Highways of Depredation: Wildlife Trafficking in the Amazon

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Wildlife trafficking is one of the most veiled criminal activities on the planet. As the United Nations warns in its main report on the subject, there are no precise figures on the true size of the market or the number of wild animals extracted from their ecosystems and sold on the other side of the world as pets, collector’s items, exotic foods, or supposedly medicinal ingredients.

There are, however, some estimates. According to several studies, each year the trafficking of wildlife moves between 7 and 23 billion dollars. At its upper limit, this means it is almost 1.75 times the annual size of the cocaine market in Europe. At its lower limit — the best-case scenario, aside from not existing at all — it is roughly equivalent to twice the gross domestic product of a country like Belize.

One analysis calculated that between 2015 and 2021, about 13 million animals — approximately 1.84 million per year — fed this illegal trade, the fourth largest in the world, behind drugs, human trafficking, and counterfeit goods, according to the U.S. government.

According to organizations such as TRAFFIC and the Wildlife Conservation Society, a significant share of the animals that make up the illegal market are captured and removed from the Amazon, the largest tropical rainforest in the world and home to roughly 10% of all living species on the planet. Due to its fragmented geography, the vastness of the biome, and the porous borders of the nine countries where its forests remain, there are no recent studies or estimates that reveal the true scope of wildlife trafficking in the region. This has prevented the issue from receiving the attention it deserves and from authorities dedicating the resources needed to confront it.

Faced with this situation, journalists from CasaMacondo in Colombia; Revista Vistazo in Ecuador; OjoPúblico in Peru; Revista Nómadas in Bolivia; and Amazônia Latitude in Brazil spent nearly a year trying to decipher the illegal trade of animals in the Amazon. To do so, we sought to unify and analyze the existing data on wildlife seizures in each of the five countries.

It was not easy. In Colombia, for example, we had to send 45 information requests to different environmental authorities and file legal actions against about a dozen of them to obtain their data. In the case of the Ministry of the Environment, a judge threatened a staff member with a contempt proceeding to force the entity to hand over the information (and even after the threat, it was delivered incomplete). In Ecuador, the authorities did not have data broken down by species, which prevented us from carrying out a detailed analysis. Something similar happened with the available information in Bolivia.

Despite everything, the data obtained and compiled in the special Highways of Depredation show that wildlife trafficking in the Amazon and around the world is far greater than what reports published by NGOs, other journalists, and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations suggest. The analysis of the consolidated information — with its flaws, omissions, and caveats — found that between 2010 and 2025, more than 46 million animals were seized or voluntarily turned over to authorities in Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, an average of nearly 3 million per year, more than one and a half times the records held by the United Nations for the entire world. (The number, in fact, could be almost double, since the study discarded figures that appeared inflated or the result of error.)

The data include the seizure of tens of millions of ornamental fish, the most trafficked category of animals in the Amazon, mainly due to the volume of captures and the ease of transport, as the Colombia story shows; more than 1,200,000 birds, including canaries, various species of parrots, and macaws, as reported in the Brazil investigation; tens of thousands of turtles, as found in Bolivia; and hundreds of sharks and mammals — such as jaguars, ocelots, and páramo wolves — which today serve as pets, status symbols, and sources of financing for criminal groups in Ecuador.

The data do not include the thousands of animals which, for example, are “laundered” or “whitened” through breeding centers or aquariums in countries like Peru, the world’s main exporter of wild animals extracted from their natural habitats. Nor do they account for the hundreds of thousands of animals that riverine communities in the Amazon themselves capture and sell illegally in the absence of viable economic alternatives.

Wildlife trafficking thrives alongside other crimes. Non-governmental organizations such as Earth League International and Traffic point out that there is an interconnection with other offenses — drug trafficking, contraband, arms or human trafficking, illegal mining, money laundering, and illegal logging. Our investigation found that, in several cases, criminal groups sell wildlife to finance their operations or launder money from other activities. In others, they transport the animals along the same routes they use to move drugs, weapons, or other products to Asia, the United States, and Europe.

The information gathered by this group of journalists points to the existence of tens of millions of histories and lives cut short of all kinds of animals. Highways of Depredation touches on only a few of them, but our intention is to share the data with authorities, journalists, and researchers who may want it, so they can review it, correct it, if necessary, work with it and — hopefully — delve deeper into the stories of more species and individuals. (A partial file can be found and downloaded here. Any use must include the appropriate credit to the project.)

In the coming weeks, the chronicles that make up this project will be available in the participating outlets and on this page. If you can, please share them.

This project was carried out with the support of the Pulitzer Center.

Text: Santiago Wills, Bianca Padró Ocasio, Gianfranco Huamán, Aramis Castro, Iván Paredes, María Belén Arroyo, Arturo Torres, João Serrão, Nayra Wladimila e Marcos Colón
Copyediting and finishing: Juliana Carvalho
Direction: Marcos Colón