In Indonesia and Malaysia, hungrily expanding oil-palm plantations are swallowing pristine jungles. In the Brazilian Amazon, cattle-ranching has chewed up an area of forest the size of Italy in just 22 years. In Madagascar, an explosion in sapphire mining is nibbling away at natural treasures. Now, we can pinpoint with increasing certainty a more elusive source of coronary environmental disease. The drugs trade.
Central America has long been exploited as a drugs’ gateway, since it forms a natural bridge linking South America, where most cocaine is grown, to North America, where most cocaine is snorted. However, in 2006-07, the importance of the isthmus boomed as a crackdown on drug activities in Mexico encouraged cartels to forge new operations and smuggling routes in Guatemala and Honduras, where a cocktail of porous borders, corruption and weak institutions provided the ideal attractant for traffickers wanting to elude prying authorities.
The flooding of well-resourced drug organisations into Central America was swiftly followed by swathes of forest loss. A few facts pointed to a possible connection between this, and well-capitalised criminals on the ground. First, was the apparent spatial overlap of hotspots of deforestation with known drug-transfer hubs in Eastern Nicaragua and Honduras.
The Honduras’ Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, for instance, a stronghold of imperilled jaguars and great green macaws, had its threat status upgraded to “World Heritage in Danger” by UNESCO in 2011, amidst worries of extensive drug-fuelled forest loss. The evidence? Multiple clandestine airplane landing strips scarring the forest landscape.
Second, was the work of several brave investigative journalists, and government officials, who publicly exposed indications of ties between suspected narcotic kingpins, agroindustry officials and public elites. These included occasions where cattle ranching and cash-crop businesses were being used as fronts for laundering illicit drug money—more on this later.
Finally, were the accounts of indigenous locals, whose dependence on the forest made them canaries in the coalmine, experiencing first-hand and early on the consequences of narco-deforestation.
(For an account of how a group of indigenous Hondurans faced AK47s when they confronted narco-deforesters, watch this video).
Despite these evidence streams, scientists have struggled to uncover the fingerprint of the drug trade amidst the scale and pace of forest loss in Central America. An industry shrouded in mystery, and characterised by backdoor dealings, bribes, blackmail and body bags isn’t the biggest magnet for tropical forest research.
A clever approach
Farmers are often responsible for clearing forest to make way for small-scale farmland. Any attempt to calculate just how big a problem narco-deforestation really is needs to be able to differentiate it from such subsistence deforestation. How can this be done? New research, published in Environmental Research Letters, has pioneered an ingenious method, which is rooted in the fact that narco-deforestation, viewed from up-on-high using satellite imagery, has a very different signature than other deforestation drivers.
Small-scale forest loss, concentrated along roads, is likely to be the work of subsistence farmers or locals trying to boost their livelihoods.
Fast clearance of large forest patches in very isolated areas is likely to be the work of well-organised and well-funded drug organisations, or the businesses that they are in cahoots with.
Building upon this, scientists identified a suite of 15 criteria, including the size, speed and location of deforestation, which can be used to distinguish patches of narco-deforestation from other forces driving forest loss. They then used these criteria to re-examine already existing satellite data, which tracked a decade of deforestation in six Central American countries: Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama. Finally, they related the observed patterns of forest loss to a database on drug flows, which traced the number and volume of cocaine seizures and shipments in different areas.
(Admittedly there are problems with using seizures and shipments as a proxy for drug flows—they provide more a snap-shot of drug flows than a full picture, and are heavily determined by government attitudes towards drug trafficking—but other measures are thin on the ground).
Their results reveal, for the first time, how drug influxes are triggering conservation disasters in Central America.
In Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, cocaine trafficking accounts for between 15-30% of annual deforestation. This translates into millions of acres of forest lost. Worryingly, it’s not crabby forest being cut down. Between 30-60% of this deforestation has occurred within nationally and internationally designated protected areas, which are the bedrock for preserving areas of enormous biodiversity importance.
According to these estimations, some 7% of global biodiversity is being undermined by cocaine trafficking. Displacement of indigenous communities, and the belching of enormous quantities of climate-change enhancing carbon dioxide emissions are yet another unquantified toll of narco-deforestation.
Cocaine, cows and chainsaws
The drugs trade in Central America has played an instrumental role in degrading the environment.. Scientists have highlighted a number of ways the drugs trade can drive deforestation.
The most obvious method is through the infrastructural development needed to transport narcotics, which invariably comes at the expense of forest cover. Clandestine airstrips, settlements and guard stations create a starkly different landscape from the tracts of luscious green, which came before them. Road construction bisect ancient forest, providing access routes to illegal loggers and poachers. Further up the supply chain, in South American countries like Bolivia, Columbia and Peru, drug cultivation itself is a culprit for forest displacement, with coco plantations often thriving near never-completed state-sponsored development projects.
However, these infrastructural impacts are small cheese compared to the more insidious effects the drug trade has in exacerbating existing deforestation threats. The spill over of weapons and money into poorly governed forest frontiers very quickly supercharges the efforts of resident forest clearers. Oil-palm growers, ranchers and loggers get involved in drug trafficking, and use their newfound wealth and power to redouble their destructive activities.
At the same time, drug organisations catch a whiff of the profitability of land-clearance and decide to invest in it themselves. Mainly, they use forested land purchases, and subsequent forest conversion into cattle-grazing lands and palm oil monocultures, as a way of shifting illicitly acquired drug profits into untraceable legal assets.
Walter White bought a car wash; in Central America, you buy a forest and fund cows with cocaine. Even if these land purchases are illegal, it’s very easy to slip unlawful beef and palm oil into poorly regulated legal markets. Besides, there’s always the opportunity to fraudulently acquire legal status for ranches or plantations down the line. A bribe to the right officials can swiftly see illegitimate lands shifted onto the national property registry.
Secondarily, this land theft allows drug syndicates to diversify their business portfolios and provides a valid excuse for their continued presence in forest frontiers—“No officer, I’ve got nothing to do with the 700 kg of cocaine you just impounded, I’m just here looking after my cows.” Large narco-estates incrementally built up by purchasing networks of forested land further succeed as a strategic ploy to block take-over by competitor drug organisations.
Take a case in point. Up until recently, the Maradiaga brothers lorded over Los Cachiros, one of the largest drug trafficking companies in Honduras. In a bid for a lenient sentence, both have been cooperating with the DEA since 2013. One brother, Lionel Riviera, has admitted to the murder of 78 people, including the assassination of a leading counternarcotics General in Honduras. When the U.S treasury department froze the resources of the brothers’ drugs trafficking network, they found large private assets in cattle ranches and oil palm.
The scale of ecological turmoil appears to have been aggravated at every turn by complicit elites. The Rosenthals, one of Honduras’ richest families, occupy the upper echelons of society, with a business empire spanning news media, financial services, telecommunications and real estate. They also appear to have acted as bankers for the Maradiaga brothers, helping them launder drugs proceeds in cattle, which was then sold in the United States. Just how far this corruption has metastasised is only now becoming evident. The ex-Honduran president’s son, Fabio Lobo is looking at a twenty-four-year jail stretch for cocaine conspiracy. On-going investigations are even exploring the possibility that drug money could have helped fund the rise of Honduras’ current president, Juan Orlando Hernández.
Deforestation is big money, big money buys power, unchecked power can breed impunity, and then impunity drives deforestation. At least this seems to be the downward spiral of destruction taking place with the drugs trade in Central America.
A few last lines
Just how directly drug trafficking is contributing to forest loss will continue be debated. Evidence of land records, ownership transfer records, and other documents changing hands is the only sure way to directly link deforestation to money laundering by drug traffickers, but for obvious reasons, these are famously difficult for authorities to get hold of.
In certain cases, drug organisations could even be having short-term unforeseen benefits. I once had a conversation with a scientist who suggested that the presence of cartels in Colombian rainforest could sometimes be protecting forest cover and biodiversity, by essentially creating exclusion zones, that block forest encroachment by smallholder farmers and artisanal miners. Analogously, as I’ve written about before, the breakout of wars and armed conflict sometimes has positive side-effects for biodiversity, allowing much needed recuperation of over-exploited wildlife populations.
On balance though, the influx of narcotics (and the criminals supplying them) into hyper-biodiverse regions is bound to have negative environmental and social implications. Current drug policies, centred around the clamping down of drug laws, prohibition, and eradication of drug crops seem to have spectacularly failed in stemming both the supply of narcotics and the environmental degradation this supply entails. In many cases, such policies appear merely to have diverted activities into ever more vulnerable and biologically important zones. Thus, if you burn an opium poppy field in the Andes, growers will retreat deeper into pristine forest. And if you come down hard on drug operations in Mexico, traffickers will slither away into the far-flung forests of Nicaragua.
It’s high time for a rethink on the war on drugs, which puts much greater emphasis on the demand-side of things, and which perhaps considers the introduction of a tightly regulated and closely managed legal drugs trade. Maybe that would trigger fewer environmental disasters?
P.s I haven’t yet worked out how to add photo credits underneath the caption photos yet, but would like to thank Harry Yates for the image!
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