Word: cactuses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mexico's cactus diversity attracts the interest of international markets and collectors who employ illegal tactics to obtain wild-collected specimens of desirable species, some of which may be newly named to science, rare, or threatened with extinction," according to a World Wildlife Fund study authored by Rolando Barcenas Luna of the Autonomous University of Queretaro, Mexico. Barcenas and Terry are members of a team of biologists currently mapping several threatened cactus species through DNA sampling, but their project is often stymied by growing threats to the plants from illegal harvesting and destruction by drug traffickers. There are almost...
...Cactus collectors are a surprisingly fervid bunch. A trawl of the enthusiasts' presence on the Internet - some of the plants' biggest fans are in Scandinavia, the Czech Republic and Japan - yields hundreds of sites offering information about cactuses as well as nurseries where collectors can buy. "There are more sites, more information than we have ever had," Wiedhopf says. "It's marvelous. That's the upside." The problem is that some collectors don't want to buy from nurseries. Rather than purchasing from, say, the acres and acres of cacti nurseries in the Netherlands, avid collectors travel to Mexico instead...
There are laws in both the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, plus international trade regulations that protect endangered and threatened cactus, and also govern the sale and movement of other cactus species. But since most cactus plants flourish in desert regions with low populations and infrequent law enforcement, catching smugglers is a challenge, often made even more difficult in Mexico by poverty: local residents sell plants for a pittance to smugglers who then sell them to collectors at much higher prices, according to experts...
...hundred and seventy miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border, the dusty old mining town of Real de Catorce has been reborn. Though the Mexican government officially condemns the harvesting of the psychotropic peyote cactus by anyone outside the Huichol Indian community of Central Mexico, whose members use it for religious purposes, Real de Catorce's website advertises the town as the place of the "pilgrimage of people of all ages and nationalities...[who] travel thousands of miles to arrive at this sacred site and experience a mystical communion with the magical cactus." Now narco-tourists are ravaging the Huichols...
...been licensed since the 1970s for use in the Native American Church. But the number of legal peyote harvesters, known as peyoteros, has shrunk from two dozen to just three. Most of the land in South Texas where peyote grows is privately held (Texas law prohibits removal of cactus from public land), so peyoteros must pay landowners to access their ranchland. The job is hardly worth the hazards, however: rugged land populated with dangerous wildlife and, sometimes, even more dangerous smugglers. And the fees that go to absentee landowners - a few hundred dollars a year - don't justify the potential...