Crackdown reveals ‘industrial-scale’ wildlife and timber trafficking across Latin America

Filed 1h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Fun in a Bottle

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: European Parliament · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Operation Madre Tierra, an Interpol-led crackdown across Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama in June and July, led to 233 arrests and the recovery of more than 1,000 animals, officials announced. Mexican authorities seized big cats including two endangered Bengal tigers, a white tiger, lions, ocelots, and jaguars moving along routes shared with drug traffickers, while Nicaragua confiscated protected parrots and macaws.

Investigators also seized about 165 kilograms of dried shark fins destined for Asian markets, valued at an estimated $280,000, plus 4.6 metric tons of cyanide and 11 containers of mercury used in illegal gold mining in Costa Rica. In Colombia, the operation expanded a 2025 probe into more than 170 companies accused of illegally clearing 52,000 hectares of Amazon forest, resulting in 16 arrests, and identified 60,000 hectares of illegal deforestation overall.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Following the money from a gold mine in Panama to a buyer somewhere in Asia or Europe is a good idea that somebody should have been doing on a standing basis rather than every couple years when the press release comes due. The scale here, tigers riding drug routes, fins destined for soup bowls, mercury dumped by the ton, says the market was never the problem of a few poachers with nets. It was a supply chain, and supply chains need customers, which means the countries buying the fins and the pets share some of the blame this release doesn't mention.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Fun in a Bottle · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0