Drug Trafficking Is Destroying Central America's Rainforest

Drug trafficking is increasingly having an environmental impact in Central America, as Mexican drug cartels move into remote rainforest areas to continue their businesses.

The environmental impacts of the drug trade have been well documented in places such as Colombia, where cocaine plantations overtook wide swaths of the Amazon rainforest during the country’s various armed conflicts. Eradication efforts merely moved the problem higher into the Andes mountains, and cocaine production continues to be a problem for the environment in South America.

But new research suggests that the environmental effects of the drug trade extend beyond merely where it is grown. Smuggling has begun to destroy the rainforest in places like Guatemala and Honduras, where drug cartels have been forced to move as the drug war in Mexico has intensified.

Some of the problems with drug smuggling are obvious: Cartels often clear parts of the rainforest to create clandestine landing strips and operation bases. But those activities alone likely contribute just a small part to the overall impact of drug-related deforestation.

In a new article in Science, Ohio State University ecologist Kendra McSweeney argues that  “trafficking of drugs (principally cocaine) has become a crucial—and overlooked—accelerant of forest loss in the isthmus.”

That’s because the well-known causes of deforestation—illegal logging, ranching, agricultural expansion—are only intensified by drug trafficking. As cartels take over the rainforest, Central American governments are less willing to police protected areas as they become increasingly dangerous. In some cases, officials are bribed to look the other way, making a “protected area” protected in name only. With less intervention, ranchers and farmers become more bold, clearing out parts of the forest that they otherwise wouldn’t touch.

“When resident ranchers, oil-palm growers, land speculators, and timber traffickers become involved in drug trafficking, they are narco-capitalized and emboldened, and so greatly expand their activities,” McSweeney writes.

The drug traffickers themselves also may become involved in these activities, looking for “legal” businesses with which to launder their money.

Statistics on how bad the problem has gotten are hard to come by, McSweeney admits, because many of these areas have become dangerous for governments and scientists to study. Correlation certainly isn’t causation, but deforestation in Central America seems to have intensified as the drug trade did. Deforestation rates in Central America were 1.19 percent annually between 2000 and 2010, compared to a global rate of .13 percent, according to a 2011 United Nations report. Between 2000 and 2010, the size of Central America’s forests shrank from 54 million acres to 48 million acres.

“Starting about 2007, we started seeing rates of deforestation there that we had never seen before,” McSweeney said. “When we asked the local people the reason, they would tell us: ‘Los narcos.’”

Other major international organizations have noticed the problem and have blamed it, partly, on drug trafficking. In 2011, UNESCO put Honduras’ Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve on its “in danger” list after the government there asked it to due to “the combined threats of illegal logging, fishing and land occupation, poaching and the reduced capacity of the State to manage the site, notably due to the deterioration of law and to the presence of drug traffickers.”

This all comes back, of course, to the war on drugs. Anti-trafficking policies have pushed traffickers into the world’s most biodiverse spots partly because they offer the most cover and are often the least populated. At this point, it’s hard to know how to best combat the problem, but McSweeney says any future drug policy needs to take into account its potential environmental impacts.

“Drug policies are also conservation policies, whether we realize it or not,” she said.