The Growing Latin America-to-Asia Wildlife Crisis

Officers at the Loreto Regional Environmental Authority informed us that poaching was on the rise. Further inquiry revealed that this was happening in tandem with escalating Chinese financial investment in the region. With new incentive, local poachers and traffickers were pulling vast numbers of animals from land and sea to ship them to Asia. Resident Chinese nationals were often involved, officials said.

Jaguars were just one of many species threatened by what they called a “poaching emergency.” This trade was targeting valuable endangered species and also overharvesting legally traded animals, fast-tracking all towards extinction.

The New World: a wildlife trafficking hotspot

Back at home in New York, I continued to investigate the Latin-America-to-Asia wildlife trade. I discovered that the volume had doubled over the last decade, with traders moving millions of animals each year.

Mexico, Central and South America offer megadiverse hunting grounds: This is the world’s most biologically diverse region. It’s home to one out of every six of the world’s land and water species, more than Asia or Africa.

Poaching is now the paramount threat facing many of Latin America’s animals, and globally, the region has experienced catastrophic wildlife declines: 94% over the past four decades, according to the 2022 Living Planet Report.  Heavily trafficked species range from monkeys, sharks, snakes, exotic birds and iguanas to aquarium fish, poison dart frogs, anoles and sea cucumbers.

Poachers often kill females to snatch their eggs or offspring. The animals are trafficked in every imaginable way: stuffed into water bottles, suitcases, wheel wells, taped to people’s bodies, shipped by plane, in shipping containers and by international courier services. They are traumatized during capture and shipped in extreme temperatures, deprived of food, water or oxygen. Many— sometimes 75 percent­­ or more––die during transport.

1. Red eyed tree frog, Braulio Carrillo National Park, Costa Rica. Frogs from Latin America have become highly sought exotic pets in China. ⒸSteve Winter/National Geographic

2. Hyacinth macaw, Pantanal, Brazil. Hyacinth macaws are poached for the pet trade and prized by collectors. ⒸSteve Winter/National Geographic

3. Olive ridley turtle nesting on Playa Grande beach, Costa Rica. Turtle meat and eggs are delicacies in China and shells are valued for use in jewelry and other decorative items. All seven sea turtle species are endangered. ⒸSteve Winter/National Geographic

Andean bears are also a target, sought for their gall bladders; (bile is used to treat fever, liver and heart disease and other maladies).

I was shocked by the unfathomable scale of this illegal industry. A few stunning examples:

• More than 78,000 endangered parrots are poached in Mexico each year.
• Colombian authorities confiscated 3,493 fins (from 900 to 1,000 sharks) at Bogotá airport in 2021, headed for Hong Kong, a consumer destination and trafficking hub. Though China banned consumption of shark fin soup at government- sponsored events in 2015, demand remains high.
• Hong Kong authorities interdicted 26 tons of fins in 2020, shipped from Ecuador (from about 38,500 animals, mostly protected thresher or silky sharks).
• In 2019, officials seized 3 million dried seahorses in Callao, Peru.
• In Mexico, trade in sea cucumbers is so lucrative that control of the market sparked turf wars between drug cartels. In one incident, 10 armed men stole 3.5 tons of dehydrated sea cucumber from a warehouse, a haul valued at more than $53,000.

3. Sea Cucumber Dish in a Restaurant in Zhumadian, Henan, China; credit: Anagoria CC BY 3.0

4. Shark fins for sale in an Asian market- credit Jean-Pierre Dalbéra CC BY 2.0

A trans-Pacific trade: the African wildlife crisis revisited?

In 2018, experts sounded the alarm that the tropical New World had become the world’s latest poaching hotspot. Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), warned of a “rapidly growing crisis: a mushrooming trans-Pacific animal trade, mostly to China.”

Chinese foreign direct investment and Chinese-led infrastructure projects have increased dramatically over the past two decades, particularly in the Amazon basin. As a result, an influx of Chinese companies and workers into Latin America have opened a pipeline for wildlife trade, alongside large shipments of minerals and other commodities to China and Southeast Asia. The state-owned China Development Bank and China Export-Import Bank provided substantial funding, loaning about $135 billion from 2005 to 2021. 

Lieberman likened this situation to what had happened in Africa some 20 years ago. Chinese companies moved into Africa, extracting resources to fuel the nation’s outsized industrial output. Massive Asian-driven declines of elephants, rhinos and other African megafauna soon followed.

Over my two decades reporting on illicit wildlife trade, I have observed that on the ground, the playbook is markedly similar worldwide. The chain of destruction begins with cutting roads into untouched landscapes. With access, heavy machinery and work crews flood in to build infrastructure, cut valuable timber, or extract minerals and oil. It also opens wild lands wide for poachers.

A 2021 study revealed that one out of every six Latin American projects financed by Chinese state banks infringed on wild landscapes. A quarter penetrated protected reserves, and one-third violated Indigenous lands.

China National Petroleum Corp has been licensed to drill 18 wells near Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park, pictured here. ⒸSteve Winter/National Geographic

Chinese workers are also driving large-scale hunting for bushmeat, according to a 2019 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) report authored by wildlife crime specialist Pauline Verheij. These workers allegedly hire local people to hunt everything from deer, peccaries, armadillos, tapirs and monkeys to turtles and snakes.

In a mirror-image of the timeline in the African crisis, a huge uptick in organized crime predated the spike in poaching in Latin America. Many of the region’s large, sophisticated criminal networks have now added eco-crime to their business portfolios. Middlemen often smuggle rare wildlife, fish or timber alongside narcotics, firearms and trafficked humans. With light penalties and rare prosecution, this low-risk industry has become one of the world’s most lucrative illegal businesses. Wildlife trafficking now ranks as the fourth largest criminal activity, valued at up to $23 billion a year, with a 5 to 7 percent yearly growth rate. As animals grow rare, their market value rises.

In Latin America and around the world, many countries have elevated wildlife trafficking to a red-alert national security issue because of cartel involvement. Corruption greases the wheels, allowing criminals to capture, move and export rare species, launder money, and operate with impunity beneath a veneer of legitimacy, often under the guise of legitimate import-export businesses.

A UN Office on Drugs and Crime investigation into Latin American wildlife trade revealed widespread corruption. It reported collusion and payoffs to park rangers, police, military personnel, customs agents and high-level government officials. These individuals  offer a support across the entire operation. They provide information, generate false paperwork, allow specimens to cross borders, derail investigations––and in the process, undermine the rule of law.

However, trying to stop poachers is extremely dangerous. Seven of the top 10 deadliest countries for environmental protectors are in Latin America.

Collateral damage to natural systems and human health

With relentless demand, this underground industry is fast-tracking innumerable species towards extinction. It amplifies the many other threats they face: razed habitat, ever-more erratic and severe weather, hunting and disease, as well as conflict with humans.

There are also serious public health risks. Up to 75% of all human diseases are “zoonotic.” They originate in animals, mutate, and jump the Darwinian divide to infect people. These “spillover” diseases include Covid-19, influenza, HIV/AIDS, bubonic plague, Ebola, Lyme disease and other deadly, debilitating illnesses.

The health threat posed by expanding Chinese investment in the region is two-fold. Wildlife trade creates dangerous breeding grounds for the next pandemic. Animals from different regions are jammed together, weak, in poor health after traumatic capture and transport. These conditions expose all to novel pathogens that may mutate to infect these new, vulnerable hosts––which that lack natural immunity to them.

Leveling forests for mining, agriculture and other development also brings people, their domestic animals and wildlife—along with the pathogens they carry—into unnatural proximity, inviting spillover.

A jaguar mother and cub. The jaguar trade collapsed after the species was protected under international treaty, but intense Chinese demand poses a more recent and currently growing threat. ⒸSteve Winter/National Geographic

But there is also broader collateral damage. Losing individual species impairs the interconnected function of entire ecosystems that evolved in synchrony over millions of years. Pulling strings from the web of life has outsized impact. Jaguars, sharks and other apex predators keep prey populations in check. Without birds, monkeys, lizards and other fruit-eaters that distribute seeds, plant communities change. With fewer fruiting trees and bushes, animals starve, triggering a “trophic cascade”––the next wave of declines.

In some cases, there are direct domino affects, like the demise of the vaquita, a small porpoise that lives only in the Gulf of California. They are victims of bycatch, caught in gillnets strung by fishers targeting another species, the totoaba, dubbed “the cocaine of the sea.” The totaba’s swim bladder (an air-filled sac that helps it float) sells for an estimated $10,000 per pound on the black market. But gillnets are death traps for vaquitas, now the most critically endangered sea mammal. Somewhere between six and 20 remain.

Action

For more than a quarter-century, animals have been vacuumed from wild landscapes across Asia and Africa for black market trade. Iconic species such as elephants, rhinos and tigers have made headlines, but poaching has wiped out hundreds of other less charismatic animals as well. Though history is repeating itself in the Americas, earlier intervention may prevent the same level of devastation.

International cooperation could possibly turn the tide. In 2019, a coalition of 21 Latin American and Caribbean countries joined forces, jointly signing the Lima Declaration, an agreement to enact stronger laws, better enforcement, and stricter penalties.

For some time, the fight has focused on arresting poachers and seizing shipments of dead animals. But poachers and middlemen are easily replaceable cogs in this illegal machine, and this strategy only increases the wildlife casualty count. Enforcement is now beginning to target kingpins who mastermind the trade and focus on disrupting illicit financial flows and the involvement of legal businesses. Some countries have begun charging wildlife traffickers with more serious offences, from money-laundering and corruption to fraud.

However, the reality is that many countries need substantial financial and technical support to prevent the killing. Large agencies have stepped in, including the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime, formed by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and INTERPOL’s I-24/7 global law enforcement communication system. Both are helping forge critical cross-border coordination.

In 2017, Peru adopted a 10-year strategy to combat wildlife trafficking. It is among the region’s first to recognize eco-crime as organized crime and establish stiffer sentencing. In a precedent-setting ruling last year, a judge issued the country’s first-ever conviction for shark fin trafficking. Officers intercepted a 4,000-pound shipment containing fins from six endangered species, with paperwork laundered for legal export to Hong Kong. Both the buyer and seller were sentenced to four-and-a-half-years in prison.

This case highlights serious challenges: Unlike the drug trade where all is illegal, how are police or customs officials to identify endangered species when some trade is legal, personnel rarely have knowledge of natural history, and animals are often shipped in unrecognizable parts? How can governments pay for and train enforcement officers––and pay for and fight against deeply embedded corruption and transnational criminal organizations?

Peru’s goal is to substantially curtail eco-crime by 2027. But as of this writing, political turmoil is convulsing the nation, with the worst violence in decades and an ongoing state of emergency. In Peru and across the region, can jaguars, monkeys, parrots, sharks and other heavily hunted animals hang on long enough to get the protection they need to survive?

WCS’s Susan Lieberman is hopeful. “If enforcement is increased and governments collaborate more with each other, I believe we can stop this in time,” she said.