Date: 09-Feb-09
Country: MEXICO
Author: Mica Rosenberg

MEXICO CITY - From the live snakes that smugglers stuff with packets
of cocaine to the white tigers drug lords keep as exotic pets, rare
animals are being increasingly sucked into Mexico's deadly narcotics
trade.

Drug gang leaders like to show off rarities like sea turtle skin
boots and build ostentatious private zoos at their mansions.

They also reap additional profits by sharing routes with animal
traffickers who cram humming birds into cigarette packs and baby
monkeys into car air conditioning ducts to be sold to underground pet
traders in the United States.

Mexico's raging drug war killed some 5,700 people last year and some
cartel leaders have even been rumored to throw rivals to their big
cats as food.

The global illegal trade in live species and animal parts -- used for
luxury accessories, Asian medicine or folk remedies like
aphrodisiacs -- is estimated to be worth up to $20 billion a year,
Interpol has said.

The big profits available from selling wildlife on the black market --
where a certain type of endangered South American macaw can fetch
$90,000 and a predatory python around $30,000 -- are added incentive
to Mexican gangs moving other contraband.

"You can sometimes make as much profit, if not more, than drug
smuggling with less consequences, because law enforcement is not
paying attention and if you are caught the penalty is just a slap on
the wrist," said Crawford Allan, the North American head of wildlife
trade watchdog group Traffic.

TURTLE SKIN AND COCAINE

China and the United States are the largest markets for banned pets
and animal products, making the US-Mexico border a busy corridor for
the smuggling of many rare species from across Latin America and
other parts of the world.

"There is some evidence the same people are trading in both (drugs
and animals)," Allan said in Mexico City, where Traffic is helping
train inspectors to spot banned animal shipments.

In a major 2007 sting operation by the US Fish and Wildlife Service,
the largest of its kind, undercover agents spent three years
infiltrating a ring smuggling endangered sea turtle skins from the
shores of southern Mexico to as far north as Chicago.

Illegal drugs turned up on both sides of the border over the course
of the investigation, US Fish and Wildlife agent Nicholas Chavez said.

In the United States, marijuana was seized at one of the raided
warehouses filled with animal skin boots. On the Mexican side,
smugglers offered to ship cocaine along with the hides of turtles
whose numbers are rapidly dwindling in the wild.

"It was just thrown out there like 'Hey, we can also move this stuff
if you want.'... They are pretty much moving anything that they can,"
Chavez said.

The animals can serve a double purpose when they are used to cover up
drug shipments.

"You have cases where there are drugs hidden in false compartments
within crates containing live venomous snakes and written on top it
says: 'Venomous snakes. Don't open!' So no customs guy is going to
want to open that," Allan said.

Bags of liquid cocaine, transparent and only barely visible due to
its slight yellow hue, have been found floating in or lining plastic
bags containing live tropical fish.

In one shocking case at Miami's international airport, some of the
312 boa constrictors found in a 1993 shipment from Colombia were
surgically implanted with condoms full of cocaine weighing a total of
80 pounds (36 kg). All the snakes ended up dead.

NARCO ZOOS

Colombian drug lords used to stock their own private zoos with lions,
tigers, hippos, venomous snakes and other exotic animals, and
Mexico's cartel leaders picked up the same hobby as they took over as
dominant players in the cocaine industry.

The head of the Gulf Cartel's feared armed wing the Zetas had two
lions and a tiger on his ranch and it is widely rumored, and
sometimes printed in newspapers, that he fed the cats with the bodies
of cartel rivals.

Mexico's local market for exotic pets is also growing.

Since they breed well in captivity, you can legally buy a tiger in
Mexico for a couple of thousand dollars, less than the cost of some
pedigree dogs, government officials say.

"It's a show of power and is incredibly common in the criminal
underworld. The worst of the worst have exotic animals," Patricio
Patron, the head of Mexico's environmental protection agency, told
Reuters.

A raid on a drug mansion last year in an upscale Mexico City
neighborhood netted a menagerie of two lions, two Bengal tigers, two
black jaguars and a monkey -- all of them well-fed and likely tended
to by a personal veterinarian.

But not all pets are as lucky as the somewhat tubby big cats, which
were sent to a public zoo after the drug raid.

Many smuggled animals do not survive their long, dark, suffocating
journeys.

Chavez, the U.S. agent who works along the US-Mexico border, once
found nine baby monkeys -- which are usually captured in the wild
after their mother is killed -- crammed into a car's air conditioning
ducts, most of them dead of suffocation.

Jorge Yanez, a government wildlife expert who runs a shelter for
rescued animals in central Mexico, said he once saw four hummingbirds
bound and stuffed into an empty pack of cigarettes.

"For every 10 that are trafficked, only one survives," Yanez said at
the shelter, which is nestled in a pine forest and works to
rehabilitate and release into the wild Mexican species like hawks,
wild boars and lynxes that were seized in police raids or handed in
by overwhelmed owners.

(Editing by Kieran Murray and Philip Barbara)

http://planetark.org/wen/51524