currentsinbiology: Cocaine trafficking is destroying Central America’s forests Kendra McSweene
currentsinbiology:Cocaine trafficking is destroying Central America’s forestsKendra McSweeney knew that something was off. When the geographer at The Ohio State University in Columbus traveled to Honduras’s La Mosquitia region in 2011 to study its indigenous communities, she saw changes to the once lushly forested landscape that shocked her: huge, indiscriminate clearings in the middle of nowhere.When she asked locals what was going on, they insisted on a sole culprit. “Los narcos.” Drug smugglers who had moved into the region in the mid-2000s—right around the time Mexico’s war on drugs intensified, and almost a decade after McSweeney herself had lived in eastern Honduras. Traffickers in the region had to figure out a way to funnel their money into the legal economy, and land clearing—in the form of cattle ranching, agro-industrial plantations, and timber extraction—was the preferred way to do it.McSweeney wanted to know more. So she and her colleagues decided to see whether they could match deforestation in six countries—Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama—to increases in drug trafficking from 2001 to 2013. Connecting the dots was no easy task. It took them years to get access to databases on drug flows from the office of the U.S. “drug czar.” Forest loss data came from the University of Maryland’s Global Forest Change website. In the end, they found links in just three countries: Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.About 30% to 60% of forest lost to cocaine trafficking in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala occurred within designated protected areas like Honduras’ Mosquitia Patrimonial Heritage Preserve, above. -- source link
#deforestation#animal husbandry#honduras#nicaragua#guatemala#tree genocide#cocaine#drug policy#money laundering