Research has revealed a strong link between the rapid loss of forests in Central America and the drug trade.

Tropical forests are disappearing at an alarming rate on the isthmus between Texas and Colombia.  It threatens the livelihood and well-being of indigenous groups, and endangers some of the most biologically-diverse ecosystems in the hemisphere.

But the reason behind clear-cutting the trees isn't to create more land to grow coca leaves for cocaine.  It's to create places to dump all of that drug money.

"Starting in the early 2000s, the United States-led drug enforcement in the Caribbean and Mexico pushed drug traffickers into places that were harder to patrol, like the large, forested areas of central America," said David Wrathall, an Oregon State University geographer.  "A flood of illegal drug money entered these places and these drug traffickers needed a way that they could spend it.  It turns out that one of the best ways to launder illegal drug money is to fence off huge parcels of forest, cut down the trees, and build yourself a cattle ranch. It is a major, unrecognized driver of tropical deforestation in Central America."

Wrathall and his team analyzed the patterns of Central American deforestation from 2001 through 2014, and identified several instances that didn't fit the usual patterns of frontier development.  They also compared the rate of deforestation to US government data on drug trafficking from the Central American corridor.

"The comparisons helped confirm relationships between deforestation and activities including cattle ranching, illegal logging, and land speculation, which traffickers use to launder drug trafficking profits in remote forest areas of Central America," Wrathall said.

The new study appears in the journal Environmental Research Letters, noting that drug trafficking was responsible for up to 30 percent of annual deforestation in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, turning biodiverse forest into agricultural land.  Much of it occurred on what was supposed to have been protected land.

"Starting in the early 2000s, the United States-led drug enforcement in the Caribbean and Mexico pushed drug traffickers into places that were harder to patrol, like the large, forested areas of central America," said David Wrathall, an Oregon State University geographer and co-author on the study. "A flood of illegal drug money entered these places and these drug traffickers needed a way that they could spend it.

"It turns out that one of the best ways to launder illegal drug money is to fence off huge parcels of forest, cut down the trees, and build yourself a cattle ranch. It is a major, unrecognized driver of tropical deforestation in Central America."



Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-narco-deforestation-links-loss-central-american.html#jCp