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Wild-animal sales thrive in Mexico's black market
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0108Animals08.html
Chris Hawley
Jan. 8, 2005
CHARCO CERCADO, Mexico - The dried snake skins and skinned foxes hanging from racks are what make the motorists slow down on this lonely stretch of
Mexico's Highway 57. But it's the live animals that are the real attraction.
Golden eagles and great horned owls, monkeys and baby deer. They're all for sale in Charco Cercado, a village 250 miles northwest of Mexico City and
one of the most infamous way- stations in Mexico's bustling underground market for wild animals. Many animals bought in Mexico are smuggled into the
United States.
"You want a squirrel? How about an eagle?" asked a wrinkled vendor. She scurried to a wooden lean-to and pulled out a huge raptor with a string tied
to its foot. It was a protected Harris' hawk, actually, not an eagle. advertisement
She looked around nervously as a visitor began to photograph the bird.
"Not my face, OK? I don't want problems," she said.
This is the shadowy world of Mexico's animal sales, where, for a price, you can get all manner of critters, from big cats to endangered reptiles,
despite government efforts to crack down on such sales. Smugglers can get thousands of dollars for animals in the United States, said Roger Maier, a
spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
"Sometimes you'll have the case of a little old lady who likes her birds and buys some at a market . . . but the bigger things are usually more
organized than that," he said.
On Dec. 23, dozens of Charco Cercado's animal vendors armed with sticks and stones threatened to shut down Highway 57 after federal police set up an
outpost nearby. A clash was averted only after police said they were there to protect holiday travelers and would not raid the markets.
The confrontation came just days after U.S. authorities in California returned 90 rare parrots to Mexico after confiscating them from smugglers. They
were among 173 birds found stuffed in the side panels and under the seats of two vehicles stopped at Tijuana border crossings.
The birds included 22 red-headed Amazon parrots, which are protected internationally as facing an immediate threat of extinction. Another 68 were
lilac-crowned Amazons, which will join the same list in April.
"The authorities have tried very hard to stop (animal trafficking), but it's very difficult," said Adrian Reuter, the Mexico representative for
Traffic, an activist group that tries to prevent such sales. "There's a lot of money to be made."
In November, authorities raided six animal vendors at the Emilio Carranza Market in central Mexico City and seized 88 protected animals, including
rattlesnakes, toucans and yellow-headed parrots, that were being sold illegally.
In the nearby Sonora market, toucans with green bills the size of bananas sell for $1,800 a pair. Baby-faced squirrel monkeys from Central America run
$2,200 apiece.
Many of the animals, at least the ones displayed openly, can be bought legally from breeders, Reuter said. But sellers boast they can provide pretty
much anything a buyer wants.
"I can get you a lion cub for 35,000 pesos (about $3,100 )," offered one vendor in Mexico City's Lagunilla neighborhood. "It comes with the fangs
removed and everything."
In 1998, U.S. undercover agents made one of their biggest arrests ever in Mexico City by collaring international wildlife trafficker Ken Liang Wong in
a sting operation. In 2001, he was sentenced to almost six years in a U.S. prison for selling some of the world's most endangered reptiles.
Birds are among the most popular animals among smugglers. One of the favorite smuggling methods is to sedate baby birds with alcohol and put them in
toilet-paper tubes, which are then strapped to smugglers' bodies, Maier said.
Wild parrots can carry exotic Newcastle disease, which spreads easily to chickens. An outbreak in 2002 forced farmers to destroy more than 3 million
chickens in Arizona, California and Nevada.
Not all of the birds smuggled from Mexico are fancy tropical varieties.
In August, a smuggler caught at a Tijuana border crossing was carrying cardinals in his pickup truck.
In the United States, it's illegal to keep cardinals as pets because they are a native species. But at the Lagunilla market and other places in
Mexico, they can be bought legally for as little as $5 apiece.
Venomous Gila monsters also are popular among smugglers. It's illegal to own a Gila monster in Arizona, but in other states they can sell for as much
as $750 apiece, said Stephane Poulin, a reptile keeper at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. Some of the animals confiscated at the border
end up at the museum.
"These are expensive animals, real money," Poulin said.
In Mexico, selling endangered or protected animals without a permit can be punished by up to nine years in prison and a $200,000 fine, said Monica
Rodr?guez Card##as, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Federal Environmental Protection Prosecutor.
But few cases ever go to court because environmental crimes are seen as less serious, Reuter said.
"If you have one guy with 20 parrots and another guy with a gram of coke, the guy with the coke is seen as the more important case," Reuter said.
"That's even though the parrots are worth a lot more."
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Mexitron
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Location: Fort Worth, Texas
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Its unfortunate that there's enough uninformed, or uncaring, people in the US that buy these animals and support that economy. Just like
drugs....they sell them because Americans have a huge appetite for them.
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cristobal
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Registered: 12-16-2003
Location: california
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I walked across the border in early DECEMBER 2004 ..... and when I got to the TAXI cab area ..... there was a guy with a cage selling those GREEN
parots ....  I should have stopped and asked him how I am supposed to get that big thing across the border.
These guys never give up.
   
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