Brazil's Animal Trade Under Fire
8/23/99
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Title: Brazil's animal trade under fire
Source: Miami Herald
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: August 23, 1999
Byline: KATHERINE ELLISON
SAO GONCALO, Brazil -- Three men sprinted through the market crowds as
the Forest Police pulled up in a six-car convoy.
The blue-uniformed officers leaped out to chase the trio, but they
soon returned to the loot the men had left behind -- dozens of
brilliantly plumed, caged birds whose sale is illegal. Two casualties
had been tossed on the filthy ground behind a stall selling plastic
toys and towels: a blackbird and a royal-blue and emerald-green
tanager. Their necks were broken, their bodies still warm.
``The traffickers killed them,'' Dener Giovanini said with a scowl.
Giovanini, the chief of Renctas, an animal protection group, added,
``They'd rather murder their merchandise than let the police get hold
of it.''
The illicit global commerce in wildlife is a multibillion-dollar
business -- third only to the sale of drugs and guns. It's also a
brutal trade. At Rio de Janeiro's international airport, wild birds
have been found with their eyes pierced to prevent them from singing
at the light of dawn or with their breastbones broken to make them
docile through pain. They've been crammed into cans, painted to look
like rarer species, and drugged and deprived of food, water and light.
Lately, police say, the traffic has been thriving throughout Brazil,
which is blessed with abundant exotic fauna but cursed recently by an
economic crisis that is spurring destitute hunters to supply a
pipeline that ends with private collectors, pet stores, zoos and
research centers in Asia, Europe and the United States.
This year, enforcement officials have a new weapon in Renctas, a
Portuguese acronym for the National Network Against Wild Animal
Traffic. An unusual joint effort by police, nongovernmental groups and
Ibama, Brazil's federal wildlife agency, Renctas could prove a model
for the rest of Latin America, where hundreds of species are
threatened with extinction.
``We're helping -- and pressuring -- the government to do its job,''
says Giovanini, 30, who has been working on wildlife protection since
he was 15.
Brazil's understaffed and underfunded environmental authorities are no
match for what they describe as the international wild animal mafia.
Only 321 Forest Police officers patrol Rio de Janeiro state,
population 13.4 million, watching for a range of crimes including
deforestation and pollution.
Animal traffic by itself would keep them busy, since the city of Rio,
with its international airport and more than 15 weekend animal
markets, is the capital of the trade.
Since its founding last January, Renctas has helped principally by
collecting about 40 anonymous tips a day through its English, Spanish
and Portuguese Web page, www.renctas.org.br.
The global animal trade threatens biodiversity, since the rarer an
animal is, the more money it commands. Brazil's government lists more
than 200 species of fauna as in danger of extinction.
Outside Brazil, a tanager similar to the one found dead in the raid
can sell for $2,000, said Francisco Neo, an Ibama biologist who
accompanied police on the raid. Interpol agents say the much rarer
Lear's Macaws -- of which only about 130 still live in the wild --
have been sold in Europe for as much as $60,000 apiece.
But as police step up their pursuit, it's the wildlife, not the
traffickers, that ends up behind bars -- in zoos, the main collection
point for the booty. Traffickers pay what Forest Police Maj. Jose Luiz
Padrone calls ``laughable bail'' and go free.
``No one ever goes to jail,'' he said. ``There is no known person in
jail for trafficking in animals, which certainly makes it look like
Brazilian judges don't consider environmental crimes to be serious.''