very localized changes in its intensively specific habitat will have severe effects. An apex predator, this superlative animal hunts predominantly fish—mostly cichlids and characins, including piranhas—but also crustaceans, small caimans and anacondas. At five-and-a-half feet long (excluding two-foot tail) and upwards of 70 pounds, adult giant river otters have no natural enemies other than, yes, us.
Trappers will tell you that among the animals live-caught in the eastern US—groundhogs, raccoons, possums, muskrats—the river otter (Lontra canadensis) is by far the craftiest, capable of picking simple locks and shinnying out of cages within minutes of capture. When menaced, these sinuous swimmers are also said to offer the most impressive defense of themselves, using their ropy strength and gnashing teeth to full effect. Imagine then an otter that’s five-and-a-half feet long (not counting the powerful, tapered two-foot tail) and over 70 pounds, with a blunt substantial face, round and baleful eyes, and curious white lapels fronting a lustrous cocoa coat.
Unusual among the Mustelidae, the weasel family, the giant otter is fairly vocal, especially when demarking territory or challenging a caiman for prime fishing grounds. Known locally as the “river wolf,” the giant otter’s high-pitched, gasping squeak is fading away through its range in the face of dam building, toxic mine runoff, and poaching by fishermen and traffickers. It is IUCN listed as Endangered.
~ The Beloved Captive
These are some of the more commonly familiar species of large animal being trafficked in and outside of Latin America, but jaguars and giant otters only scratch the surface. Let’s spend a moment on a few other mammals that aren’t as well known, but which are suffering to a sometimes even greater degree.
The golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia), a coppery little monkey native to Brazil’s fast-disappearing Atlantic lowland forests, is too cute for its own good, and even that’s not its greatest problem. Omnivores like us, they enjoy fruits, flowers, nectar and animals prey such as frogs, snails, lizards, spiders and insects. Ten inches tail with chunky ones weighing only a pound and a half, the squirrel-sized golden lion tamarin sports a thick reddish mane and lives in extended families of four to eight.
Latin Americans, both rural and urban, have a long tradition of displaying imprisoned wildlife in the home, not so much as pets but as living trophies. The commonplace capturing for exhibit of what Brazilians call xerimbabos (“something beloved”), of species ranging from monkeys to turtles to anteaters caged for life as pathetic spectacles, is a problem that offers its own abiding injuries through genetic depletion, the introduction of disease and invasive species, and most observably a hideous excess of animal cruelty.
With their antic charm, small monkeys like the golden lion tamarin have long been targeted for the wildlife trade, new roads bulldozed through the forests to expedite logging and mining interests serving as ideal means of invading pristine areas, trapping their wild inhabitants, and trucking the living loot back to the cities.
While population loss to traffickers appears to be improving in some areas, mainly due to a rare instance in which captive-bred animals are successfully introduced into the wild (1/3 of wild tamarins were bred in captivity), more permanent threats are accelerating, chiefly in the fragmentation and destruction of viable habitat. Brazil’s coastal state of Rio de Janeiro is the country’s most heavily populated, and clear-cutting for crops, charcoal production, ranching and urbanization have left the golden lion tamarin with a few meager footholds; the IUCN reports that, “Approximately 20 percent of the original range of L. rosalia is still forested, but 60 percent of this total is comprised of patches of 1,000 ha or less, 96 percent of which are less than 100 ha. The average size of the forest patches is 35 ha…” If these disconnected microhabitats—which are sufficient to temporarily sustain, though not to expand the species—go up in smoke like the rest of this area’s supremely endangered coastal lowland forest, the temporary gains of captive breeding will have been for nothing; what good is a resuscitated species if its only life fulfillment is reproduction behind bars?
~ Born Free
The oncilla or little spotted cat (Leopardus tigrinus) is one of those smaller wild felids that seem to have been shoved aside in public perception by its bigger brothers, the jaguar, lion, tiger and leopard, but the secretive oncilla is suffering at the hands of man as well. Closely related to the ocelot and the margay, themselves little known in the US but which together form the backbone of small-to-medium scale natural predation in Latin America, two feet long with a one-and-a-half-foot tail and weighing a scant six-and-a-half pounds, the wiry oncilla is essentially the size of a particularly muscular, beautifully spotted housecat, but rather than being an introduced exotic species which annually kills an estimated 12.3 billion small mammals, 2.4 billion birds and 650 million reptiles and amphibians in the US every year, the oncilla is a native American felid which operates on the edges of the alpha predators for which it itself is sometimes prey, hunting insects, small rodents, birds and lizards.
Following the erasure of easily accessible ocelots for the fur trade a few decades ago, the oncilla became in the deathly trickledown logic of wildlife trafficking the new quarry, causing its populations to drop sharply. And while CITES and other international agreements have checked the export of oncillas, there is a less manageable side to trafficking: the domestic trade in wildlife.
The nullifying xerimbabos effect, which appears to be a base attempt at subsuming the sublime characteristics of spectacular wildlife to shore up one’s social standing, once again rears its evil head as a driver of the cultural commodification of wildlife. One might imagine the sort of man who can rip the wonder from the eyes of an oncilla kitten and chain it to a pipe for the rest of its pacing, defeated existence. IUCN status: Vulnerable.
~ Endangered on Arrival
We’ve enjoyed the company of numerous luminous animals here, creatures whose splendid physical attributes have often precipitated their endangerment, but to conclude I’d like to direct your attention to a megafaunal mammal that astonishingly had gone undiscovered until 2014—testament to the biologic riches of Amazonia that wait to be revealed, and protected.
The Araguaian boto (river dolphin) is the first discovery of a river dolphin species since 1918, when the Yangtze River dolphin or baiji of China was taxonomically identified. The baiji was declared “functionally extinct” in 2006 after a six-week survey found not a single specimen of what had been traditionally known as a protective goddess by local fishermen. This benign deity, having been relied upon for centuries to defend boatmen from the fluctuations of storm and surge, was repaid with the damnation of its only home, the Yangtze River, by the ruinous Three Gorges Dam, along with the destruction of critical habitat, water pollution and indiscriminate electric-shock commercial fishing. It is the first documented megafaunal vertebrate extinction in half a century.
The Araguaian river dolphin shares the same freshwater build as its departed Chinese cousin—a stocky frame, long and narrow snout, bulbous forehead (the “melon,” used for echolocation) and a subtly pinkish pearl-gray skin tone. Native only to the Araguaia River in central Brazil, this dolphin, like many Amazonian aquatic species, is accustomed to the seasonal lowland flooding that allows swimming predators to transcend the riverbanks and hunt among the riparian forests for a time, an ancient cycle now being halted by hydroelectric dams.
But the most immediate threat to the species comes from direct human take, generally due to fisherman shooting and even setting out poisoned bait because the dolphins occasionally, naturally, take fish from their nets. Lacking the marine sleekness and wide-eyed adorability of the bottlenose, the newly discovered Araguaia river dolphin may disappear as suddenly as it was found, with an estimated extant population as low as 600 animals.
~ Ephemeral Animals in an Eternal Landscape
The fresh green breast of the Andean foothills and Amazon River still abounds with unparalleled wildlife and intact habitat, reaching hundreds of verdant miles from the montane cloud forests historically governed by the Inca, the last urbanized American empire to fall to the Spanish, to the industrially hyperthermic Atlantic Ocean. The creatures I’ve described here are only the most immediately intriguing of hundreds being hunted, poisoned, butchered, caged and trafficked throughout this unparalleled region of the wild world, a continental mountains-to-the-sea flood of precious life evolved specifically to survive in this biologically luxuriant landscape.
There are a few—not many, but a few—glimmering spots of hope on the horizon for Amazonia’s beleaguered wildlife. Just last month Brazil signed on to the UN-led Convention on Migratory Species, joining 121 other countries in what “is increasingly being recognized as an important global forum to promote the conservation of threatened migratory species including many iconic animals.” International organizations like the World Wildlife Foundation, TRAFFIC and the Wildlife Conservation Society along with local groups like Freeland Brasil are working to reduce wildlife trafficking from the Amazon, while just a few days ago Peru announced the creation of the Sierra del Divisor National Park, a 3.3 million acre “Yellowstone of the Amazon” that, if afforded meaningful long-term protection, promises to serve as an invaluable reservoir for both wildlife and native peoples.
In another very recent development, this time here in the US, Congress (yes, that Congress) has commendably passed the Global Anti-Poaching Act (HR 2494), which while currently limited to supporting conservation efforts in Africa, admirably equates the crime of wildlife trafficking with those of running guns and narcotics. US relations with some Latin American countries that had lately become strained are on the mend, while their indignant hosts are increasingly challenging the authoritarian assumptions of state-owned Chinese extractive corporations. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 86 percent of Brazilians describe themselves as being “very concerned” about climate change … the highest ratio in the world. All is not lost, not yet.
Amazonia’s unique wildlife is both a natural and cultural heritage, a ubiquitous component of national identity the loss of which would make a barren, lightless desert of Earth’s most verdant and essential tropical ecosystem. All of the creatures listed here are in dire need of our support, our introspection, and our capacity for reining in the greed and indifference that is causing so much suffering today. Each and every one, including the thousands upon thousands not mentioned, play a vital role in the way their world works; each deserves, in the fullest sense of the word, to play their unique role in the great river of life flowing eastward to the eternal sea.
The nightmarish imagery coming almost daily from the African poaching battlefields has understandably set the tone for the public’s understanding of the accelerating Sixth Extinction, which must be recognized as an obliterating triad of climate change, habitat loss and direct take in the form of poaching (for both foreign and domestic consumption and for the pet trade) as well as through human/wildlife conflict over natural resources. Latin America’s trafficking woes have largely been subsumed in the public eye by other environmental concerns, including deforestation, dam building, oil extraction, mining and illegal incursions into protected areas, but the destruction of the region’s spectacular wildlife is ongoing and accelerating.
Increasingly it is the same pervasive patterns seen in Africa that is being blamed for Latin America’s ills: Chinese money, Chinese extractive industries, and the unappeasable Chinese market for “traditional medicines,” “delicacies” and other frivolous wildlife uses, casually facilitated by endemically corrupt local officials. Meanwhile organized crime, embodied in Latin America’s notoriously powerful drug cartels, has recently recognized wildlife trafficking for the goldmine it’s become: a global black market whose monetary potential rivals that of narcotics, advanced weaponry and modern slavery.
~ Follow the (Lack of) Money
To be certain, elitist consumers and criminal syndicates aren’t the only ones to blame: much of the demand for wildlife being trafficked from Latin America comes from right here in the United States, due both to domestic demand and to the network of international shipping facilities enabling the export of Latin American wildlife across the globe. A study by Defenders of Wildlife released just last month identifies the five most frequently used trade routes for illegal wildlife shipments entering the US from Latin America: Mexico to El Paso; Haiti to Miami; Mexico to San Diego; Mexico to Louisville; and the Bahamas to Miami. Wildlife trafficked through identified points of export may have originated thousands of miles away, illustrating the difficulties involved in tracing illegal imports to their source.
There are 328 recognized ports of entry into the US, but only 18 American cities are designated as intake ports for legal wildlife shipments and staffed by inspectors with the US Fish & Wildlife Service, and of these only three (LA, Chicago and Miami) have the sniffer dogs whose olfactory talents can uncover smuggled wildlife at 100 times the speed of humans. A scant 130 USFWS agents are tasked with processing legal wildlife shipments, intercepting illegal wildlife trafficking and enforcing national and international law, a shameful restriction of resources for the world’s wealthiest country and a blatant shortcoming that plays directly into the traffickers’ hands.
A glance at the numbers from a single port of entry speaks to the depth of the problem. In 2013 hardworking federal agents in Los Angeles were able to examine 22,409 imported wildlife shipments, but the city’s combined import facilities processed more than 1.9 million tons of air cargo, 5.5 million containers and 3.9 million tons of ocean freight that year, so that the minuscule amount of cargo that was actually inspected pales in comparison to that which was not, allowing a staggering percentage of imported freight to enter the country without our knowing what wildlife, living or dead, it might contain.
Wildlife agencies across the governmental spectrum are notoriously underfunded, understaffed and underappreciated, but these are the hardworking people on the front lines of the trafficking wars, and if we’re serious about putting an end to the horrific toll of wildlife poaching the USFWS needs an aggressive restructuring of its funding allotments, with a substantial hiring campaign mirroring that of the US Border Patrol, the establishment of additional checkpoints at points of entry, and the training and deployment of dozens of additional sniffer dogs.
~ The Human Cost of Wildlife Trafficking
As the center of ecological richness for this half of the world, the Upper Amazon and Andean foothills currently stands as the Latin American focal point in the global war for wildlife, with unmatched levels of biodiversity and intact tropical forest. These critical remote areas are also the homes of some of the world’s last uncontacted peoples, Native American tribes whose existence is threatened by the same infrastructural incursions that expedite poaching; these are the human casualties of the poaching crisis.
In certain cases, as in parts of Brazil, indigenous tribes are fighting back, sometimes violently, against the loggers, plantation farmers, oil surveyors and poachers who are destroying the carefully balanced relationship that has allowed them to coexist with their environment. For the native peoples whose cultures have drawn on local wildlife for sustenance and spirituality for ages, the outcome of the trafficking calamity in Latin America is a matter of life and death, of freedom to make independent decisions regarding the degree of interaction to be had with modern society versus the defeated paralysis that contact with industrial culture has wreaked around the world over the last century. Amazonia’s centrality to the commercial exploitation of wildlife: of all New World mammal species being trafficked, 95 percent are found in Brazil.
~ American Tiger
While hundreds of species are threatened by the widening scope of the international poaching epidemic, I will begin this analysis of targeted species with more familiar Amazonian natives such as jaguars, parrots, spectacled bears and giant otters, though truth be told even such common species as vicuñas are now being routinely slaughtered for profit. So let’s leap in, unafraid and resolute as a great cat diving for a caiman, with the resident deity of our American rainforests: the jaguar.
Panthera onca is the largest cat native to this side of the planet and belongs to the same mighty genus as the lion, tiger and leopard. The species currently inhabits 18 Latin American countries from Mexico to Argentina, with occasional forays into sky islands of the southwestern United States; their former range had once included South Texas, southwest New Mexico, much of Arizona and parts of southern California. Jaguars, like all apex predators (except humans), are remarkably sensitive to disturbances to their habitat, and the burgeoning population growth driving clear-cutting, resource extraction, road building and poaching have eradicated these splendid felids from 40 percent of their historic range. Listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as Near Threatened, there are approximately 150,000 jaguars left roaming the wild—which means there’s still time to make informed conservation decisions.
With a chunky head and formidable body spanning five to six feet (not including the three-foot tail) and weighing in at a maximum of around 350 pounds, the jaguar’s diet is remarkably diverse, with 85 species of prey being recorded. It is this capacity for omnivorous adaptation, a perceptible necessity in an environment largely lacking the vast herds of ungulates that sustain its Old World kin, as well as the comparatively robust population for such a large predator, that has some conservationists pointing to the jaguar as an ideal candidate for successful human/wildlife coexistence.
Dr. Alan Rabinowitz is CEO of the advocacy group Panthera. He believes that the relative intactness of much of the jaguar’s remaining habitat, and the low level of human intrusion compared to Africa and Asia, means that the jaguar might serve as a kind of poster child for the long-term retention of megafaunal predators. “The fact that jaguars have been more resilient and, in many ways, more lucky in their survival than other big cats is exactly why we should focus our attention and conservation efforts on them,” Rabinowitz says. “This could be the world’s greatest success story for large carnivore conservation and show how big predators such as these can indeed live with humans.” Panthera’s Jaguar Corridor Initiative spans the entire extant range of these big cats and works with representative governments, businesses and communities to protect critical habitat for the sustained genetic transfer necessary for a species to remain robust and reproductive.
While habitat fragmentation, conflicts with cattle ranchers and the persecution of the jaguar’s prey to fuel the exploding trade in bushmeat remain the primary challenges facing jaguars today, another ominous threat lurks just over the horizon in the form of increasing Chinese involvement in the region, including road building and deforestation, both of which accelerate traffic in wildlife and wildlife products. Groundless belief in the healing properties of large cat bones, perhaps sustained less from medicinal applications than by the arriviste posturing of the newly wealthy, has decimated tiger populations across Asia and helped deplete Africa’s lions by 42 percent in only 21 years; with the money to be made it can only be a matter of time before Asia’s rapacious markets leech the world of yet another of its precarious, irreplaceable big cats.
~ Emptied Nests
The international pet trade is one of the world’s most loosely regulated and ecologically damaging industries, draining habitats worldwide of everything from to turtles to monkeys. As we’ve seen in the Everglades and elsewhere, when these exotics invariably escape they can themselves have enormously harmful impacts to their adoptive ecosystems. One of the most egregiously targeted wildlife families is the Psittacidae, the lovely and notoriously intelligent parrot family, represented in Latin America by budgie-sized conures to the great radiant macaws that outlive us in the wild and are rapaciously sought by collectors.
In 2012 Interpol announced the conclusion of “Operation Cage,” a massive targeting of illegal bird and egg sales in Latin America and Europe. More than 8,700 birds and other animals were been seized and nearly 4,000 people arrested at docks, airports, open-air markets, pet stores and taxidermy shops. Operation Cage had been launched in response to the growing illegal trade in wild birds and eggs, and the increasing involvement of criminal networks in their transit from Latin America to Europe, a tremendously profitably racket that predictably attracts the worst kinds of people. Of the 19 species of macaw—typically the priciest parrots being trafficked—the IUCN lists only eight of these as having fairly stable populations, with the rest ranging from Near Threatened (one species) to Vulnerable (three), Endangered (three) to Critically Endangered (three). For the Cuban macaw, it’s already too late.
~
Jaguars may be the most iconic Latin American animals being targeted, and parrots the most recognized and noticeable of the hundreds of species poached or captured, but they merely skim the surface of the lawless Wild West mentality that is devastating Amazonia’s incomparable biodiversity. Here are some other marvelous creatures being shot, trapped, poisoned, butchered and sold into bondage from the Andean foothills to the sea.
~ Amazonia’s Treehugger
Along with genetic isolation stemming from habitat degradation (often in the service of foreign extractive industries) poaching remains a serious threat throughout the extensive range of the lovely Andean or spectacled bear. The last surviving member of the short-faced bear subfamily (Tremarctinae), the spectacled bear is almost purely vegan, with only around seven percent of nutrient intake being meat, and it shares with the panda a tooth structure and mandibular musculature that allows it to dine on tough fibrous plants. Along with the black bears of America and Asia it is also the most arboreal bear species, and upon encountering humans will quickly scale the nearest tall tree to avoid conflict.
This behavior let it flourish among Amazonian bowmen, but is woefully inadequate to protect against today’s rifles, snares and poisons. Spectacled bears are targeted for raiding cornfields and for allegedly (doubtfully) killing livestock. For both local and increasingly for foreign markets, bear products are used for pseudo-medicinal or ritual purposes; live bears are also captured and sold to shoddy roadside zoos. The species is IUCN listed as Vulnerable.
~ Fatal Attractiveness
Tortoiseshell is a prized luxury commodity and has been since classical times; the subtly mottled scutes, or the armored plating of the hawksbill sea turtle’s shell, were carefully carved into combs, boxes, frames, inlays and veneers by the Greeks and Romans (Caesar felt the vast tortoiseshell stockpiles of ancient Alexandria to be his chief gain from conquering Ptolemaic Egypt) and until the 1970s the persecution of the hawksbill was unabated. In the last century tens of millions of loggerheads were butchered for their shells and meat, and even though trade in Eretmochelys imbricata was prohibited for CITES adherents in 1977, 29 Caribbean and Latin America provided 44.2 percent of loggerhead shells (that’s 460,220 turtles) to the Japanese bekko artisanal industry between 1950 and 1992.
In the face of international law, loggerhead trafficking continues to plague Latin America in what the IUCN terms an “extensive clandestine trade” facilitated by “management and law enforcement (being) inadequate throughout the region.” But trafficking in tortoiseshell and meat is only part of the loggerhead’s dilemma: the illegal harvest of eggs for both food and trafficking often approaches 100 percent; tropical shorelines are being developed and paved over, destroying recurrent nesting grounds; coral reefs—the loggerhead’s primary hunting grounds—are dying off worldwide from seawater acidification due to climate change; oil pollution continues to grow with foreign investment in drilling; and like sharks, seabirds, dolphins and countless other animals lost to “bycatch,” sea turtles are routinely killed by becoming entangled in gillnets, driftnets and the inescapable effectiveness of modern commercial fishing.
While the recent reset with Cuba could build on the steep reduction in loggerhead take there since the 1990s which has spared tens of thousands of turtles from the bekko industry, this hopeful glimmer is a sad exception in a world in which loggerhead populations have sunk over 80 percent in three generations. The pantropical loggerhead turtle, a strangely beatific reptile with broad speckled wings, a shy smile and wide, curious eyes, hovers closer to the edge of the abyss than any other animal reviewed here, with an IUCN ranking of Critically Endangered.
~ The River Wolf
Although widely distributed in South America, the giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) may occupy less than one percent of any given watershed, so that even very localized changes in its intensively specific habitat will have severe effects. An apex predator, this superlative animal hunts predominantly fish—mostly cichlids and characins, including piranhas—but also crustaceans, small caimans and anacondas. At five-and-a-half feet long (excluding two-foot tail) and upwards of 70 pounds, adult giant river otters have no natural enemies other than, yes, us.
Trappers will tell you that among the animals live-caught in the eastern US—groundhogs, raccoons, possums, muskrats—the river otter (Lontra canadensis) is by far the craftiest, capable of picking simple locks and shinnying out of cages within minutes of capture. When menaced, these sinuous swimmers are also said to offer the most impressive defense of themselves, using their ropy strength and gnashing teeth to full effect. Imagine then an otter that’s five-and-a-half feet long (not counting the powerful, tapered two-foot tail) and over 70 pounds, with a blunt substantial face, round and baleful eyes, and curious white lapels fronting a lustrous cocoa coat.
Unusual among the Mustelidae, the weasel family, the giant otter is fairly vocal, especially when demarking territory or challenging a caiman for prime fishing grounds. Known locally as the “river wolf,” the giant otter’s high-pitched, gasping squeak is fading away through its range in the face of dam building, toxic mine runoff, and poaching by fishermen and traffickers. It is IUCN listed as Endangered.
~ The Beloved Captive
These are some of the more commonly familiar species of large animal being trafficked in and outside of Latin America, but jaguars and giant otters only scratch the surface. Let’s spend a moment on a few other mammals that aren’t as well known, but which are suffering to a sometimes even greater degree.
The golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia), a coppery little monkey native to Brazil’s fast-disappearing Atlantic lowland forests, is too cute for its own good, and even that’s not its greatest problem. Omnivores like us, they enjoy fruits, flowers, nectar and animals prey such as frogs, snails, lizards, spiders and insects. Ten inches tail with chunky ones weighing only a pound and a half, the squirrel-sized golden lion tamarin sports a thick reddish mane and lives in extended families of four to eight.
Latin Americans, both rural and urban, have a long tradition of displaying imprisoned wildlife in the home, not so much as pets but as living trophies. The commonplace capturing for exhibit of what Brazilians call xerimbabos (“something beloved”), of species ranging from monkeys to turtles to anteaters caged for life as pathetic spectacles, is a problem that offers its own abiding injuries through genetic depletion, the introduction of disease and invasive species, and most observably a hideous excess of animal cruelty.
With their antic charm, small monkeys like the golden lion tamarin have long been targeted for the wildlife trade, new roads bulldozed through the forests to expedite logging and mining interests serving as ideal means of invading pristine areas, trapping their wild inhabitants, and trucking the living loot back to the cities.
While population loss to traffickers appears to be improving in some areas, mainly due to a rare instance in which captive-bred animals are successfully introduced into the wild (1/3 of wild tamarins were bred in captivity), more permanent threats are accelerating, chiefly in the fragmentation and destruction of viable habitat. Brazil’s coastal state of Rio de Janeiro is the country’s most heavily populated, and clear-cutting for crops, charcoal production, ranching and urbanization have left the golden lion tamarin with a few meager footholds; the IUCN reports that, “Approximately 20 percent of the original range of L. rosalia is still forested, but 60 percent of this total is comprised of patches of 1,000 ha or less, 96 percent of which are less than 100 ha. The average size of the forest patches is 35 ha…” If these disconnected microhabitats—which are sufficient to temporarily sustain, though not to expand the species—go up in smoke like the rest of this area’s supremely endangered coastal lowland forest, the temporary gains of captive breeding will have been for nothing; what good is a resuscitated species if its only life fulfillment is reproduction behind bars?
~ Born Free
The oncilla or little spotted cat (Leopardus tigrinus) is one of those smaller wild felids that seem to have been shoved aside in public perception by its bigger brothers, the jaguar, lion, tiger and leopard, but the secretive oncilla is suffering at the hands of man as well. Closely related to the ocelot and the margay, themselves little known in the US but which together form the backbone of small-to-medium scale natural predation in Latin America, two feet long with a one-and-a-half-foot tail and weighing a scant six-and-a-half pounds, the wiry oncilla is essentially the size of a particularly muscular, beautifully spotted housecat, but rather than being an introduced exotic species which annually kills an estimated 12.3 billion small mammals, 2.4 billion birds and 650 million reptiles and amphibians in the US every year, the oncilla is a native American felid which operates on the edges of the alpha predators for which it itself is sometimes prey, hunting insects, small rodents, birds and lizards.
Following the erasure of easily accessible ocelots for the fur trade a few decades ago, the oncilla became in the deathly trickledown logic of wildlife trafficking the new quarry, causing its populations to drop sharply. And while CITES and other international agreements have checked the export of oncillas, there is a less manageable side to trafficking: the domestic trade in wildlife.
The nullifying xerimbabos effect, which appears to be a base attempt at subsuming the sublime characteristics of spectacular wildlife to shore up one’s social standing, once again rears its evil head as a driver of the cultural commodification of wildlife. One might imagine the sort of man who can rip the wonder from the eyes of an oncilla kitten and chain it to a pipe for the rest of its pacing, defeated existence. IUCN status: Vulnerable.
~ Endangered on Arrival
We’ve enjoyed the company of numerous luminous animals here, creatures whose splendid physical attributes have often precipitated their endangerment, but to conclude I’d like to direct your attention to a megafaunal mammal that astonishingly had gone undiscovered until 2014—testament to the biologic riches of Amazonia that wait to be revealed, and protected.
The Araguaian boto (river dolphin) is the first discovery of a river dolphin species since 1918, when the Yangtze River dolphin or baiji of China was taxonomically identified. The baiji was declared “functionally extinct” in 2006 after a six-week survey found not a single specimen of what had been traditionally known as a protective goddess by local fishermen. This benign deity, having been relied upon for centuries to defend boatmen from the fluctuations of storm and surge, was repaid with the damnation of its only home, the Yangtze River, by the ruinous Three Gorges Dam, along with the destruction of critical habitat, water pollution and indiscriminate electric-shock commercial fishing. It is the first documented megafaunal vertebrate extinction in half a century.
The Araguaian river dolphin shares the same freshwater build as its departed Chinese cousin—a stocky frame, long and narrow snout, bulbous forehead (the “melon,” used for echolocation) and a subtly pinkish pearl-gray skin tone. Native only to the Araguaia River in central Brazil, this dolphin, like many Amazonian aquatic species, is accustomed to the seasonal lowland flooding that allows swimming predators to transcend the riverbanks and hunt among the riparian forests for a time, an ancient cycle now being halted by hydroelectric dams.
But the most immediate threat to the species comes from direct human take, generally due to fisherman shooting and even setting out poisoned bait because the dolphins occasionally, naturally, take fish from their nets. Lacking the marine sleekness and wide-eyed adorability of the bottlenose, the newly discovered Araguaia river dolphin may disappear as suddenly as it was found, with an estimated extant population as low as 600 animals.
~ Ephemeral Animals in an Eternal Landscape
The fresh green breast of the Andean foothills and Amazon River still abounds with unparalleled wildlife and intact habitat, reaching hundreds of verdant miles from the montane cloud forests historically governed by the Inca, the last urbanized American empire to fall to the Spanish, to the industrially hyperthermic Atlantic Ocean. The creatures I’ve described here are only the most immediately intriguing of hundreds being hunted, poisoned, butchered, caged and trafficked throughout this unparalleled region of the wild world, a continental mountains-to-the-sea flood of precious life evolved specifically to survive in this biologically luxuriant landscape.
There are a few—not many, but a few—glimmering spots of hope on the horizon for Amazonia’s beleaguered wildlife. Just last month Brazil signed on to the UN-led Convention on Migratory Species, joining 121 other countries in what “is increasingly being recognized as an important global forum to promote the conservation of threatened migratory species including many iconic animals.” International organizations like the World Wildlife Foundation, TRAFFIC and the Wildlife Conservation Society along with local groups like Freeland Brasil are working to reduce wildlife trafficking from the Amazon, while just a few days ago Peru announced the creation of the Sierra del Divisor National Park, a 3.3 million acre “Yellowstone of the Amazon” that, if afforded meaningful long-term protection, promises to serve as an invaluable reservoir for both wildlife and native peoples.
In another very recent development, this time here in the US, Congress (yes, that Congress) has commendably passed the Global Anti-Poaching Act (HR 2494), which while currently limited to supporting conservation efforts in Africa, admirably equates the crime of wildlife trafficking with those of running guns and narcotics. US relations with some Latin American countries that had lately become strained are on the mend, while their indignant hosts are increasingly challenging the authoritarian assumptions of state-owned Chinese extractive corporations. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 86 percent of Brazilians describe themselves as being “very concerned” about climate change … the highest ratio in the world. All is not lost, not yet.
Amazonia’s unique wildlife is both a natural and cultural heritage, a ubiquitous component of national identity the loss of which would make a barren, lightless desert of Earth’s most verdant and essential tropical ecosystem. All of the creatures listed here are in dire need of our support, our introspection, and our capacity for reining in the greed and indifference that is causing so much suffering today. Each and every one, including the thousands upon thousands not mentioned, play a vital role in the way their world works; each deserves, in the fullest sense of the word, to play their unique role in the great river of life flowing eastward to the eternal sea.