Four years of investigating jaguar parts trafficking rings in Latin America led Andrea Crosta to a grim realization: The same smugglers were often involved in a variety of illegal enterprises, including moving different kinds of wildlife products across national borders. Especially shark fins. “We kept stumbling upon shark fin trafficking — it was the same people,” Crosta told Mongabay. “And it happened everywhere: It happened in Bolivia, in Peru, in Ecuador, in Suriname.” The Italian-born, Los Angeles-based Crosta is the founder of Earth League International, a small conservation NGO that operates like a mini-FBI, using undercover operatives to infiltrate wildlife trafficking networks while feeding information to law enforcement about the key players and their modi operandi. The job is easier said than done: the smugglers tend to be better organized than their adversaries in government, who fail to collaborate with their counterparts overseas as effectively as the traffickers do, according to Crosta. “On the one hand we have very organized crime, and on the other hand very disorganized law enforcement agencies,” Crosta said. In April, ELI published a report about shark fin trafficking in Latin America, detailing five case studies involving 10 trafficking networks operating transnationally. Individuals’ names are redacted, but the report describes dozens of them in colorful terms: “a Chinese timber trafficker in San Jose who uses a solar panel company as a cover,” for example; “a Cantonese leader of SA1 based in Paramaribo whom sources describe as having a large appetite for risk if he thinks it…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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