Mexico in Focus

Lions, jaguars, parrots and many other Mexican species in constant danger

I have always wondered why people like to boast their wealth having exotic and endangered animals imprisoned in their mansions.

What kind of excitement does having a fabulous lion, a gray fox or a jaguar in a cage provokes them?

Why do people insist on taking animals out of their natural habitat and chain them up in miserable places at urban areas, where nothing resembles the vital cycle of nature?

As probably many of you guess, the answer is simple and complicated at the same time.

People enjoy the power of possessing wild and exotic animals. They don’t care about the animals, they don’t give a damn about their welfare. They just love the pleasure of possessing them.  And there is a millionaire business behind any wild animal taken from its habitat.

Last Thursday, Mexican police federal officers rescued 10 tigers and jaguars that were captive in a restaurant and in a piece of private land at the touristic area of Cancun. According to press releases, the felines were visibly malnourished and in deplorable conditions, but they were used as an attraction for tourists.

Few months ago, officers from the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (Profepa) also rescued four lemurs, two foxes, one macaw and a California King snake from a mansion in Mexico City.

Rescues such as these are not rare in Mexico and they include a variety of species, from mammals to reptiles and endangered birds.  Most of the animals are trafficked by organized crime networks that operate along the United States, Canada and Mexico, among other countries.

According to federal authorities, Mexico ranks third place among the countries where the trafficking of animals is more intense.  The annual profits generated by this crime are only surpassed by the profits of drug and weapons trafficking.

Mexico has one of the richest mammalian fauna in the world and according to the UNAM’s Ecology Center it is among the 12 countries that host most (60-70%) of the biological diversity of the world. However, databases from The Ujima Project, Mexico ranked first place among the countries with the most threatened endemic species in 2010, with a total of 287 animals threatened.

Some figures from Defenders of Wildlife of Mexico give an idea of the magnitude of the animal-trafficking problem: “It is estimated that between 65,000 to 78,500 parrots are caught illegally every year and from them, 77 percent die before they arrive into the hands of a buyer. The mistreatment these animals suffer explains the high mortality rate.

The illegal trafficking of animals is considered a crime punished with one and up to nine years in prison, but apparently that is not enough to stop a business that according to Defenders of Wildlife represents worldwide profits for more than $25 billion annually .

With this big amount of money at stake, no wonder why the welfare of the animals and the impact that this business has creating in our environment are the least important thing to think about.

Every time that a single parrot, a monkey, a reptile, a turtle, a jaguar, a wild cat or a tiger is taken out from its habitat “to decorate” the mansions of wealthy people or just to feed their egocentric needs of recognition, the complete ecosystem is damaged, and in the future, we, the entire humanity, will pay the consequences too.

 

Mexican families in need of closure

 What it is happening in Mexico these days goes beyond the most sickening vision that anybody could have.

As in the worse horror movie ever seen, Mexican authorities have been discovering day by day the bodies of 145 people buried in more than a dozen of different mass graves –narcofosas– in the region of San Fernando in the northern state of Tamaulipas.  According to preliminary reports, many of those people were migrants in their way to the U.S. and they were forced off busses and then executed by organized crime.

To make things even more shocking, 16 police officers are under federal investigations because the suspicion that they allegedly covered up the criminals involved in the majority of those killings.

At the same time, more narcofosas have been discovered in other Mexican states. In Los Mochis, Sinaloa, 13 bodies were found this week, while in Nogales, Sonora, other five bodies were discovered. Not enough, authorities in Durango found the bodies of five people and six heads buried in a mass grave Thursday.

The horrifying discovery of these bodies is shedding light on one of the most serious and perturbing problems related to the violence today: the undetermined number of people, who has just disappeared after being kidnapped or “lifted” (levantados) by unknown reasons.

There is not a precise figure to establish the magnitude of the problem, but according to the National Human Rights Commission, around 5,397 people have been reported as disappeared between 2006 and 2011. People have disappeared from practically all the Mexican states, but some entities, such as Guerrero, Chiapas, Michoacán, Sinaloa, Sonora, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Coahuila y Durango have the highest numbers of disappeared.

Mexican journalist Marcela Turati, author of “Fuego Cruzado” –a recently released book that gives voice to the victims of the violence– has extensively documented the heartbreaking journey of thousands of families in the search for their relatives. They have gone from police stations, to hospitals, shelters and to finally to all the places where mass graves have been discovered around the country.

As Turati documented, many of these families rushed to Taxco, Guerrero, in June of 2010, when 55 bodies were discovered in the depths of a mine. If their relatives were not there, they would go to other places where mass graves were discovered. What they want is to know what happened to their relatives, to have closure, to be able to pray and to mourn for them.

There is all kind of people among the disappeared: farm workers, taxi drivers, businessmen, tourists, students, drug dealers, journalists, politicians, police officers, house keepers, migrants, military men and even children. “Entire families have disappeared including old man and children. The younger one is a 3-year-old boy, whose name is in a list of disappeared in Coahuila”, Turati wrote.

In the state of Tamaulipas today, dozens of families are waiting outside of the morgue for DNA test. They are placed in the worse scenario, where they are probably praying not to find the remains of their relatives in the pile of bodies, but at the same time, they need to know if they are dead, to have closure and mourn for them.

Tamaulipas is not just showing how decomposed is the country today, but also how deep and painful is the wound that organized crime and the drug war is inflicting in the Mexican society. 

And we still don’t hit bottom.

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A note: Marcela Turati's book "Fuego Cruzado" will be presented at UTEP April 27 at 6 p.m. at the Stanlee and Rubin Center Auditorium.

 

Has Mexico hit bottom?

 In Cancun Wednesday, William R. Brownfield, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, stated that the drug-related violence in Mexico has hit bottom. He said that in some years we would see some of the positive results of the strategies against criminal organizations.  In contrast, Genaro Garcia’s, Mexico’s Secretary of Public Security, warned that the violence associated to the drug war will continue for at least seven years, before we could see a reduction on violent crime.

While Mexican and American officials were holding an international drug conference in Cancun, thousands of people from Mexico participated in several protests against the violence. When protesters were claiming justice and the end of the bloodshed, the bodies of 59 people were discovered in a common grave in the northern state of Tamaulipas. This is the same place where eight months ago, the bodies of 72 migrants from Central and South America were also found.

In his final remarks at the international drug conference Thursday, President Felipe Calderón said there is no bigger pain for a society than seeing its youth being killed by unscrupulous criminals. Meanwhile, an additional 13 bodies were found in Tamaulipas, which brings the total to 72 corpses found in one week in one area.

Authorities said that some of the people killed could have been passengers on a bus, who were supposedly kidnapped by an organized crime group for recruiting purposes. Until now, authorities have discarded the idea that the people killed were migrants in transit to the United States.  However, as has commonly happened with criminal investigations in Mexico, we will never know what happened, who were the killers and why all these people were massacred.

Although Mr. Brownsfield thinks that the violence in Mexico has hit bottom, events such as these show that we haven’t seen the worst yet. Unfortunately, Mr. Garcia Luna’s warning of seven more years of violence  is the most realistic and terrible scenario for Mexico and its vulnerable society in the future.