How Drug Cartels Moved into Illegal Logging in Mexico
Date of Publication
1-1-2020 12:00 AM
Security Theme
Environmental Security
Keywords
Illegal Logging, Latin America, timber traficking, Mexico, cartels, corruption, protection mechanisms, illegal wood
Description
Chihuahua is Mexico’s biggest state, and more than a fifth of its 25,000 hectares is forested, mostly with pine trees of the type that are harvested in vast quantities in this country. Half of those wooded areas are in the Sierra Tarahumara -- a chain of mountains focused in the southwestern part of the state that is home to a large Indigenous population known as the Tarahumara and a prized drug trafficking corridor. In late 2018, InSight Crime traveled to Delicias, a small town 100 kilometers south of Chihuahua City, to visit Cruz Soto and his wife Maria. The two live in a humble house on the outskirts of the town. It wasn’t the couple’s home. They had been forced out of their ranch that lay some 500 kilometers further west in the state of Chihuahua, at gunpoint. Illegal logging here is common and increasingly overlaps with drug trafficking, according to research and fieldwork by InSight Crime. The illicit timber trade is the primary concern for many of the Indigenous communities in the Sierra Tarahumara, according to a survey carried out in February 2018 by the State Commission for Indigenous Towns (Comisión Estatal para los Pueblos Indígenas -- COEPI). The biggest causes of deforestation, the survey respondents said, are corruption, organized crime, the over-exploitation of the forests and legal logging permits, and a lack of legal supervision by the relevant authorities.
How Drug Cartels Moved into Illegal Logging in Mexico
Chihuahua is Mexico’s biggest state, and more than a fifth of its 25,000 hectares is forested, mostly with pine trees of the type that are harvested in vast quantities in this country. Half of those wooded areas are in the Sierra Tarahumara -- a chain of mountains focused in the southwestern part of the state that is home to a large Indigenous population known as the Tarahumara and a prized drug trafficking corridor. In late 2018, InSight Crime traveled to Delicias, a small town 100 kilometers south of Chihuahua City, to visit Cruz Soto and his wife Maria. The two live in a humble house on the outskirts of the town. It wasn’t the couple’s home. They had been forced out of their ranch that lay some 500 kilometers further west in the state of Chihuahua, at gunpoint. Illegal logging here is common and increasingly overlaps with drug trafficking, according to research and fieldwork by InSight Crime. The illicit timber trade is the primary concern for many of the Indigenous communities in the Sierra Tarahumara, according to a survey carried out in February 2018 by the State Commission for Indigenous Towns (Comisión Estatal para los Pueblos Indígenas -- COEPI). The biggest causes of deforestation, the survey respondents said, are corruption, organized crime, the over-exploitation of the forests and legal logging permits, and a lack of legal supervision by the relevant authorities.