Latin America, a biodiversity hotspot home to 40% of the world’s species, is witnessing an alarming decline in its wildlife. Illegal wildlife trafficking to wealthier parts of the world, such as North America and Europe, is one of the factors driving the decline.

A recent report highlights the scale of wildlife smuggled illegally from Latin America into Europe, including the EU and Russia, and discusses how traffickers abuse loopholes in existing EU wildlife trade regulations. Published by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), the report stems from a 2024 study that found staggering levels of illegal wildlife crimes in Spanish-speaking America.

The report found 34 wildlife trafficking seizures in Europe involving almost 2,500 animals belonging to 69 species between 2017 and 2023. More than half of the seized individuals were amphibians (59%), followed by birds (29%) and reptiles (12%). More than 94% of all seized wildlife were live animals, suggesting the exotic pet trade is a key driver.

“The EU is a major market, but it’s not only for illegal [trade], it’s legal and illegal, and the problem is, the illegal gets laundered through the legal system,” says Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). “It’s not new, but the problem hasn’t gone away.”

With the EU set to act on its 2022 revised action plan to end wildlife trafficking by strengthening regulations and understanding demand, the recent IFAW report comes at “a perfect time to have something that gives us a little bit more evidence of this issue,” says Ilaria Di Silvestre, director of policy and advocacy for Europe at IFAW.

The IFAW report analyzed media coverage of illegal wildlife seizures in the EU and Russia trafficked from Latin America (except Brazil) between 2017 and 2023. In addition, it included seizures of Latin American wildlife smuggled to Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands — known trading hotspots in Europe — reported in bulletins published by the France-based NGO Robin des Bois. The authors also scouted the Internet to find wildlife sold online and interviewed law enforcement officers in the Netherlands and Spain about their observations on the illegal trade.

Nearly 30% of the species seized were endemic to South America, including birds such as the Sira tanager (Stilpnia phillipsi) that lives only in Cerros del Sira, a remote ridge in the eastern Andes in Peru, and reptiles such as the Guatemalan emerald spiny lizard (Sceloporus taeniocnemis). The shipments included many songbirds from Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Suriname and endemic reptiles from Mexico and Brazil.

Poison dart frogs, sought for their attractive, brightly colored bodies, were among the most trafficked animals from Colombia, Panama and Brazil into Europe. In the last two decades, global demand for poison dart frog species, such as harlequin poison frogs (Oophaga histrionica) and Lehmann’s poison frogs (Oophaga lehmanni), has decimated their wild populations, with the two species now considered critically endangered.

Most shipments were caught in or on their way to the Netherlands, Germany and Russia, while Germany had the highest number of seized animals, followed by Russia and Spain. Most of the shipments came from Suriname, Brazil and Mexico, while Columbia, Panama and Mexico were the top three sources for the trafficked wildlife.

“This is definitely the tip of the iceberg,” says Di Silvestre, since seizures represent a fraction of the actual illegal trade. Besides, most of these seizures analyzed occurred because of animal welfare concerns or public health reasons and not because of the lack of permits or other irregularities, she adds. “The press is less interested when this happens, so it’s very rare that these cases are recorded.”

Sandra Altherr, co-founder and head of science at Pro Wildlife, a Germany-based NGO that works on improving laws against wildlife exploitation, says the report is further proof that wildlife crime is ongoing in Europe. “This report is extremely helpful to show that the scope is not at all neglectable and that something needs to be done.” Altherr did not contribute to the report.

Regulation loopholes boost unchecked trade

The most startling finding from the report, according to Di Silvestre, is that a whopping 75% of the species were not listed on CITES, the international agreement that regulates wildlife trade. This means international trade in these species is not regulated. While she was expecting this number to be big, she says she was surprised by how high it was, considering many of the non-CITES species were very rare, endemic and protected in the countries of their origin. Only a quarter of the seized species were listed on CITES.

“The existing wildlife trade legislation in the EU is basically the transposition of CITES,” says Di Silvestre, adding that apart from a few additional species, the EU Environmental Crime Directive’s list of protected species are the CITES-listed species. “So, when species are not listed in CITES at the moment … they can enter [the EU] and can be purchased and kept and traded, and there are no offenses.” Therefore, smuggling in non-CITES species is high-profit, low-risk for traffickers, she says.

The EU also lacks a species-level database of all wildlife that enters the continent for trade, especially of those not listed on CITES. There’s scarce data on what is imported, their country of origin and whether they are wild-caught or captive-bred, Altherr says. “For non-CITES species, the imports are a black box.”

The current CITES regulations make exceptions for trade in captive-bred animals, even if their wild-caught counterparts are strictly regulated, and that makes the EU a laundering hotspot for species from the wild. Sometimes, traffickers falsely claim wild-caught species as captive-bred and provide documents to support those claims, making it challenging for law enforcement, says Lieberman. “If you have some things legal and some illegal, it’s very much harder to enforce.”

Reflecting on her three decades of experience studying the ivory trade, Lieberman says having a mix of legal and illegal trade in the same species makes it very difficult to regulate trade. “There was one point at which [ivory trade] was illegal from some countries and legal from others. … It got out of control,” she says. The only time that trade could be controlled, she says, was when importing countries banned all ivory trade.

Unlike the Lacey Act in the U.S., which prohibits the import and sale of illegally sourced wildlife, EU regulations do not check for legality in source countries, facilitating the trafficking of protected, often endemic species. “As soon as the wildlife traffickers have successfully smuggled out those illegally sourced animals, they can be openly and legally imported, sold, possessed and reexported in Europe,” Altherr says, adding that her organization has been working with the EU to close this loophole for a decade.

The demand for rare, endemic species is also driven by collectors who collect them for hobby, Lieberman says. “There are hobbyists who will pay more money the rarer a species is, or if it’s an unusual form, or if it’s a weird color,” she says, adding that public awareness campaigns do little to change this demand. “The hobbyists know what they’re doing, and they know it’s illegal.”

Germany stands out as a huge market for the exotic pet trade also because it hosts one of the world’s biggest reptile fairs in the world, Altherr says. Held every quarter in the city of Hamm, the Terraristika reptile fair is a known hotspot for traffickers. “It’s the meeting point attracting hundreds of traders and thousands of clients from across Europe and even abroad,” she says.

Closing loopholes and strengthening enforcements

The report recommends changing EU legislation to penalize traffickers, strengthen law enforcement and close existing loopholes.

In 2022, the EU adopted the Digital Services Act, aiming to make all offline illegal trade likewise illegal online, including wildlife. Di Silvestre hopes this legislation can help tackle online sales of exotic animals for the pet trade.

As part of the 2022 EU action plan to stop illegal wildlife trafficking, three studies are underway. The first aims to review and amend existing EU laws to reflect provisions of the Lacey Act in the U.S. The second aims to create a “positive list” of exotic pets that are easy to keep and pose no danger to conservation, public health and native biodiversity. The third study aims to understand what’s driving the demand for exotic pets and how to reduce it. Their results are expected in the coming months.

“This action plan is really welcome,” Di Silvestre says, but she points out that it is not legally binding and there’s no obligation for member states to implement the recommendations. “So, it’s also difficult for us as NGOs to monitor the level of implementation by member states … but it’s definitely effective in terms of raising the attention on wildlife trafficking.”

Although IFAW does not work in Russia, a top wildlife importer according to the IFAW report, Di Silvestre says she hasn’t heard of the country having laws that criminalize importing and trading wildlife species protected in their country. “Our recommendation could be the same we make to the EU in the report: to adopt legislation addressing this loophole.”

Lieberman agrees that while the EU has good legislation on wildlife trafficking, it needs to be improved by incorporating IFAW’s recommendations. She also says the EU must work with countries from where wildlife is trafficked, citing the example of a recent EU-funded WCS report on how NGOs can help combat wildlife trafficking in source countries. “You can’t always catch everything, so you also need the cooperation at the other end,” she says.

But time might be running out for those species on the verge of extinction.

“We can’t always wait for the public to learn and become aware and care about wildlife,” Lieberman says. “We need laws and regulations because wildlife can’t wait a generation or two.”

Banner image: A Guatemalan emerald spiny lizard endemic to Guatemala and popular in the pet trade, but not listed on CITES. The IFAW report found that 30% of the seized wildlife were endemic to South America. Image by León Felipe/CC-BY-NC.

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