The illegal wildlife trade is worth approximately USD $20 billion per year. In the Amazon, home to nearly 10% of the world's known species, this activity has become an increasingly important source of revenue for transnational criminal organizations. These groups exploit porous borders, weak law enforcement, and local legislation to promote the "laundering" of species between countries.
Investigators have become aware of particular smuggling cases, but there is no clear picture of which are the most trafficked species and what are the predominant routes used by criminal groups in the Amazon. Countries rarely cross reference their data and some of them—Colombia, for instance—don't even have a centralized database.
In the past six months, journalists from CasaMacondo, in Colombia, Ojo Público, in Peru, Revista Vistazo, in Ecuador, Revista Nómadas, in Bolivia, and Amazonia Latitude, in Brazil, spoke to biologists, authorities, and government, traveled to trafficking hubs in the Amazon, and analyzed data of hundreds of thousands of wildlife interdictions to understand how this crime is affecting the region and what can de done to stop it.
