By Insight Crime

This present study on Bolivia was led by InSight Crime. The findings and analysis are based on one year of open-source and fieldwork investigation in the cities of La Paz and Santa Cruz, and desk research, phone, and face-to-face interviews with environmental experts, government and security officials, members of local communities, academics, and others.1 The report provides a snapshot of the complex web of actors (state and non-state) and relationships fueling environmental crime in the Bolivian Amazon. Rather than just diagnosing the issue, the study aims to raise new dialogue and intervention opportunities regarding environmental crime in the region. This study addresses long-standing issues of securing land rights to traditional communities in the Amazon, many of which currently face new forms of land grabbing and land trafficking, notably by export companies extracting natural resources. It also includes ideas for reforming and strengthening structurally weak and corruption prone public institutions in the Bolivian Amazon, notably those related to land, environmental, and security issues. Finally, the report also sheds light on the transnational and cross-border dynamics of environmental crime in Bolivia in activities such as wildlife trafficking and illegal mercury trafficking for river-gold mining and illegal logging exports. The complexity of increasingly globalized supply chains initiating in or cutting through the Bolivian Amazon call for more and stronger regional and international cooperation to dismantle environmental crime and protect the forest and its people

Washington, DC: Insight Crime, 2024. 73p.

By Joel Salvador Herrera and , Cesar B. Martinez-Alvarez

A growing body of evidence suggests that criminal organizations across the Global South actively exploit natural resources in the communities where they operate with important sociopolitical consequences. In this article, we investigate the case of Mexico where the incursion of criminal groups into the mining and export-agricultural sectors impacts violence at the local level. We propose two mechanisms that explain why criminal groups diversify. First, the war-profit motive suggests that competition and state repression prompt criminal organizations to look for non-traditional sources of incomes and to build up their violence-making capacities. Second, the governance motive suggests that extracting rents from key industries represents a strategy for these organizations to establish territorial control in local communities. Using homicide data from 2007 to 2011, we demonstrate that access to primary sector revenues is associated with higher levels of violence among Mexican municipalities. Using qualitative evidence from Michoacán, we show how the introduction of criminal governance systems to rural areas was a key factor in explaining why criminal groups diversified toward mining and export-agriculture.

World Development. Volume 151, March 2022, 105769

By Felber J. Arroyave, Alexander M. Petersen, Jeffrey Jenkins & Rafael Hurtado

Illicit wildlife trafficking poses a threat to the conservation of species and ecosystems, and represents a fundamental source of biodiversity loss, alongside climate change and large-scale land degradation. Despite the seriousness of this issue, little is known about various socio-cultural demand sources underlying trafficking networks, for example the forthright consumption of endangered species in different cultural contexts. Our study illustrates how wildlife trafficking represents a wicked problem at the intersection of criminal enforcement, cultural heritage and environmental systems management. As with similar network-based crimes, institutions are frequently ineffective at curbing wildlife trafficking, partly due to the lack of information detailing activities within illicit trading networks. To address this shortcoming, we leverage official government records documenting the illegal trade of reptiles in Colombia. As such, our study contributes to the understanding of how and why wildlife trafficking persists across robust trafficking networks, which are conduits for a broader range of black-market goods. Leveraging geo-spatial data, we construct a multiplex representation of wildlife trafficking networks, which facilitates identifying network properties that are signatures of strategic trafficker behavior. In particular, our results indicate that traffickers’ actions are constrained by spatial and market customs, a result which is apparent only within an integrated multiplex representation. Characteristic levels of sub-network coupling further indicate that traffickers strategically leverage knowledge of the entire system. We argue that this multiplex representation is essential for prioritizing crime enforcement strategies aimed at disrupting robust trade networks, thereby enhancing the effectiveness and resources allocation of institutions charged with curbing illicit trafficking. We develop a generalizable model of multiplex criminal trade networks suitable for communicating with policy makers and practitioners, thereby facilitating rapid translation into public policy and environmental conservation efforts.

Applied Network Science volume 5, Article number: 20 (2020)

By Tanya Wyatt, Daan van Uhm & Angus Nurse

Historically, the poaching of wildlife was portrayed as a small-scale local activity in which only small numbers of wildlife would be smuggled illegally by collectors or opportunists. Nowadays, this image has changed: criminal networks are believed to be highly involved in wildlife trafficking, which has become a significant area of illicit activity. Even though wildlife trafficking has become accepted as a major area of crime and an important topic and criminologists have examined a variety of illegal wildlife markets, research that specifically focuses on the involvement of different criminal networks and their specific nature is lacking. The concept of a ‘criminal network’ or ‘serious organized crime’ is amorphous – getting used interchangeably and describes all crime that is structured rather than solely reflecting crime that fits within normative definitions of ‘organized’ crime. In reality, criminal networks are diverse. As such, we propose categories of criminal networks that are evidenced in the literature and within our own fieldwork: (1) organized crime groups (2) corporate crime groups and (3) disorganized criminal networks. Whereas there are instances when these groups act alone, this article will (also) discuss the overlap and interaction that occurs between our proposed categories and discuss the complicated nature of the involved criminal networks as well as predictions as to the future of these networks.

Trends in Organized Crime (2020) 23:350–366

By Michelle Anagnostou

The intensified illegal trade of wildlife has contributed to the unsustainable decline of wildlife populations, the destabilization of ecosystems, and threatens economic development and human security. Though often lacking empirical evidence, convergence theory has emerged recently as a topic of interest among researchers, practitioners, and the media to explain the growing overlap of criminal activities in an increasingly globalized world. In this paper, I explain the interdisciplinary theoretical foundations for the interconnectivity of criminal networks, including connections between illegal wildlife trade networks and non-state armed groups. I also outline and discuss various perspectives on the convergence of the illegal wildlife trade with other organized crime activities. I conclude by highlighting the urgent need for a better understanding of the role of the organized criminal groups involved in the illegal wildlife trade, and of how these groups converge with other types of criminal activities. The policy implications of filling in this knowledge gap are twofold: firstly, understanding how criminal networks converge can facilitate the implementation of more effective law enforcement and investigations that target high-profile offenders, as opposed to focusing on low-level poachers; and secondly, this understanding can foster more cooperation across agencies and jurisdictions to address multiple crime types and crime in convergence settings

Environmental Challenges. Volume 5, December 2021, 100222

By Earth League International and John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Environmental crime convergence, the focal point of this report, poses an imminent threat to our planet’s delicate ecosystems. To address this urgent issue, ELI, and John Jay College present ELI’s revolutionary 4-Type Environmental Crime Convergence paradigm to comprehensively understand and combat the intricate web of transnational organized crime operations that perpetuate environmental degradation.

The foundation of this report is built upon the fieldwork and intelligence analysis of ELI’s investigators and crime analysts, who have gathered first-hand evidence of Environmental Crime Convergence directly from some of the world’s most notorious environmental criminals and their networks. Drawing on years of investigative fieldwork in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, over two dozen case studies have emerged from ELI’s work as primary sources of data.

This report highlights five (5) case studies of the transnational criminal networks in Latin America identified by ELI that illustrate the convergence of environmental and wildlife crime with other serious crimes and expose the severity of the issue at a global scale.

Los Angeles: Earth League International, 2023. 83p.

By The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA)

All eight pangolin species are facing an unprecedented threat from the transnational trafficking of their scales and meat by criminal networks. • Between 2017, when the Appendix I listing for all pangolin species entered force, and July 2021, at least 269 tonnes of pangolin scales were confiscated globally. • Pangolin scales are trafficked to China, often via Vietnam, and are primarily sourced from West, Central and East Africa. • Nigeria, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo are the top export hubs for pangolin scales trafficked from Africa to Asia. • Global pangolin trafficking is driven by consumer demand for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) products containing pangolin scales. • In China, licenced hospitals and pharmaceutical companies can legally trade and utilise pangolin scales from privately held stockpiles. • In 2020, 56 pharmaceutical companies in China were confirmed to be advertising 64 manufactured medicines containing pangolin scales online. • It is very likely that demand for pangolin scales in China far exceeds the legally available supply from stockpiles. …

London; Washington DC: EIA, 2021. 18P.

By The IUCN National Committee of The Netherlands

On behalf of the IUCN National Committee of the Netherlands (IUCN NL), Earth League International (ELI) conducted undercover investigations on jaguar poaching and trafficking in Bolivia. ELI investigated the criminal networks behind this illegal wildlife trade from 2018 to 2020 and unveiled the traffickers’ modus operandi and transport methods, routes and geographical hotspots. The investigations showed that the demand for jaguar parts comes from Asia and the trade is generally run by Chinese residents in Bolivia. The jaguar is the only member of the panthera family in the Americas and is by far the biggest cat on the continent. Scientists estimate there are between 130,000 and 208,000 jaguars left in the wild, mostly concentrated in the Amazon basin. The jaguar is classified by IUCN as ‘near threatened’. According to local experts, today there are an estimated 2,000-3,000 jaguars left in the wild in Bolivia.

Amsterdam: IUCN National Committee of The Netherlands, 2021. 24p.

By Tanya Wyatt

Wildlife trafficking is a major black market, and is thought to be the second most profitable illicit market after drug trafficking. It has significant negative impacts on species, ecosystems, and biodiversity. After habitat loss, wildlife trafficking is the leading cause of extinction. It is also a threat to food industries and human health with its connection to disease transmission. The patterns of wildlife trafficking vary throughout the world and nations approach the prevention of it differently. The differences that exist raise the question as to why the levels differ between nations that appear to be similar. This is the case with the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, which are demographically similar with a significant shared cultural history. Yet New Zealand has high levels of wildlife trafficking, Australia low levels, and the UK somewhere in between. This research uses the trade database from the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to explore all the illegal trade incidents of these three countries reported to CITES from its creation in 1973. Combined with a review of the literature, the paper investigates the differences and similarities in the wildlife that is traded and the legislation that is implemented. It appears that more regulation in this instance may be connected to decreased levels of wildlife trafficking.

Canberra: Transnational Environmental Crime Project, Department of International Relations, Australian National University, 2013. 25p.

By Matthew Marshall

This paper summarises, analyses, and assesses four working papers published by the Transnational Environmental Crime (TEC) Project and written by two employees of the Australian Government’s Department of the Environment (DoE) who served as Visiting Fellows to the TEC Project. This working paper also forms part of the TEC Project. It synthesises the data and concludes the overall contribution made by DoE, emphasising future areas of consideration. Part of this involves enunciating research findings in such a way that they can be better utilised by DoE to subsequently develop policy in the area of TEC regulation, which is also one of the aims of the TEC Project generally: that the course of academic research provide assistance in the development of government policy on the matter of TEC with subsequent operational benefits.

Canberra: Transnational Environmental Crime Project, Department of International Relations, Australian National University, 2014. 24p.,

By Environment Investigation Agency (EIA)

Our new report BAN-BOOZLED: How Corruption and Collusion Fuel Illegal Rosewood Trade in Ghana reveals how despite a comprehensive ban in place since March 2019, the dry forests and rural communities of Ghana are still the victims of rosewood plundering. EIA estimates that since 2012, over 540,000 tons of rosewood – the equivalent of 23,478 twenty-foot containers or approximately 6 million trees – were illegally harvested and imported into China from Ghana while bans on harvest and trade have been in place. EIA’s investigation documents a massive institutionalized timber trafficking scheme, enabled by high-level corruption and collusion.

New York: London: Environmental Investigation Agency, Inc. 2019. 16p.

By Amanda Gore

Boniface Mathew Malyongo was, by most accounts, the perfect fit for a Hollywood villain. Nicknamed ‘Shetani’ (Satan, or the devil, in Kiswahili), he was allegedly one of the most prolific elephant poachers and ivory traffickers in the world, accused by some of controlling as many as 15 poaching gangs responsible for killing up to 10 000 elephants in five countries. The Leonardo DiCaprio-produced documentary, The Ivory Game, which culminated with dramatic footage of Malyongo’s arrest in Tanzania, assured him a certain degree of global infamy. And when he was jailed for 12 years in 2018, conservation organizations and activists around the world rejoiced. But Malyongo appealed, and in 2020 Tanzania’s Court of Appeal quashed the conviction. For conservationists, it was a stunning reversal – the court ruled that there were basic errors and police missteps that fatally compromised the chain of evidence, a complete lack of evidence to prove the key elements of the crimes and an overreliance on confessions as proof of guilt. Despite charging Malyongo with ‘leading organized crime’, as defined in Tanzania’s Economic and Organized Crime Control Act, investigators and prosecutors produced no hard evidence that he organized, directed or financed a ‘criminal racket’, or reaped a profit from it. The case and the vast sums involved could have been a chance to unravel the financial threads underpinning an alleged transnational syndicate, yet no financial investigation was ever done. Police seized four vehicles and identified several properties, including a house and a supermarket, which, they said, had been obtained as a result of poaching activities. But that is where the financial inquiries stopped. No attempt was made to produce evidence showing how the syndicate financed its operations, where the money originated, how it flowed or how it was laundered. While the effect of the judgment is that Malyongo has been found innocent, the conduct of the public officials in this case, the police and prosecutors, is a matter that deserves scrutiny

Geneva, CH: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2021. 44p.

By Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Kaoem Telapak (KT)

Indonesia’s legal system is failing to act against timber criminals, seriously undermining the country’s top-level efforts to tackle illegal logging and deforestation. New research by EIA and our Indonesian partner Kaoem Telapak reveals that action through the courts was taken against only a handful of companies out of more than 50 proven to have either traded directly or indirectly in illegal timber.

London; Washington, DC: EIA, Bogor, Indonesia: Kaoem Telapak. 2021. 30p.

By United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

The present version of the Wildlife and Forest Crime Analytic Toolkit is an initial attempt to provide a comprehensive overview for understanding the main issues related to environmental offences and for analysing preventive and criminal justice responses to wildlife and forest offences in a given country. Efforts have been made to provide a framework through which measures for prevention and response can be analysed and understood as the basis for an effective national response to wildlife and forest offences. The Toolkit is designed mainly to assist government officials in wildlife and forestry administration, Customs and other relevant enforcement agencies. It will help them to conduct a comprehensive analysis of possible means and measures to protect wildlife and forests and monitor their use and thus, to identify technical assistance needs. In this sense, the Toolkit may also be used as training material for law enforcers. In addition, other stakeholders at the international and national levels, as well as civil society, may find the Toolkit useful regarding their daily responsibilities. The Toolkit can be used effectively to address (a) a wide range of wildlife and forest offences, including illegal logging and illegal trade in timber and a lack of adherence to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and, (b) the usefulness of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the United Nations Convention against Corruption.

New York: United Nations, 2012. 212p,

By Arias Goetschel

The Illegal Trade in Wildlife (IWT) is one of the most cumbersome threats currently facing biodiversity, with broad implications for the health and wellbeing of humans and nature. Over the past decade, reports of international illegal trade in jaguars (Panthera onca), with links to demand from Asian wildlife markets, have emerged throughout Latin America, raising the profile of jaguars as the emblem of Latin America’s fight against IWT. This DPhil is among the first to explore the characteristics, prevalence, and drivers of this threat to jaguars, with the goal of providing scientific evidence in support of ongoing and future projects and policies aimed at addressing it. Data collection efforts centred in Mesoamerica and Bolivia, two areas with varying degrees of evidence of international trade, and were based on interviews with enforcement agents and conservation practitioners, and questionnaire surveys with rural communities coexisting with jaguars. In both study areas, the illegal jaguar trade was found to be a prevalent, domestically-focused, and opportunistic activity, driven largely by the confluence of cultural traditions surrounding wildlife uses, forest-dependent livelihoods, and negative perceptions and interactions with jaguars, manifested through human-jaguar conflict. To a lesser degree, the trade was also influenced by a more diverse set of external actors and drivers than originally expected, including tourists of diverse backgrounds, regional immigrants, and traders of Asian-decent. Enabling factors ranged from critical limitations in the enforcement capacity of wildlife authorities, to a high social acceptability of jaguar killing in rural communities. Additionally, the DPhil highlighted biases in how those in charge of addressing the illegal trade in jaguars perceive and use evidence on the trade, with a tendency to disregard its reliability and conservation relevance. To address this issue, the DPhil provides guidelines towards a more objective decision-making on the illegal wildlife trade, and reinforces the need for evidence-based, multifaceted, counter-trafficking approaches that consider the complex interacting domestic and international, cultural and commercial drivers behind the illegal trade in jaguars.

Oxford, UK: St. Cross College, University of Oxford, 2021. 244p.

By James Wingard and Maria Pascual

Anti-money laundering (AML) laws have the potential to play a crucial, game-changing role in transforming wildlife trafficking from a low-risk/high-reward to a high-risk environment. Yet despite the 2017 UN Resolution callings on countries to leverage AML laws in the fight against wildlife trafficking, they remain under-utilised. Investigations and prosecutions in the case of wildlife-trafficking crimes still rely primarily on charges for poaching or trafficking, while money-laundering crimes are mostly overlooked. There are several reasons for this, one of them being the degree to which wildlife crimes constitute a predicate offence. This paper reviews the AML laws from 110 jurisdictions from the Legal Atlas online platform to determine their applicability to illegal wildlife trade (IWT) crimes, showing positive results for 64 out of the 110 countries. The paper also flags some more general challenges that may hinder the application of such AML laws.

Missoula, MT: Legal Atlas, 2019. 29p.

By Wildlife Justice Commission

The report ‘Operation Dragon: Revealing new evidence on the scale of corruption and trafficking in the turtle and tortoise trade’ describes in detail the results of the Operation and how the intelligence and evidence gathered by the Wildlife Justice Commission investigators provided an in-depth understanding of individual roles and network dynamics, enabling law enforcement agencies to target the most prolific criminals in a time-critical manner.

New York: WJC, 2018. 46p.

By Nellemann, C., Henriksen, R., Raxter, P., Ash, N., Mrema, E. (Eds)

Given the alarming pace, level of sophistication, and globalized nature that illegal trade in wildlife has now notoriously achieved, UNEP initiated a Rapid Response Assessment to provide some of the latest data, analysis, and broadest insights into the phenomenon. Tackling illegal wildlife trade demands this examination of the relationship between the environmental resources at stake, their legal and illegal exploitation, the loopholes that exacerbate the situation, the scale and types of crimes committed, and the dynamics of the demand driving the trade. In the international community, there is now growing recognition that the issue of the illegal wildlife trade has reached significant global proportions. Illegal wildlife trade and environmental crime involve a wide range of flora and fauna across all continents, estimated to be worth USD 70–213 billion annually. This compares to a global official development assistance envelope of about 135 billion USD per annum. The illegal trade in natural resources is depriving developing economies of billions of dollars in lost revenues and lost development opportunities, while benefiting a relatively small criminal fraternity. This report focuses on the far-reaching consequences of the environmental crime phenomenon we face today. The situation has worsened to the extent that illegal trade in wildlife’s impacts are now acknowledged to go well beyond strictly environmental impacts – by seriously undermining economies and livelihoods, good governance, and the rule of law. Even the security and safety of countries and communities is affected: the report highlights how wildlife and forest crime, including charcoal, provides potentially significant threat finance to militias and terrorist groups. Already recognized as a grave issue in DRC and Somalia by the UN Security Council, the assessment reveals that the scale and role of wildlife and forest crime in threat finance calls for much wider policy attention, well beyond those regions. The consequences are increasingly evident: illegal wildlife trafficking constitutes a barrier to the achievement of both sustainable development and environmental sustainability. As reflected in a range of decisions of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the UN Office for Drugs and Crime, the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, INTERPOL, the UN Security Council, and others, the illegal trade in wildlife and environmental crime are now widely recognized as significant threats on a global scale, to be tackled with urgency. However the responses to date, in terms of impact on the ground, have been too modest, and inadequate to the scale and growth of the threat to wildlife and the environment.

Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme; Arendal, Norway: GRID-Arendal. 2014. 108p.

By Ian M. Ralby

On January 13, 2017, the Atlantic Council launched a major study on downstream oil theft at its inaugural Global Energy Forum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The present analysis draws on that launch event to examine the implications of the Downstream Oil Theft: Global Modalities, Trends, and Remedies report findings, and to suggest tangible next steps in both further investigating this global scourge and beginning to confront it effectively. The panel, moderated by Ambassador Richard Morningstar, the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center’s chairman, included the lead author of the report, Dr. Ian Ralby, a nonresident senior fellow of the center and chief executive officer (CEO) of I.R. Consilium; Éric Besson, former minister of industry, energy, and digital economy for the Republic of France; Dr. John Gannon, former Central Intelligence Agency deputy director for intelligence and chairman of the US National Intelligence Council; and Kola Karim, CEO of Shoreline Energy, an oil company in Nigeria. Though the panelists’ comments form a starting point for this analysis, they do not constitute the sole basis for this report. The implications of the study are extensive and point to a wide range of challenges, but six areas stand out as encompassing the most significant consequences of illicit downstream hydrocarbons activity: 1. The Energy Industry 2. Security, Terrorism, and Law Enforcement 3. The Environment 4. Finance and Economics 5. Politics and Policy 6. International Relations The present analysis focuses on the implications of the study for these six areas

Washington, DC: Atlantic Council, 2017. 15p.

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By Robin Clarke.

Join Robin Clarke, world class naturalist, on his dramatic venture in Bolivia, to establish the Amboró national park along with his friend and Bolivian zoologist Noel Kempff Mercado, who was eventually murdered by a drug cartel. Clarke battled for decades to save the beautiful rain forests, terminate the trafficking in endangered species, and grappled with the Californian mafia’s drug cartel. And he risked his life to save hikers lost in the wilds of the Bolivian mountains. Though this book is essentially a very personal memoir, it reads like a suspense story.

New York. Harrow and Heston, A Read-Me.Org Imprint. 2022. 391p.