Mexican Drug Cartels Move Into Chinese Market for Illegal Wildlife Trade

Mexican drug cartels have been working with the Chinese organized crime networks for illegal wildlife trade, a new report said.

The Brookings Institution report shows the full threat posed to Mexico's biodiversity because of this illicit activity. The investigation conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank revealed how a lot of Mexico's marine and terrestrial animals are being poached and how this environmental crime passes into other illegal economies, according to an InsightCrime News report.

Mexico's wildlife is mainly used in China for food and traditional Chinese medicine. Lizards, turtles, jungle cats, macaws, parrots, toucans, and other birds are being trafficked from Mexico to China, sometimes via the U.S.

Aquatic life also has its use in the Chinese market, with creatures such as abalone, sea cucumbers, and shark fins being commercialized with a huge mark-up in price between the two countries.

Sea cucumber can gain 70 times the profit in Hong Kong that it does for Mexican fishers. A kilogram of totoaba bladder, a delicacy in China, can also be priced at $60,000 in China but worth $5,000 in Mexico.

Mexican drug cartels also sometimes swap illegally captured wildlife for chemicals that can be converted into fentanyl or methamphetamine.

Mexican Drug Cartels Engaging in Illegal Wildlife Trade

According to National Geographic, Mexican drug cartels such as the Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco cartel have seized control of large companies that have fishing fleets or process high-value species such as scallops and lobster.

Mexican drug cartels use legal businesses to launder poached marine species, with the Sinaloa cartel "allegedly in the process of opening its own formal legal seafood processing plant."

The Sinaloa cartel also plans to form a company and hire people for its operations. Mexican drug cartels also force restaurants to buy their fish exclusively, including restaurants serving international tourists.

The Sinaloa cartel reportedly bought up Mexico's permits for geoduck clams, a large mollusk sold to Chinese buyers. The permit gives the Mexican drug cartel control over the legal geoduck clam fishing operations.

Mexico's Illegal Wildlife Trade

Poaching and illegal wildlife trade in Mexico do not only threaten the country's biodiversity. It can also be a source of dangerous zoonotic diseases, such as the COVID-19, and facilitate their spread.

According to the Brookings Institution report, Mexican environmental activists and U.S. government officials claimed that Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was not interested in establishing zoonotic disease monitoring controls.

The report noted that Lopez Obrador's administration had withdrawn the budgetary and personnel resources of Mexican government regulatory environmental agencies.

Many environmental agencies were reportedly weak, lacking mandates, rangers, and resources to enforce an action against environmental crimes even before the withdrawal of the budget came effectively.

Meanwhile, the report further noted that the Mexico-China wildlife trade had become a mechanism to transfer value in illicit economies while bypassing anti-money-laundering controls in the United States and Mexican banks.

Mexican drug cartels use many animal and timber products to pay for drug precursor chemicals from which criminal organizations in Mexico produce fentanyl and methamphetamines.

Many other methods of money laundering are also used. Chinese informal money transfer systems even displaced established Colombian and Mexican money launderers.

Wildlife barter using different methods of money laundering and value transfer can reportedly destroy biodiversity in Mexico.

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Mary Webber

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