CRIME AGAINST NATURE

In Latin America, Drug Production and Trafficking Threaten Fragile
Ecosystems -- and the Scientists Trying to Pursue Research in the
Region

In the southern reaches of Mexico's Baja California peninsula,
majestic cardon cacti stand sentry over the dusty red desert, which
crumbles into the turquoise waters of the Gulf of California. But in
this striking landscape, dark forces are at work.

Within an hour of leaving the airport at the resort of Loreto, our
truck is flagged down at a checkpoint set up by federal agents. They
include inspectors from the environment ministry searching for
abalone and other illegally harvested wildlife. Calling the shots are
members of the AFI -- the Mexican equivalent of the FBI -- clad in
flak jackets and armed with semiautomatic rifles. They are looking
for narcotics.

I am here with Wallace J. Nichols, a biologist with the California
Academy of Sciences and the Ocean Conservancy, who since 1993 has
studied endangered sea turtles off the Baja coasts and worked with
local fishermen to reverse their decline. These efforts are
threatened by the trade in illegal drugs.

Drug production and trafficking can damage sensitive ecosystems, and
some projects, such as those run by Nichols, are undermined by
epidemics of addiction among local people. In other cases, biologists
and officials who should be enforcing environmental laws are kept
away by the threat of violence.

Given the dangers, there have been few studies to quantify the
problem. Researchers and conservation organizations are often
reluctant to discuss the issue, which is seen as intractable and
outside the realm of science. "This is an extremely important issue,
and one that is not talked about enough," says Thomas Brooks of
Conservation International's Center for Applied Biodiversity Science
in Washington.

Remote biodiversity hot spots make ideal bases for narcotics
production and trafficking. The problems are particularly acute along
the smuggling routes of Latin America, from the forests of Colombia
to the Mexican staging posts from which drug runners make their final
push into the United States. The situation is often made worse by
efforts to crack down on the trade.

Mexico is on the front line. According to the U.S. State Department,
up to 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States enters
via Mexico. Mexican growers produce about 30 percent of the heroin
on the U.S. market. And in recent years, "superlabs" south of the
border have become the major source of methamphetamine, a powerfully
addictive synthetic drug. The entire business is controlled by
powerful and ruthless cartels that exert a strong influence through
official corruption.

Traveling through Baja, almost everyone has a story about the
narcotics trade. Cecilia Fischer, who works for a developer in
Loreto, recalls a standoff three years ago when she was part of a
team trying to eradicate introduced animals on local islands. Her
camp was disturbed in the dead of night by armed men expecting to
pick up a drugs shipment. "Had the hunters with us not had guns, I
don't know where we would have been," Fischer says.

Officials employed to prevent poaching of turtles and other marine
species live in fear of the drug runners, who want to keep government
boats out of the water. "They've had gunfire over their homes at
night, flattened tires or smashed windshields on their vehicles --
things that have made them back off from doing their job," Nichols
says.

Compared with some parts of Mexico, the Baja peninsula is relatively
safe. The Sierra Madre highlands are a center for marijuana and opium
cultivation, and the gangs that control the trade jealously guard
their territory. Dean Hendrickson, a fish biologist at the
University of Texas at Austin, says the threat of violence hampers
his attempts to survey streams in the area. "We always work with
local guides," he says. "Frequently they'll say: 'Maybe you'd like to
go down that canyon, but just don't.' "

Where marijuana and opium is grown, the disturbance can displace
animals such as jaguars, which may then be shot by ranchers, says
ecologist Sandra Guido at the Research Centre for Food and
Development in Mazatlan, Mexico. One small benefit is that the
lawlessness cuts off remote areas, preventing further habitat
destruction.

For the most part, though, the negatives outweigh such locally
positive effects. The fragile Sonoran desert near the U.S. border is
a case in point. It has become a major drug route in recent years, as
border controls tighten around Tijuana and other cities. "The
fieldwork I do in northwest Mexico is severely impacted," says
Richard Felger, a botanist and director of the Drylands Institute in
Tucson. "Everyone has guns now." Some sites have become too dangerous
to visit, and on one occasion Felger was robbed while a gun was held
to his forehead.

Violence is spilling over the U.S. border. Skirmishes between drug
runners and the U.S. border patrol threaten endangered animals --
including the Sonoran pronghorn antelope, now down to a few dozen
individuals in Arizona. "They're highly sensitive to disturbance,"
says Kathy Billings, superintendent of the Organ Pipe Cactus National
Monument in Arizona.

For U.S. conservation biologists, encountering drug-related violence
is a new experience. At the other end of the smuggling routes, in the
forests of Colombia, it has been a fact of life for many years.
Since the 1990s, cocaine production in Colombia has largely been
controlled by leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries.
Thomas Defler, a primatologist now at the National University of
Colombia in Bogota, ran into trouble with the largest left-wing
group, the FARC, in the late 1990s while working near the Brazilian
border. First, one commander demanded $5,000 from him for permission
to carry on working. "I was going to give it to them," Defler
admits, though fortunately that faction was run out of the area
before it could collect the money.

Then, in 1998, Defler was expelled from his field station by another
FARC unit. Detained by the rebels and expecting to be shot, Defler
escaped by diving from a boat, then making his way through the forest
over three nights. "I've got a huge list of places I'd like to go,
but I can't, either because of guerrillas or drugs production," he
says.

Colombia is also one of the few places where scientists have tried to
assess the impact of drug production on conservation. At Javeriana
University in Bogota, Andres Etter has used satellite images to study
deforestation in Caqueta, a biodiversity hot spot in the Colombian
Amazon. He found that it reached a peak between 1996 and 1999, when
coca cultivation was booming in areas controlled by the FARC.

The most comprehensive studies come from a researcher at Columbia
University in New York, who has pieced together a picture of the
ecological impact of drugs cultivation from a variety of sources. A
Colombian national, she writes under the pseudonym of Maria Alvarez
to ensure her safety. In 2002, Alvarez revealed that clearance for
cultivation of coca and opium poppies had risen to account for half
of the deforestation in Colombia, threatening the survival of some
bird populations.

Since then, she has extended her analysis to the whole of the
tropical Andes, including Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. The good news is
that it should be possible to preserve most birds endemic to the
region by protecting areas that are not yet affected by drug
production. "But birds aren't the whole story," Alvarez says. What's
more, her studies suggest that efforts to eradicate drug crops by
spraying them with glyphosate herbicide are making the problem worse,
by driving growers to clear more forest.

Since 2000, as part of an anti-drugs initiative called Plan Colombia,
backed to the tune of $4.7 billion by the U.S. government, vast
quantities of glyphosate have been sprayed in Colombia's remote
forests. It seems to have done little to curb drug production.
Ecologists are worried about the effects of the sprays, especially
surfactant chemicals that are added to help the herbicide penetrate
foliage.

Frogs and toads, which are highly sensitive to pollution, are a
particular concern. John Lynch, a herpetologist at the National
University of Colombia, would like to investigate the effects on
amphibian populations. But having been kidnapped by leftist
guerrillas in 1999 and again in 2000, he is not prepared to take the
risk.

Such dilemmas help explain why few conservation organizations are
addressing the narcotics issue. It is also a difficult topic for
groups that rely on a "wholesome" image to attract public donations.
"It's not something that foundations necessarily want to print in
their annual reports," says Nichols. "It's considered unstoppable.
And I think people perceive the danger involved in engaging with it
in any way."

The conservation organization World Wildlife Federation, for
instance, is running into narcotics-related problems in the forests
of Choco-Darien, near the Colombia-Panama border. "The issue of drug
use and production is very far removed from our expertise," says Tom
Lalley, spokesman for the U.S. arm of the federation. "We're dealing
with very powerful forces which can put our people in danger."

Nichols argues that conservationists cannot ignore the issue. He
wants to see more studies to quantify the problem, and believes field
workers must forge links with public health organizations to try to
find solutions.

Ultimately, fundamental change may only happen if there is a shift in
strategy in the U.S.-led war on drugs, currently dominated by
attempts to reduce supply by targeting illicit crops and drug smugglers.

Laurie Freeman, a fellow of a non-governmental organization called
the Washington Office on Latin America, has studied the escalating
drug-related violence in Mexico and believes the answer lies in
efforts to reduce demand in the United States, and a broader approach
to aiding Latin American countries in their anti-drugs efforts.

"You need to have the whole system: education, health care, the
judiciary and economic development," she says. "It's going to be
really difficult. Drug cartels are only getting more powerful, more
corrupting and more dangerous."