Rare bird hunt shows how Ecuadorian drug violence hampers investigation

“Do your work somewhere else, because it’s dangerous here,” he told a man in the troubled mining town of Camilo Ponce Enriquez in April. That night, the town’s mayor was shot dead. Earlier this month, a clash between criminal gangs in the town left five people dead, two of whom were found decapitated and one burned. Garzon, an ornithologist with the state-run National Institute of Biodiversity (Inabio), tried to continue his research in a nearby town, whose mayor was also killed. Tired of the ever-present danger, he packed his bags and returned to Quito. Garzon has studied the El Oro parakeet for 20 years, campaigning for its conservation and supporting sustainable management of its habitat. The bird is predominantly green, with a red forehead, and is endemic to Ecuador, having been seen only in the southwestern provinces of Azuay and El Oro. With an estimated 1,000 individuals left, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers it endangered. Garzon visited Camilo Ponce Enriquez, in the province of Azuay, to track down and study the endangered parakeet. But the gold-rich town is in the grip of the drug-trafficking gang Los Lobos, which finances its activities through illegal mining. “We are left with uncertainty and frustration (…) There is a lack of information on that site,” he told AFP. He said the violence was a blow to conservation because “there could be important areas where endemic or endangered species live and we can’t do anything.” – ‘Windows of opportunity’ – Sandwiched between Colombia and Peru – the world’s biggest cocaine producers – once-peaceful Ecuador has seen an explosion in violence in recent years as hostile gangs with ties to Mexican and Colombian cartels battle for control. As gangs gained ground, Ecuador’s homicide rate has risen from six per 100,000 residents in 2018 to a record 47 per 100,000 in 2023. Mario Yanez, another Inabio biologist, said his current work is about finding “windows of opportunity” to keep research going despite the violence. Scientists work closely with local communities and authorities, conducting shorter field trips or focusing on similar species in less-risk areas. “The level of violence has led to total restrictions in certain areas of the country,” particularly on the coast and where mining is taking place, Yanez said. These places carry the “stigma” of violence and that “unfortunately limits international cooperation funds to carry out conservation actions,” he added. The Lalo Loor private reserve in southwestern Manabi is one of the last intact remnants of a unique ecosystem in Ecuador known as a dry coastal forest, home to many endemic species. The province is also a stronghold for drug trafficking. Due to the security crisis, American universities canceled an annual visit by researchers and students to the reserve, a major source of income for Lalo Loor. Their continued absence could force the reserve’s administrative office to close, manager Mariela Loor said. Judith Denkinger, a German biologist at the private Universidad San Francisco de Quito, told AFP that she has suspended her two-decade research on humpback whales off the coast of the conflict-torn northwestern province of Esmeraldas, bordering Colombia, since 2022. She has been unable to collect photographic or acoustic recordings of the humpbacks that come to the equatorial Pacific to mate and give birth. She also highlighted the plight of fishermen, with whom she often works at sea. “Pirates, who are usually drug traffickers, come and threaten them, hijack their boat or steal their engine or kidnap them” to force them into drug trafficking, she said. Daniel Vizuete, a specialist in social studies of science and technology at Quito’s Flacso University, said that environmental research “may be the most undermined, precisely because it takes place … in places where institutions are weaker.” “That means that even the lives of researchers can be at risk,” he added. He also pointed to other possible effects of criminal violence on science, such as a “decline in terms of female participation.”