Cactus Poachers Ravage Mexican Desert
Cox News Service
Sunday, February 17, 2008
EL ARBOLITO, Mexico — These moonscape lands used to guard secret treasures. Delicate balls of snowy thread, twisting cones topped with graceful pink flowers, spiky lemon-lime colored orbs until recently dotted the central Mexican desert.
But rare and endemic cacti are disappearing at an increasing rate. Cactus poaching is booming in Mexico, helping to make wildlife species trafficking the third largest smuggling industry in Mexico behind drugs and guns.
 NANCY FLORES/Cox Newspapers Botanical garden director Emiliano Sánchez Martínez supervises a youth-run greenhouse project in the small community of El Arbolito, Querétaro.  NANCY FLORES/Cox Newspapers An estimated 35 percent of Mexico's 684 cactus species are endangered or threatened. The Cadereyta Regional Botanical Garden seeks to rescue and protect the endangered species. Mexican experts are signaling a growing crisis in cactus thievery, which they say threatens some species with extinction. Critics say the Mexican government is doing little or nothing to address the lucrative traffic in succulents.  NANCY FLORES/Cox Newspapers This area of the Querétaro desert in central Mexico has been the scene of constant cactus looting over the past century.  NANCY FLORES/Cox Newspapers Álvaro Ramirez, 16, used to help support his family by leading collectors and tourists into the desert behind his house to poach endangered cacti. Today he raises the same type of cacti in a pilot-project nursery in El Arbolito, Querétaro.  NANCY FLORES/Cox Newspapers Biologists monitor the growth of endangered cacti at the Cadereyta Regional Botanical Garden in Querétaro. |
The trade is fueled by private collectors and the burgeoning xeriscape movement in the U.S. South and Southwest. Rare cacti species can fetch hundreds of dollars on black markets from America to Japan.
Mexico's deserts are so ravaged by cactus poachers that researchers no longer publish the location of new species they find, lest eager collectors plunder the newfound cacti.
Mexico represents the Holy Grail in the lucrative world of cactus collecting. It is home to more unique cacti, some 684 species, than anywhere else on the planet.
But more than one third of Mexico's cactus species are considered at risk of disappearance, according to the Mexican government.
"There are specialized collectors who are willing to spend big money and are interested in the rarest species," said Rolando Bárcenas Luna, cactus expert at the Autonomous University of Querétaro. "And they only want plants from the desert. They're not interested in plants from nurseries, which they consider artificial because they haven't suffered for years in the desert."
Experts say Texas is both a destination and a transshipment point for illegally exported Mexican cacti.
Mexico also exports legal cacti through more than 100 registered nurseries. And collectors and exporters can get government permits to harvest wild cacti for export, though very few permits are requested or given out. But cactus advocates complain that export regulations are so onerous and costly that they actually promote illegal trafficking. And experts say Mexico lacks an effective system to differentiate between legal and illegal cacti once they hit the market.
In 2005, the Mexican government counted 3,791 Web sites trafficking in 531 species of Mexican cactus.
To get a better idea of the precarious lives of Mexican succulents, consider the case of Ariocarpus bravoanus, a small, fleshy cactus that blooms with dramatic purple flowers. The cactus was discovered by chance about 20 years ago in an isolated arroyo in the state of San Luis Potosi. Although the academics that discovered it tried to keep the location hidden, word soon filtered out.
"The biggest plants disappeared quickly," Bárcenas said. "The population was reduced almost to the point of extinction by collectors."
Despite the cactus's presence on international endangered species lists, an Internet search shows the plant for sale throughout Europe, the United States and Japan.
"The damage of all this plundering has already been done," said Emiliano Sánchez Martínez, director of a state-run botanical garden in an area of the Querétaro desert plagued by illegal cactus poaching. "Historically we've done little in Mexico stop it, either through laws or through social consciousness."
Wildlife advocates say the Mexican government has neither the resources nor the will to confront illegal cactus poaching.
While Mexican law requires permits to remove any cacti from Mexican soil, just a handful of investigators are charged with enforcing the law.
Adrian Reuter, of a World Wildlife Fund project that tracks trade in threatened wildlife, said putting cactus smuggling on the national radar is difficult in Mexico, where drug trafficking dominates the headlines.
But Reuter said that the big drug cartels also have their tentacles in the lucrative world of wildlife smuggling. "(Wildlife) trafficking goes all the way from small-time poaching, stealing a cactus from the side of the road, up to organized crime, and that is something that has to be recognized," Reuter said.
Mexico's limited numbers of inspectors pursue a wide variety of environmental crimes, making cactus prosecutions rare, said Joel Gonzalez, director of wildlife inspections for the Mexican government.
Instead, the government has sought to turn local residents into vigilantes. "They are the eyes of the authorities," he said.
Prized cactus plants tend to grow in Mexico's most rugged desert — and thus in the country's poorest communities.
Advocates are trying to convince locals that it makes better economic sense to build nurseries than to rip the cacti from the ground.
"They hire themselves out as guides for 50 pesos (about $5)," Bárcenas said. "We tell them to be careful because when you lose all your plants you are left with nothing."
Fines for cactus poaching can be as high as $25,000, though environmental officials said no one has been arrested in Mexico in the past two years.
Although the number of cacti being smuggled across the border is hard to determine — experts estimate the Mexican government stops just a tiny percentage of illegal cacti — advocates worry that increased use of cactus in the landscaping of water-scarce cities like Atlanta and Austin is putting added pressure on Mexican stocks.
Cactus advocates are pushing for a similar system as in Arizona, which requires legally harvested wild cacti to be tagged, letting buyers know they aren't supporting illegal wildlife.
A similar bill has yet to pass the Texas Legislature because of concerns it would reduce xeriscaping, a low water landscaping practice. Environmentalists say such a bill is needed in Texas to clamp down on large scale poaching of Lone Star State cacti to feed the regulated Arizona market.
Bárcenas and a team at the Autonomous University of Querétaro are working on mapping the DNA of Mexico's cacti, a project that could eventually allow investigators to run genetic tests to determine whether cacti were harvested illegally from the wild or legally through a greenhouse.
Meanwhile, Bárcenas hopes to instill in both collectors and community members the importance of buying and selling cacti raised in greenhouses.
In a remote corner of the Querétaro Desert in Central Mexico, Primitivo Ramirez's family embodies what cactus advocates hope is a growing trend.
Ramirez once supported his family as a guide, helping groups of collectors and tourists pluck rare cacti from the desert floor. He makes no excuses for making a living out from the harsh desert any way he could, but as cactus stocks diminished, he set out for Atlanta, where he installs air conditioning units and sends money back home.
About the same time, a nearby government-run botanical garden embarked on a pilot project to bring a cactus greenhouse to Ramirez's tiny hometown of El Arbolito. The idea was to teach local youngsters how to raise the area's endangered cacti in the greenhouse, protect the community's dwindling wild plants and eventually create a source of income in the form of cacti they could sell to visiting tourists.
Today Ramirez's 16-year-old son Álvaro works in the greenhouse tending to an immaculate collection of mammalia herrerae, a highly prized cactus that resembles a golf ball.
"Sometimes I'm here working and (collectors) come and ask me to take them out into the desert to find plants," Alvaro said. "I demand to see their permit. They just want to take them and re-sell them. And it's bad, because these cacti are in danger."